This document is part of an archive of postings by John Ray on Australian Politics, a blog hosted by Blogspot who are in turn owned by Google. The index to the archive is available here or here. Indexes to my other blogs can be located here or here. Archives do accompany my original postings but, given the animus towards conservative writing on Google and other internet institutions, their permanence is uncertain. These alternative archives help ensure a more permanent record of what I have written
This is a backup copy of the original blog. Backups from previous months accessible here
1 September, 2024 "In an attempt to go green, we are losing our green"
Catriona Rowntree has slammed the Victorian government over “secretive” plans to build a massive renewable energy battery project next to her farm southwest of Melbourne.
The Getaway presenter, 53, is furious about the proposal to build batteries and solar panels on 770 hectares of land in Little River at the base of the You Yangs Regional Park, just outside Geelong, saying locals were blindsided by the plans and fear it poses a fire risk.
“You are about to learn what many of us across the state of Victoria are being blindsided with — that is in an attempt to go green, we are losing our green,” she told followers on Instagram ahead of an appearance on the ABC.
Rowntree later told the broadcaster the state government was trying to “sneak through” the proposal “and the council did not know”.
“I’m feeling like the canary in the coal mine,” she told ABC Melbourne radio host Raf Epstein. “If you don’t know something’s happening, how can you object? That’s what happened to us.”
ACEnergy acquired the land in 2023 to build the Little River Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), with the development application currently being considered by Victorian Department of Transport and Planning.
The 350MW/700MWh lithium battery farm would be one of the state’s largest if it goes ahead and “support Victoria’s clean energy transition”.
“By providing a reliable and flexible storage solution, it will help balance supply and demand, integrating more renewable energy into the grid and reducing reliance on fossil fuels,” ACEnergy states on its website.
Rowntree, a long-time presenter on the Channel 9 travel program, spoke at Tuesday night’s Geelong Council meeting to voice her concerns about the Sandy Creek Road project, saying she had only found out through press reports days earlier.
“It is currently on prime agricultural land and historically, this property in a fire corridor,” she said, the Geelong Advertiser reported.
She noted fatal bushfires had ripped through the area in 1969 and suggested other sites in the area may be more suitable. “As you know, this is a high wind area, and opposite the You Yangs Park 500m away,” she said.
At the meeting, Geelong Mayor Trent Sullivan agreed that the community had been caught “unaware”.
“Whether it’s a battery [or a] a waste-to-energy incinerator, things that have been tried to, I dare say, be snuck through by the state government, the community must be made aware of it,” he said.
A decision on the project is expected by the end of the year and construction would begin in 2025.
Cr Sullivan said on Thursday the council had written to the state government to request and extension of the community consultation period, which ends on September 7, by three weeks.
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If Peter Dutton is racist for urging caution on Gaza migrant checks, then so am I
Steve Waterson
It’s a painful thing to learn so late in life, and more painful still to confess in public, but I’ve recently discovered I’m a racist. Not a white-hooded, Ku Klux Klan, cross-burning racist, you understand, nor a genocidal Nazi, but just one of your odious, everyday bigots.
For decades I’ve deluded myself, believing a lifelong refusal to hate anyone or judge them inferior on grounds of their race, colour, religion or culture was sufficient to escape the charge.
As part of the social contract that guides our lives and interactions, I understand and endorse our duty to protect and assist the marginalised and underprivileged in our society, but here’s where my mask of tolerance falls away: if we try to extend that compassion to embrace everyone in trouble, anywhere in the world, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to erect one or two safeguards. I am convinced that some caution needs to be exercised when inviting people to join our happy club, with particular attention paid to their background and professed beliefs.
Hypersensitive and racist fearmongering, no doubt, but in my view migrants from societies that feature suicide bombing and random murder in their repertoire of political self-expression merit close scrutiny; indeed, the people fleeing those places have more tangible fears of the vicious lunatics they are escaping and don’t want them arriving unvetted on the next plane.
If our leaders invite trouble into this country through inattention, laziness, recklessness or negligence, they have failed in their most fundamental responsibility. Immigration ministers and anyone who commands them should abide by the doctor’s golden principle: first, do no harm.
On Monday another assault was launched on the Opposition Leader, this time by federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers, himself a doctor of philosophy (an amusing turn of phrase, given what passes for that discipline in our modern polity, where basic notions of logic and semantics have gone astray).
Let’s skate over the cost-of-living crisis, housing unaffordability and stagnant building activity, industrial relations anarchy, a million new migrants a year, homelessness, unemployment and underemployment, a vanishing defence capability, anti-Semitism, preposterous domestic energy prices while we ship our coal overseas, crumbling health and education systems (that’ll do for starters), and focus on what’s really behind our nation’s decline: that horrible man over there.
To describe Dutton, with shrill outrage, as “divisive” seems a bit rich, the accusation levelled by the team that manufactured the voice referendum that cleaved the nation in two. And to label him dangerous, apparently for disagreeing with the government, betrays a misunderstanding of his role. Hint: there’s a clue in the man’s job title.
Even more hypocritical is the notion that Dutton’s supposed failings should disqualify him from being prime minister, when a lack of ability has been no hindrance to the elevation of a clown car of incompetents to ministerial office.
Back to philosophy school with you, Doctor, for a refresher course in ethics and the logical fallacy of argumentum ad hominem.
Sadly, this is where the runaway train of modern politics is headed. It’s naive and foolish to be disappointed, but this season’s rhetoric seems particularly lacklustre, led by the US, where the train has already left the tracks, and where “weird” has somehow become incisive, critical analysis and “joy” a legitimate aim of government, both to be considered with chin-stroking gravity.
In the end, of course, the self-righteous beauty of calling someone a racist (especially if you don’t really believe it) is that it means you don’t have to listen to another word the evil bastard says: as with all the currently popular terms of disparagement, the tactic is designed to silence dissent. We’ve seen it consume our universities, and it’s spreading like a noxious weed into the wider public arena.
This will sound like a fairy story to younger readers, but once upon a time we listened to what other people had to say, however disagreeable. We argued with them, changed their minds or were persuaded by them, but it never occurred to us to gag them.
We trusted good ideas to drive out the bad; our language was purged of cruel descriptors of different races, the disadvantaged and disabled, those of alternative sexual orientation, not by prohibition but because in listening to the ugly voices we became aware of how repellent we might sound ourselves.
Unlikely, I know, but it might be nice to restore that educated, civil discourse and leave the name-calling and juvenile abuse back in the gutter. An apology across the board for the more unpleasant and intemperate remarks our politicians have spewed at each other would be a handsome start, but I won’t, as they say, be holding my racist breath.
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Education gone wrong
Alarm bells should be ringing in Australia today. As they are to some unfocused degree in newspaper headlines expressing disquiet over the deteriorating mental health of teenagers, soaring rates of school truancy and fear about declining aggregate NAPLAN scores in basic numeracy and literacy. The problem is broad and deep. It has resulted, at the core, from the declining authority of the teacher in the classroom. In turn, this reflects gradual changes in the wider culture since Arendt was writing.
Formality used to be more institutionalised. When teachers were always addressed as Mr Smith or Sir, or Mrs Jones or Miss, they stood more at a distance, the classroom atmosphere cooler, the teacher as instructor rather than friend or equal. The principal was a remote figure who could be referred to as an authority of last resort, with the threat of stern rebuke or punishment.
The physical punishment of strapping or caning has become unthinkably barbaric today. There was a time when it was the ultimate coercive tool in maintaining discipline. While no one would argue for its return, it must be acknowledged that it made it generally easier, even in the much larger classrooms of the 1960s, to instil obedience and respect.
There is progress and regress at work here, making any overriding judgment difficult. Friendlier, warmer relations in the best classrooms today are to the good. Just as the closer relations within families between parents and their children, breaking down old generation gaps of misunderstanding, are to the good.
But such progress has come at the price of making it more difficult to control places such as large classrooms of unruly students, where order depends on the teacher’s ability to keep control, backed by a wider school culture of formality and discipline.
To put this in context, the central question about the rise of modern society is what transformed the typical person of the European Middle Ages – violent, immoderate, perceiving the world in childlike extremes – into the self-controlled, disciplined and inward individual who has come to occupy a central position in societies such as our own. Schooling played a central role in this long historical process. Generation after generation followed the simple and punitive adage of spare the rod and spoil the child.
Further, it was the capacity for systematic and sustained work and for rational, calculated organisation that was to constitute the human prerequisite for the development of the industrial democratic society that was to emerge. Medieval forebears were, by disposition, incompatible with the workings of modern society, being far too emotionally unstable to work regular hours in a modern office, factory or shop.
And schooling today retains a good deal of its civilising function, the slow and laborious work of instilling in children the capacity for self-control and concentration. The common put-down that the main job of schools is childminding, while holding some truth, vastly underestimates the role in the character development of the young.
Then came the 1960s, and a new injection of the Rousseau fallacy that humans in the state of nature were happy and free before being ruined by the artifices of civilisation. They were “noble savages”. This fed through into an educational philosophy centred on belief in the innate creativity of the child, with the task of schooling just to stand back to encourage self-realisation. Rote learning of the times tables was out; playful fun was in.
Australian director Peter Weir drew on his Sydney school experience, in his brilliant 1989 film Dead Poets Society, to explore this territory, showing how an inspired poetry teacher could be just as destructive to teenage mental equilibrium as the old order he replaced, one of stiflingly routine discipline. At risk, as Rousseau might have celebrated, was the reversing of centuries of the civilising process.
It’s worth recalling that even in Elizabethan London the typical church or theatre audience would have been unrecognisable to us – a constant chattering hubbub of restless shuffling, squabbling, nudging, spitting and swearing. But is it much better today in an average Australian high school, with inexperienced female teachers in their 20s trying to control restless 16-year-old boys, unsettled by bubbling levels of testosterone, boys who don’t want to be there?
It has become extremely difficult to be a secondary school teacher. Those who are privileged to work in the private school system, or in a few elite government schools, provide the exception. In both those atypical categories, behaviour management in the classroom tends not to be a morale-crushing problem.
Behaviour management, requiring teachers to be prison officers, but without the bars or the solitary confinement, is not a stand-alone challenge.
Teachers in a recent ongoing South Australian study spoke of an alarming increase in misogynistic, homophobic, racist and sexist language and behaviours, mostly by boys and young men targeting girls and young female teachers.
This includes intimidating physical confrontation of female teachers as well as shameless sexual innuendo, teachers who were on their own in classroom, corridor or carpark without any other adult support, and sometimes with no serious backing from a principal, plus hostility from parents who couldn’t credit that their darling son could be such an insensitive brute. Such parents, in their turn, reflect the decline of the authority of the teacher and a general disrespect for their position.
If discipline is one side of the education coin, engagement is the other. Changes to the curriculum, such as introducing phonics in teaching primary school children to read, will mean little without capable, talented teachers to arouse the interest of their students, stimulate them, making them want to learn. A bored classroom is a dead classroom.
If income is a lead indicator of social status, then tradies rank far higher in today’s Australia than teachers. Plumbers and electricians may be indispensable in day-to-day life, but are they more important to the long-term wellbeing of the society?
Plato, in his last work, signalled his judgment after a long life of reflection: the most important institution in any society is the one that teaches the teachers. By implication, he regarded teaching as the highest of all vocations. Australia today seems to invert Plato, with teacher training degrees of low status, generally of mediocre intellectual calibre, and including little practical hands-on training in classrooms. To be fair, federal Education Minister Jason Clare and his state counterparts are trying to reform teacher training, to focus it more on practical experience and the capacity to teach basic literacy and numeracy. Their success, if gained, would be of greater long-term benefit to the country than almost anything else their governments achieve.
The ability to engage students is the first principle of teaching. It requires some charisma in the classroom. Gifted teachers will almost inevitably communicate an enthusiasm for their subjects. This is no more than a by-product of the true mission of education, at its highest. Teachers are servants of the truth, dedicated to passing it on. Their role illustrates the centrality to the good life of coming into harmony with the deep truths of human existence; and believing in the possibility of so doing.
This even holds in scientific and vocational disciplines, where an ethos is transmitted, including timeless methods of thinking, and ways to attack problems, as well as factual knowledge.
Life, under this star, becomes a long voyage of learning, with the teacher as captain, bestowing legitimacy and authority on the voyage. A minority of teachers may be in this gifted category, influencing their students irrespective of the wider environment within which they work.
Yet the wider environment can make a crucial difference. When morale is high in a school, with a camaraderie among the teachers encouraging belief in the fine mission of what they do, then many will perform much better than their lesser selves would otherwise allow. In a good school, the average teacher can become a great teacher. Further, high conviction and enthusiasm among teachers are infectious and will usually transmit to students.
Education is broader than schooling. The most effective learning is often indirect, working unconsciously, with slow impact on the motivational complexes churning deep within an individual. Parents play the critical role here, as unwitting exemplars more than guides – and obviously, for bad as for good. There are also key educational influences on the bigger social stage. Take the recent Olympics. It displayed young men and women, many hardly more than boys and girls, who have dedicated years of their lives to their sport and then produce world record-breaking performances on the global stage, winning the adulation of their nation as they ascend the dais, the gold medal placed around their neck, and shedding tears of joy as the flag rises to the playing of the national anthem.
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A requiem for "Voice"
Its advocates can't admit that they got it wrong in wanting special representation for blacks
There was a time when the Yes side infuriated me with the shallow quality of their “debate”. Now the Yes side bores me. It has been 10 months since the proposal to change our Constitution failed, and its proponents still have not moved past the second stage of grief. They are now wallowing in anger. Why did this happen, who is to blame? Someone, please wake me up when the bloodletting stops. Even better, let’s hope they get to the final stage – acceptance – soon. Please.
In recent weeks, some losers on the Yes side have displayed tedious self-indulgence, blaming everyone except themselves for the loss. The recent contributions of Shireen Morris and Greg Craven tell you something about the lack of insight and the shoddy analysis that have marked much post-referendum contributions by voice supporters. What we’ve learned most clearly is how deluded they remain.
Mr Albanese holds a press conference for The V once referendum at the Sydney Opera House. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Sam Ruttyn
Mr Albanese holds a press conference for The V once referendum at the Sydney Opera House. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Sam Ruttyn
It might have helped the nation better understand the voice if the violent disagreements among people on the Yes side had been aired in public in full and before the referendum rather than behind closed doors after the referendum. Only towards the end of the campaign did we see even the hint of cracks emerge in their facade.
Instead, with completely ineffectual exceptions, the Yes side presented itself publicly as a solid phalanx of moralising custodians of the path to righteousness. Now they are more like Moaning Myrtles, shouting over metaphorical toilet cubicles past each other.
Craven made his last-gasp concerns particularly irrelevant by saying the defects of the voice proposal could be ignored. He would still vote Yes because it was the moral thing to do. The radicals picked their marks superbly. They didn’t need to compromise because all those who might have had sufficient influence to speak up and seek a workable compromise were already locked into whatever the radicals served up.
Morris writes in her extract from Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum that “Indigenous leaders repeatedly compromised to try to win Coalition support”. This is barmy stuff. As someone who followed this debate very closely, I know numerous compromises were offered – and categorically rejected by the Yes side. Both Father Frank Brennan and barrister Louise Clegg bravely put forward proposals with more moderate constitutional wording aimed at narrowing the voice’s operations. Both were ignored.
Indeed, according to another Yes supporter, Damien Freeman, Morris stopped working with the group Uphold & Recognise, the moderate voice supporters, after they held a forum in February last year that included Brennan and Clegg. “She objected to the fact that we allowed Clegg and Brennan to raise their concerns about the constitutional draft amendment that the Prime Minister announced … at Garma. Morris believed we should have put up only speakers who made the case for the Garma amendment,” Freeman wrote last weekend.
No signs of compromise there.
Others, including me, suggested that any constitutional provision include a “non-justiciability” clause to ensure that a future High Court could not soak itself in social and political activism with the new voice provisions. In fact, for many years Morris assured us “a First Nations voice was specifically designed to be non-justiciable”.
Alas, there was no compromise. When the Prime Minister released the proposed wording at Garma, non-justiciability was tossed aside. Leading Yes activist Marcia Langton laid bare the radical demands: “Why would we restrict the voice to representations that can’t be challenged in court?” And, according to Freeman, Morris didn’t want any critics of the High Court’s major role speaking at the Uphold & Recognise forum.
Others suggested the proposed wording of the voice be limited to advising on acts of parliament so that it would not reach into every part of executive government, including every move by a bureaucrat. That was ignored, too.
Morris is wrong about another more fundamental matter. It is, in my view, almost certain that the voice, even if all the various compromises had been accepted, would have been defeated.
At its core it was a bad idea for the simple reason that Australians would never accept a two-tier Constitution, where one group of people had special rights permanently entrenched in the Constitution. Dividing groups by race made a bad proposal worse. Acceptance of this simple yet powerful truth will be the final stage of activists dealing with their loss. However, some of the compromises at least would have moved the voice closer to success than the firm rejection it finally received last October.
So, failure doesn’t rest with the political right, as Morris alleges. The failure is twofold: a bad idea that was badly prosecuted.
The voice proposal was, in large measure, a vibe thing, packaged up as this undefined goal called reconciliation, along with a reaching out, hands in friendship thing, and so on. The only clear part of the proposal was that if you opposed the voice, you could expect abuse (we were racist), ridicule (we were too stupid to understand it) and mocking labels (we were Chicken Littles). What stood out was the deep disrespect of Yes advocates towards just about everyone. Even those who agreed with the voice were not told candidly and precisely what this body would entail.
The Yes side had little idea how to win friends and influence people. They treated morality as a zero-sum game – we on the Yes side are moral; you No people are not – when disagreement should have been respected as a difference of opinion.
Craven was one of the biggest disappointments during the debate. The constitutional academic had a long history of being astute about our Constitution and our High Court. In 1999, he wrote about our highest court under the title A Study in the Abuse of Power. The professor wrote: “The Court now has a long record of consciously ‘interpreting’ the Constitution in a manner contrary to the Founders, with a view to achieving this or that supposedly desirable social result … the court simply has begun a process of inventing appropriate rights, and purporting to ‘imply’ them into the Constitution.”
In 2012, writing in The Australian Financial Review, Craven wrote that “putting a whole new section into the Constitution to deal with Indigenous people, then packing it with abstract, legally binding value statements, displays the sort of political naivety usually encountered in the Mosman branch of the Young Greens. Once again, the slogan will be ‘Don’t Know – Vote No’.”
Back then, Craven predicted correctly that “legions of depressed Australians, entirely committed to reconciliation, yet not prepared to maul the Constitution to escape the lash of Professor Langton’s tongue” would vote no.
I miss that version of Craven – the genuine constitutional conservative. In recent years, Craven succumbed to unintellectual emotion and moralising every bit as unhelpful as the more radical activists. He treated thoughtful concerns about the voice with shrill contempt, never properly addressing them as a constitutional conservative should. Quips and comedy may help Craven get through his day but it was never going to carry the day for the voice.
If Craven was having heated disagreements with the Yes side, and I don’t doubt him, he didn’t bother telling us soon enough or fully enough. Only much later, when it became clearer that the Yes vote was probably going to fail, and he would be on the losing side, was Craven candid enough that there were problems with the proposal as drafted. The killer punch to Craven’s constitutional conservatism came when he threw caution to the wind and said he’d vote for the voice anyway because it was the moral thing to do.
Unlike Craven, Freeman has offered the one piece of post-referendum insight that helps us truly understand why such a bad proposal was put and why it was prosecuted with such fervour.
Freeman, a fellow Yes advocate, has the courage to identify the proposal as driven by a particularly radical form of identity politics. This consists not only of the belief that some groups in society have been oppressed and that political action is needed to correct that oppression but that “only the oppressed group can determine what political action is necessary to overcome the oppression they have experienced”. Now we understand why at least some of those who might have been sceptical about the voice proposal felt themselves unable to object to it.
One thing Craven said 30 years ago is worth repeating. He described constitutional academics as “pretty pointless people”.
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29 August, 2024
It wasn’t just race and politics that motivated people who opposed a black "Voice" in Parliament. Here’s what we found when we dug deeper
Jonathan Bartholomaeus didn't dig deeply enough. The only scales he used that gave a substantial correlation with attitude to "Voice" were RWA and SDO -- both of which were strong measures of conservatism.
http://jonjayray.com/altdef.html
So all he has found is that is was mainly conservatives who opposed the "Voice" idea, which we already knew. There were no other substantial correlationsIt is in any case absurd to say that people who defied all the aurhorities on "Voice" were authoritarian. That's what comes of using defecive measuring instruments in your research. Bartholomaeus took his measurement instruments at face value instead of researching their validity. He clearly didn't even look at the questions he was asking. Very foolish. His conclusions below are rubbish
The outcome of the referendum has been chalked up to deepening political polarisation, Australian’s entrenched racial prejudice and the rise of populism.
In short, opposition to the Voice to Parliament has been characterised as a conservative populist backlash with racist undertones. In the wake of a 60/40 “no” vote majority, this message only serves to deepen the post-referendum divide.
However, new research indicates the story is a little more complex. Findings show it was fundamentally the esteem of authority, the desire for an ordered society, and perceptions of justice and fairness that dictated how people engaged with this emotionally charged political issue, and ultimately how they voted.
It is only by a greater understanding of people’s attitudes towards the referendum (even if we disagree with them) that Australians can move forward and have a more productive bipartisan conversation.
Hierarchical status quo
We collected survey data from 253 people before and after the referendum. We wanted to get an idea of the way people’s worldviews would influence their vote and opinions about the outcome of the referendum.
In June 2023 (roughly 16 weeks before the vote) we asked about people’s attitudes towards authority, their opinion about social hierarchy, and their perceptions of justice in society. In October (immediately after the vote) we asked how people voted and whether they thought the outcome of the referendum would be good for Australia.
Our findings show people who voted “no” and who were pleased with the outcome were more willing to submit to authority. They also preferred a hierarchical society where the social status of different groups is maintained.
These attitudes were more important in predicting voting behaviour than a person’s age, gender, ethnicity, income, education, religion or even their political orientation.
Whereas social hierarchy beliefs are broad and refer to a person’s general view that it’s a “dog-eat-dog” world, racism relates more narrowly to discrimination against people based on their ethnicity. While there’s often a complicated relationship between preference for social hierarchy and racism, these findings counter the widespread claims that those who voted “no” were entirely racially motivated or were simply voting along political lines.
In understanding why some people voted “no”, these findings can promote a more open discussion.
For example, in the future when discussing profound and potentially momentous changes to the country (the current debate around nuclear energy, for example), it will be helpful to remember that people differ drastically in their willingness to follow along with authority.
Some will be quick to cotton on to messages from leaders and may act passionately (even aggressively) on these convictions. Others will be slower and more cautious in their support for ideas expressed by authority.
It will also be helpful to remember people have different ideas about how society should be structured. Some people will prefer a society with a clear pecking order, perhaps fearing the chaos of a disordered society. Others are less concerned with a clear structure in favour of things like social mobility.
Our findings show we shouldn’t reduce support for complex issues simply to one’s political orientation or demographic characteristics. We need to seek first to understand a person’s worldview and attitude towards societal change. Only then can we have a productive conversation about what is best for the country.
Perceived (in)justice
Populism is the idea that a small group of elite people are trying to force change on society. A populist backlash occurs when ordinary people rebel against the powerful minority and exert the popular will of the people. Voting down the referendum has been characterised in such terms.
Our data show people who voted “no” view society as a just place in which people are generally treated fairly. They didn’t accept the fundamental premise on which the referendum was sold: that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are, and have been, unjustly treated. This finding provides a helpful insight into the populist explanation for the referendum outcome.
At its heart, the populist narrative is a story of justice. The idea that the elite are pursuing their own agenda to the detriment of the people strikes us all as unjust.
But it is people who already see society as a just and fair place who are especially sensitive to this perceived injustice. These people can act out in sometimes extreme ways. Consider, for example, the January 6 storming of the US capitol.
By understanding the populist account in terms of justice, we can clearly see how the post-referendum divide in society has formed: those who voted “no” feel vindicated at having avoided an unjust change to society, while those who voted “yes” become wary of these people for their extreme and seemingly unwarranted reaction. Understanding not only the important role that justice plays in people’s lives, but also that people can have differing views of what justice is, is crucial to keep in mind.
In a world where political polarisation is increasing and where we are confronted with news (some real, some fake) that continually seems to deepen this divide, taking the time to understand the complexity of people’s worldviews and political opinions – even those you might disagree with – is more important than ever.
Jonathan Bartholomaeus does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
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Economic downturn there for all who have eyes to see
Inflation doesn’t stem from external forces or market failures, nor is it an unpredictable ‘black swan’ event, as described by Nassim Taleb. Inflation rather results from poor government policies. It’s more like a ‘pink flamingo’, an obvious problem that everyone sees but neglects to address until it’s too late
Nobel laureate Milton Friedman astutely commented that, ‘Inflation is the one form of taxation that can be imposed without legislation.’ This observation may provide insight into why, despite claims to the contrary, the Albanese government seems to be implementing policies that perpetuate and sustain inflation rather than mitigate it. After all, inflation can generate the tax revenues needed to fund the government’s extensive and expensive spending programs.
The government and its economic advisors appear hesitant to recognise that the era of fiscal and regulatory irresponsibility, which has been cushioned by the deflationary effects of globalisation and the accommodating monetary policies of central banks, is rapidly approaching its end.
Treasurer Chalmers frequently refers to the evolving global economic and strategic landscape as ‘churning and changing’. Yet despite acknowledging this shift, he has not adapted his policy toolkit to meet the new challenges. As the saying goes, to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and the government continues to tackle every economic and social issue with the same combination of increased spending and more legislation.
Within government, the default response to any situation, whether the economy is thriving or struggling, seems to be the same: increased government spending and regulation. There never seems to be a compelling economic argument or appropriate moment to reduce either.
Since the early 2000s, Australia’s prosperity has been underwritten by the dividends of globalisation. Record commodity sales and prices, along with the deflationary effects of China and other Asian countries becoming manufacturing hubs, have helped keep consumer prices low. And when poorly conceived policies threatened economic growth, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) would swiftly intervene with accommodating monetary stimulus to mitigate the damage.
This benign environment is rapidly coming to an end. The landscape is indeed ‘churning and changing’. And given the government’s refusal to reconsider its policy settings and foundations, it should not be surprised that inflation remains stubbornly high. Rather, it should be surprised that it isn’t rising further.
In the little over two years since the Albanese government took office, nearly every economic policy that might have previously had minimal impact has instead contributed to inflation – from sovereign interventions in commodity markets; to increases in middle-class welfare; to labour market interventions that reduce productivity; to unprecedented levels of spending, particularly on out-of-control and fraud-riddled social programs; and energy market deformations. The government’s actions, individually and cumulatively, are entrenching inflation.
Friedman was awarded his Nobel Prize for his work on monetarism, famously stating that, ‘inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon’. Often overlooked, however, is the second part of his insight that ‘inflation… can be produced only by a more rapid increase in the quantity of money than in output’.
This imbalance was evident in the RBA’s latest Monetary Policy Decision statement, which noted that, ‘higher interest rates have been working to bring aggregate demand and supply closer towards balance’. This statement also reaffirms Say’s Law, which observes that supply creates its own demand, and changes in aggregate demand only affect the price level, not real gross domestic product or employment.
Yet while much of the current economic discourse focuses on aggregate demand, there is scant discussion on enhancing aggregate supply through promoting productivity and production. Instead of pursuing policies that enhance productivity and production, it has become increasingly common for governments to label every new spending or regulatory initiative as an ‘investment’ or ‘productivity’ measure without any evidence to support such claims.
The notion that universal government-funded childcare enhances productivity is as credible as suggesting that government-owned petrol stations would lower fuel prices. Such policies are more likely to destroy businesses and jobs than to create them.
If a business were to invest like government, it would rapidly go broke.
Unfortunately, the unfounded assertions made by our politicians and governments often go unchallenged, despite the noticeable correlation between the increasing size and frequency of so-called government investments and productivity measures, and declining actual productivity and frequency of economic dislocations. For more than two decades, it has been bipartisan policy at all levels of government to consistently undermine productivity and production.
Just as the era of globalisation-driven economic windfalls is coming to an end, so too, it seems, are the days of frank, fearless, first-rate economic advice from Treasury. Earlier this year, Treasury Secretary Stephen Kennedy praised the inflation-powered system of bracket creep tax increases as an ‘automatic stabilising influence’, arguing that adjusting tax brackets for inflation during a period of rapid price increases would feed money back into the economy, making it harder to control inflation. Conveniently, Kennedy failed to mention the crucial alternative to increasing taxes to ameliorate inflation: reducing government spending, a response which could help bring inflation under control without surreptitiously and usuriously taxing Australians.
Addressing Australia’s economic challenges requires a fundamental rethinking of government and government policy. This shift includes altering the political incentives that encourage unchecked spending and excessive regulation. If an investment manager or business director made representations akin to what our politicians did, they would be rapidly prosecuted and jailed. Asic and the ACCC would be on to them faster than a hawk spotting prey in an open field. Yet conveniently, the statements and financial projections made by politicians are not subject to the same civil and criminal liabilities imposed on private sector actors. Making unfounded and unsubstantiated claims about the benefits of higher spending and wasteful programs is how elections are won.
For far too long, governments at all levels and across the political spectrum have been aware of Australia’s economic issues; problems that call for less government, not more. Unfortunately, the political incentives are to deliver more and more government, irrespective of the costs and consequences.
A cognitive and policy reset is urgently needed. Australia’s next significant economic downturn won’t be a sudden, unexpected event but rather a ‘pink flamingo’—a clearly visible issue that is rapidly gaining momentum. The warning signs are evident. At question is whether there will be the will to act before it is too late.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/eyes-wide-shut-2/
*************************************************Our abused Sexual Discrimination Act
A decision in the Federal Court last Friday confirmed a shocking reality that many of us already knew; it is now illegal for women to publicly make a single-sex space in Australia under the current operation of the Sex Discrimination Act (1984) (SDA). The SDA is no longer fit for purpose, or rather, its purpose is now to threaten women into submission.
What we are seeing is not the ‘unintentional consequences’ of gender identity protections. The legislation that Justice Bromwich ruled on in the Federal Court regarding the Tickle v Giggle case is the SDA operating exactly as it is intended to operate by the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC), who have been slowly re-purposing the SDA for decades.
The Federal Court ruled that Sall Grover and Giggle for Girls Pty Ltd had engaged in indirect discrimination by removing Roxanne Tickle from the social media App that Grover had created for female people.
All the arguments mounted by Grover’s legal team failed, except for the argument that Grover could not have ‘directly’ or intentionally discriminated on the basis of gender identity, as gender identity can’t be discerned on sight because gender identity is invisible. Gender identity is essentially a legally protected sexed soul built from stereotypes.
Significantly, Bromwich declared ‘that in its contemporary ordinary meaning, sex is changeable’. Bromwich based this on a few cases in the last 30 years where this had been applied to trans-identified people for compassionate reasons.
No one thought to gather all the cases and legislation where women and girls are dealt with by the law as humans with a specific reproductive path. The Sex Discrimination Act, under which Sall Grover and her business were sued, was once such a piece of legislation.
The SDA originally recognised that the female body had a reproductive path that placed women and girls at a structural disadvantage in society. In the 40 years since its inception, the SDA has been the victim, like so many women and girls, of unbridled molestation.
The SDA came into effect under the Hawke Labor government in 1984 after years of campaigning by women’s rights activists. The legislation wasn’t original, but a type of civil rights legislation that was being trialled in Western nations to encourage full participation of women in society, free from discrimination and male pattern sexual harassment.
The SDA has been altered 56 times since 1984, almost always at the instigation of the Australian Human Rights Commission who administer the Act, and most famously by the Gillard Labor government which removed the definitions of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ from the SDA in 2013.
It was clear in the Explanatory Memorandum of the 2013 change that the definition of man and woman was removed from the SDA specifically to include trans-identified males in the definition of women. The memorandum states:
These definitions are repealed in order to ensure that ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are not interpreted so narrowly as to exclude, for example, a transgender woman from accessing protections from discrimination on the basis of other attributes contained in the SDA.
When Julia Gillard was asked last year about the 2013 amendments by Women’s Rights Network representatives, her rationale for the change was that there are a ‘number of people who genuinely believe that they are trapped in the wrong body and they want to be recognised as the gender their mind and soul have always told them that they are’.
The second key piece of legislation Justice Bromwich relied on in his decision was the newly minted Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration (Act 2023) (BDMRA), which only came into effect between the trial in April and the judgment last week.
Because the validity of the (BDMRA) was challenged constitutionally by the Giggle legal team, and against international women’s rights treaties, and failed, the implications of the use of the act go much further than birth certificates.
The legislation that the Federal Court just recognised as constitutionally valid, and in no way contravenes international human rights law, states in black and white that the kind of ‘internal’ gender identity that is protected over sex, the kind of gender that changes sex, can exist in ‘name, dress, speech, and behaviour’.
A male trying to gain access to women’s formerly safe spaces, doesn’t even need to have a certificate, because gender identity protections under the Qld BDM Registration Act, protects a man performing female gender via a hat, a garment from Millers, a tilt of the head, or a higher octave of voice. Any sign of ‘woman gender’ allows a man to access all areas for any reason and he can’t legally be removed if he claims a gender identity, unless he breaks the law, he doesn’t need a certificate because gender identity is an internal soul evidenced by words.
In my opinion, the way constitutional validity of gender identity legislation has been handled, combined with the discarding of international human rights concerns, has left the courts as the enablers of women being removed as a sex class.
We call this a culture war, but this is a class war, playing out in our institutions.
How many working-class fathers do you think would accept grown men identifying into the change rooms where their daughters are compelled to change while the child is in the custody of schools and sporting institutions? All schools and sporting institutions will fall under the authority of this ruling, and we need to take away its structure piece by piece.
When Shannon Fentiman introduced the Qld BDM Registration Act to Parliament she said, ‘I am proud to rise to introduce the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Bill 2022. I want to start by acknowledging the many trans and diverse people and their allies in the gallery today. These are the people this legislation is for.’
Under the Queensland constitution, members of Parliament are bound to make laws for the people of Queensland, not fringe interest groups or invisible gender souls. The Qld BDM Registration legislation redefines human sex categories against criteria the government itself provides. The mandate to allow the government to redefine human sex categories in law was never given to the Queensland Labor Party.
Individuals simply won’t be able to fight these dictates in court. In the process of Giggle v Tickle, Sall Grover’s business has been ruined, and if she didn’t have a group of supporters to fund her, she would certainly be bankrupted by the legal fees. Combined with the $10,000 awarded by the judge to Tickle personally, Sall Grover is obliged to pay Tickle’s costs (that are only partially capped). The legal fees that Sall is facing, including her own, will come close to $1M, and that is not including the High Court challenge she is about to embark on, which will likely exceed an additional 500K. You could almost buy a house in Brisbane for that.
Tickle was funded by the Grata Fund, which is listed as a legal aid charity, that fund social justice causes.
In endeavouring to interpret the correct intention of gender identity protections, Bromwich adopted the terminology, without which, it is impossible to make gender identity make any sense at all but that makes human sex a birth condition that is subject to change. He stated:
‘…cisgender refers to a person whose gender corresponds to the sex registered for them at birth. That is to be contrasted with a person whose gender does not correspond with their sex as registered at birth, commonly referred to as transgender. The respondents do not accept the legitimacy of the terms cisgender and transgender. I find both terms useful and convenient for the purpose of deciding and discussing the relevant facts and in accordance with the gender identity discrimination provisions in the SDA.’
The problem with ‘assigned at birth’ as a sovereign concept in law, over the more scientific understanding of human sex as an immutable characteristic, is that sex is not a birth condition, sex is a life condition. Furthermore, the life condition of sex is authoritative in the life of girls and women in a way that places them at a structural disadvantage.
If you have been saying to yourself ‘surely this won’t get through the courts’, you can stop that now. We should all support Sall Grover and her crowd funder to continue her fight to the High Court, but personally I have little hope of this being changed in the courts.
This issue, I believe, will only be ultimately fixed through the political process, through bringing our politicians to account, and for the conservative parties to take up this cause in earnest.
People are in favour of gay rights, we already know that, but not this is not that.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/our-abused-sexual-discrimination-act/
***************************************************40°C in August? Why is Australia so ridiculously hot right now?
Blaming the heat on global warming is absurd. It is mere unprovable assertion. And note that is was as hot in 1910, long before the modern industrial economy was widespread
It’s winter in Australia, but as you’ve probably noticed, the weather is unusually warm. The top temperatures over large parts of the country this weekend were well above average for this time of year.
The outback town of Oodnadatta in South Australia recorded 38.5°C on Friday and 39.4°C on Saturday — about 16°C above average. Both days were well above the state’s previous winter temperature record. In large parts of Australia, the heat is expected to persist into the coming week.
A high-pressure system is bringing this unusual heat — and it’s hanging around. So temperature records have already fallen and may continue to be broken for some towns in the next few days.
It’s no secret the world is warming. In fact 2024 is shaping up to be the hottest year on record. Climate change is upon us. Historical averages are becoming just that: a thing of the past.
That’s why this winter heat is concerning. The warming trend will continue for at least as long as we keep burning fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere. Remember, this is only August. The heatwaves of spring and summer are only going to be hotter.
The Bureau of Meteorology was expecting many records to be broken over the weekend across several states. On Thursday, bureau meteorologist Angus Hines described:
A scorching end to winter, with widespread heat around the country in coming days, including the chance of winter records across multiple states for maximum temperature.
The amount of heat plunging into central Australia was particularly unusual, Hines said.
On Friday, temperatures across northern South Australia and southern parts of the Northern Territory were as much as 15°C above average.
Temperatures continued to soar across northern parts of Western Australia over the weekend, with over 40°C recorded at Fitzroy Crossing on Sunday. It has been 2–12°C above average from Townsville all the way down to Melbourne for several days in a row.
Bear in mind, it’s only August. As Hines said, the fire weather season hasn’t yet hit most of Australia, but the current conditions — hot, dry and sometimes windy — are bringing moderate to high fire danger across Australia. It may also bring dusty conditions to central Australia.
And for latitudes north of Sydney and Perth, most of the coming week will be warm.
What’s causing the winter warmth?
In recent days a stubborn high pressure system has sat over eastern Australia and the Tasman Sea. It has kept skies clear over much of the continent and brought northerly winds over many areas, transporting warm air to the south.
High pressure promotes warm weather — both through clearer skies that bring more sunshine and by promoting the descent of air that causes heating.
By late August, both the intensity of the sun and the length of the day have increased. So the centre of Australia can really warm up when under the right conditions.
High pressure in June can be associated with cooler conditions, because more heat is lost from the surface during those long winter nights. But that’s already less of an issue by late August.
This kind of weather setup has occurred in the past. Late-winter or early-spring heat does sometimes occur in Australia. However, this warm spell is exceptional, as highlighted by the broken temperature records across the country.
The consequences of humanity’s continued greenhouse gas emissions are clear. Australia’s winters are getting warmer overall. And winter “heatwaves” are becoming warmer.
Australia’s three warmest Augusts on record have all occurred since 2000 — and last August was the second-warmest since * 1910 *. When the right weather conditions occur for winter warmth across Australia, the temperatures are higher than a century ago.
The warmth we are experiencing now comes off the back of a recent run of global temperature records and extreme heat events across the Northern Hemisphere.
This warm spell is set to continue, with temperatures above 30°C forecast from Wednesday through to Sunday in Brisbane. The outlook for spring points to continued above-normal temperatures across the continent, but as always we will likely see both warm and cold spells at times.
Such winter warmth is exceptional and already breaking records. Climate change is already increasing the frequency and intensity of this kind of winter heat — and future warm spells will be hotter still, if humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions continue.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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28 August, 2024
Australia should heed Robert F Kennedy’s health policy deal with Trump
There is good evidence that ultra processed foods are NOT bad for you:
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/05/fresh-health-warning-over-ultra.html
But RFK's view is popularly accepted so should win votesWhen Robert F. Kennedy Jr decided to pull out of the US presidential race he approached the Democrats to do a deal. The backing of the great Kennedy name would have probably locked in a Kamala Harris victory.
But the Democrats rejected Kennedy so he turned to Donald Trump and they made an incredible deal that means that if Trump wins, the global food industry and US health will be transformed. Australia will follow.
Kennedy was called a traitor by the Democrats but, according to the opinion polls, the Kennedy support has put Trump back in the presidential race although, as Paul Kelly points, out he has been campaigning badly.
The presidential race in the US is too close for an Australian business commentator to fpredict the outcome. But Down Under we can pick up potentially world changing events in the campaign that get missed in the frenzy of US political reporting.
The Kennedy-Trump deal is one such event.
The Kennedy campaign received high levels of support in some states because he was backed by a massive team of volunteers. Kennedy has agreed to use that team to campaign for Trump in the five key US swing states led by Pennsylvania.
And what makes Kennedy so dangerous to Harris is that his team will concentrate on one issue – the food processing deal Kennedy secured with Trump.
Kennedy has a passion about the health of Americans and believes his Trump deal, if implemented, is a key to improving US health. To illustrate the passion he will take to the electorates I will use his words to describe what is happening on the US health scene and what he will do about it.
Australia has similar problems.
Kennedy: “Today, two-thirds of American adults and half of children suffer chronic health issues. Fifty years ago, the number for children was less than one per cent.
“In America, 74 per cent of adults are now overweight or obese, and close to 50 per cent of children. In Japan, the childhood obesity rate is three per cent.
“Half of Americans now have prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
“There’s been an explosion of neurological diseases that I never saw as a child. ADD, ADHD, speech delay, language delay, Tourette’s, narcolepsy, ASD, and Asperger’s.
“In the year 2000, the autism rate was one in 1,500. Now, autism rates in kids are one in 36 nationally, and 1 in 22 in California. The screening has not changed. Nor has the definition. The incidence has changed.
“About 18 per cent of teens have fatty liver disease, a disease that primarily used to be found only in late-stage alcoholics. Cancer rates are skyrocketing in the young and the old. Young adult cancers are up 79 per cent.
“One in four American women is on an antidepressant medication: 40 per cent of teens have a mental health diagnosis. Today, 15 per cent of high schoolers are on Adderall and half a million children are on SSRIs.
“So what’s causing all this suffering? I’ll name two culprits. First is ultra-processed foods. About 70 per cent of American children’s diet is ultra-processed – industrially manufactured in a factory. These foods consist primarily of processed sugar, ultra-processed grains, and seed oils.
“Lab scientists concoct thousands of other ingredients to make these foods more palatable, more addictive. These ingredients didn’t exist 100 years ago, and humans aren’t biologically adapted to eat them. Hundreds of these chemicals are banned in Europe, but ubiquitous in America’s processed foods.
“The second culprit is toxic chemicals in our food, medicine, and environment. Pesticides, food additives, pharmaceutical drugs, and toxic waste permeate every cell of our bodies. The assault on a child’s cells and hormones is unrelenting.
“It is crippling our nation’s finances. When my uncle was president, our country spent zero dollars on chronic disease. Today, government healthcare spending is mostly for chronic disease, and it is double the military budget. And it is the fastest-growing cost.
“The good news is that we can change all of this, and change it quickly. America can get healthy again. To do that we need to do three things. First, root out the corruption in our health agencies, all of them are controlled by huge for-profit corporations.
“Second, change the incentives of the healthcare system. And third, inspire Americans to get healthy again.
“With President Trump’s backing, I am going to change that. We are going to staff these agencies with honest scientists and doctors free from industry funding. We will make sure that the decisions of consumers, doctors, and patients are informed by unbiased science.”
Back to my words.
If Trump wins and honours the deal (highly likely) allowing Kennedy to transform US food products we will also change because most of the food processors in Australia are foreign owned and follow US patterns.
Like most Australians I am greatly concerned at the health issues that are emerging in our youth. I don’t know whether the Kennedy remedy is the answer but he may be right.
Meanwhile Kennedy will also use his heritage and words skill to add power to his health campaign.
“My uncles and my father both relished debate and prided themselves on their capacity to go toe-to-toe with any opponent in the battle over ideas. They would be astonished to learn of a Democratic Party presidential nominee who, like Vice President Harris, has not appeared for a single interview or unscripted encounter with voters in 35 days,” he said.
“This is profoundly undemocratic. How are people to choose, when they don’t know whom they are choosing? And how can this look to the rest of the world?
“My father and uncle were always conscious of America’s image because of our nation’s role as the template of democracy and the leader of the free world,” Kennedy concludes.
There is lots more to come in this US election campaign.
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Smart politics sends university Group of Eight a clear message
The Albanese government has done what it was always going to do and will regulate international student numbers from next year.
This is smart politics, plus it is an improvement on existing ineptly managed immigration rules, and it sends vice-chancellors of old and rich universities a clear message – they can protest as much as they like (and they have) but their opposition is politically irrelevant.
It is also ordinary policy. The creation of international enrolment quotas for universities and vocational colleges demonstrates the government is back in the business of regulating higher education and training – there will be more of this very soon. It is also in the business of blaming universities for the national housing shortage and immigration rackets that bother voters.
The first is ridiculous – international students paying top rental dollar occurs in inner-cities and has nothing to do with skilled labour shortages delaying housing starts across the country.
The second is blame shifting – student visa rorts are mainly a problem in the training sector where bodgy colleges pretend they are educating so-called students who are actually in Australia to work.
While the new quotas rightly apply to training colleges, including universities demonstrates the government is on to immigration and housing problems. It is also why the opposition will be wise to wave the student caps bill through the Senate, unless it wants to give Labor the chance to blame the Coalition for both.
Yet all universities enrolling international students have their quotas and the losers are already complaining. There will be warnings of a collapse in Australia’s international research ranking as international student fees stop funding new science kit, and of job losses as casual teaching staff will not be needed.
It won’t occur all at once and not everywhere. The cash cut will hurt worse Group of Eight capital city campuses (the universities of Sydney and Melbourne are standout examples), which have used international student fees to fund opulent building programs and capital-intensive research.
Early estimates put their 2025 international quotas at around pre-pandemic numbers, but 20 per cent plus down on this year.
In contrast, there are vice-chancellors who hope their universities will pick up international students the big metro campuses cannot accommodate.
This is unlikely: students in China know about Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane and that’s about it. Yet hope springs eternal and some universities have already supported the new scheme.
It’s one reason the government will get away with it – the higher education system is split on caps.
All up, this looks like an immediate win for the government with another to follow.
The government has a new agency, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission, ready to go. It would have powers to regulate Australian student admissions, allocate funding and create closer links with training. If vice-chancellors think international student caps is peak interference, they ain’t seen nothing yet.
****************************************************
40°C in August? Why is Australia so ridiculously hot right now?
Blaming the heat on global warming is absurd. It is mere unprovable assertion. And note that is was as hot in 1910, long before the modern undustrial economy was widespread
It’s winter in Australia, but as you’ve probably noticed, the weather is unusually warm. The top temperatures over large parts of the country this weekend were well above average for this time of year.
The outback town of Oodnadatta in South Australia recorded 38.5°C on Friday and 39.4°C on Saturday — about 16°C above average. Both days were well above the state’s previous winter temperature record. In large parts of Australia, the heat is expected to persist into the coming week.
A high-pressure system is bringing this unusual heat — and it’s hanging around. So temperature records have already fallen and may continue to be broken for some towns in the next few days.
It’s no secret the world is warming. In fact 2024 is shaping up to be the hottest year on record. Climate change is upon us. Historical averages are becoming just that: a thing of the past.
That’s why this winter heat is concerning. The warming trend will continue for at least as long as we keep burning fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere. Remember, this is only August. The heatwaves of spring and summer are only going to be hotter.
The Bureau of Meteorology was expecting many records to be broken over the weekend across several states. On Thursday, bureau meteorologist Angus Hines described:
A scorching end to winter, with widespread heat around the country in coming days, including the chance of winter records across multiple states for maximum temperature.
The amount of heat plunging into central Australia was particularly unusual, Hines said.
On Friday, temperatures across northern South Australia and southern parts of the Northern Territory were as much as 15°C above average.
Temperatures continued to soar across northern parts of Western Australia over the weekend, with over 40°C recorded at Fitzroy Crossing on Sunday. It has been 2–12°C above average from Townsville all the way down to Melbourne for several days in a row.
Bear in mind, it’s only August. As Hines said, the fire weather season hasn’t yet hit most of Australia, but the current conditions — hot, dry and sometimes windy — are bringing moderate to high fire danger across Australia. It may also bring dusty conditions to central Australia.
And for latitudes north of Sydney and Perth, most of the coming week will be warm.
What’s causing the winter warmth?
In recent days a stubborn high pressure system has sat over eastern Australia and the Tasman Sea. It has kept skies clear over much of the continent and brought northerly winds over many areas, transporting warm air to the south.
High pressure promotes warm weather — both through clearer skies that bring more sunshine and by promoting the descent of air that causes heating.
By late August, both the intensity of the sun and the length of the day have increased. So the centre of Australia can really warm up when under the right conditions.
High pressure in June can be associated with cooler conditions, because more heat is lost from the surface during those long winter nights. But that’s already less of an issue by late August.
This kind of weather setup has occurred in the past. Late-winter or early-spring heat does sometimes occur in Australia. However, this warm spell is exceptional, as highlighted by the broken temperature records across the country.
The consequences of humanity’s continued greenhouse gas emissions are clear. Australia’s winters are getting warmer overall. And winter “heatwaves” are becoming warmer.
Australia’s three warmest Augusts on record have all occurred since 2000 — and last August was the second-warmest since * 1910 *. When the right weather conditions occur for winter warmth across Australia, the temperatures are higher than a century ago.
The warmth we are experiencing now comes off the back of a recent run of global temperature records and extreme heat events across the Northern Hemisphere.
This warm spell is set to continue, with temperatures above 30°C forecast from Wednesday through to Sunday in Brisbane. The outlook for spring points to continued above-normal temperatures across the continent, but as always we will likely see both warm and cold spells at times.
Such winter warmth is exceptional and already breaking records. Climate change is already increasing the frequency and intensity of this kind of winter heat — and future warm spells will be hotter still, if humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions continue.
***************************************************
Peter Dutton has the Anthony Albanese government rattled and it shows
Several poor poll results and a drubbing in the NT election on the weekend has the Labor government lashing out in an increasingly nasty fashion.
Labor has decided that the best way to deal with the serious issues afflicting the country – from the cost of living crisis to the Gaza visa furore to suicidally stupid energy policies saddling households and businesses with crippling bills – is to attack the Opposition Leader. Typically it’s opposition leaders who are accused of being overly negative and in permanent attack mode, but Labor has flipped the playbook and is targeting Dutton as if he’s the prime minister.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers intensified the government’s attacks against Dutton when he launched into a particularly shrill diatribe at the John Curtin Research Centre in Melbourne on Monday night.
“Leadership which is destructive, and divisive, is not really leadership at all.
“And that’s what we are seeing from Peter Dutton. He is the most divisive leader of a major political party in Australia’s modern history – and not by accident, by choice,” Chalmers said. “It is the only plank in his political platform. He divides deliberately, almost pathologically. This is worse than disappointing, it is dangerous. His divisiveness should be disqualifying.”
To call Dutton dangerous and the most divisive leader in modern Australia is not just hyperbole but stinks of desperation and delusion.
Polls show that despite the consistently harsh treatment Dutton receives from the bulk of the mainstream media, he is cutting through on consequential issues from the economy to national security to cultural issues.
Dutton’s response to Chalmers’ astonishing attack hit the nail on the head.
“If Australians were doing so well, and if the economy was running as great as Jim Chalmers claims it is, why is he dedicating his speech to me?” he said.
And, it’s rather rich for Chalmers, or anyone on the Left, to call the Liberal leader “divisive” when it was Labor who tried to enshrine racial division into the Australian constitution.
Far from being the sensible centrists they claimed, the Albanese government has proved to be radically Left and willing to back reckless, irrational policies.
Ideology is trumping reality and reason, and that never ends well.
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27 August, 2024
Australia’s gold standard attack on religious freedom: Churches must remain free
As the flame goes out on the Paris Olympic Games, one image left smouldering in the minds of those of faith was the overt mockery of Christ at the opening ceremony on 26 July.
The grotesque parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper, saw Jesus Christ, portrayed by a lesbian DJ, surrounded by drag performers and a near-naked man painted blue. While the painting depicts one of the most profound moments of the Gospel stories, the Olympic organisers saw fit to parade writhing cross-dressers over what Christians hold sacred.
Despite the overtly profane performance, its artistic director, Thomas Jolly, hurriedly denied it was so, and Paris2024 spokesperson, Anne Descamps, apologised for any offence caused by the ceremony, stating, ‘I think (with) Thomas Jolly, we really did try to celebrate community tolerance…. If people have taken any offense, we are, of course, really, really sorry.’
In Australia, attacking Christianity has become a sport for the elites and the political class.
Just as in Paris, the evocation of ‘tolerance’ and ‘love’ is eerily resemblant of attacks on Christianity in our own country. Indeed, in Australia, the most savage attacks on our religious institutions are carried out in the name of ‘inclusivity’ and ‘equality’.
In March, the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) released its report into religious educational institutions and anti-discrimination laws as proposed by the Albanese government. While entitled Maximising the Realisation of Human Rights, the ALRC in reality acknowledged that within ‘progressive’ politics, some rights are more equal than others. It concluded that while its changes would enhance many other rights, religious freedom should be limited in order to better protect the rights of others, noting ‘the recommended reforms may limit, for some people, the freedom to manifest religion or belief in community with others and the associated parental liberty to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions’. It proceeded to propose sweeping changes that would render religious schools seriously vulnerable to activist attacks.
The report recommended that faith-based schools be stripped of their current exemption under Section 38 of the Sex Discrimination Act 1984, which allows them autonomy in hiring and enrolments so long as their decisions are made ‘in good faith in order to avoid injury to the religious susceptibilities of an adherent of that religion or creed’.
The proposed changes would hand a sword to activists seeking to undermine faith-based education by making faith-based schools vulnerable to litigation. Under the ALRC’s proposed changes, if a teacher conducted lessons contrary to the school’s religious ethos, it would have had no protection to ensure staff members honour the fundamental principles of the institution’s values.
Under the current laws, schools are protected from litigation under Section 38. However, if a future federal government successfully enacts the ALRC’s recommendations, the school would be left with little choice but to acquiesce to the teacher’s demands, or face litigation.
Having failed to convince the federal opposition to buy into its attack on Australia’s religious institutions, the Prime Minister appears to have contracted a serious case of cold feet on changing Australia’s religious discrimination laws, of which changes to Section 38 were believed to be a part. The PM said rather sheepishly, ‘The last thing that Australia needs is any divisive debate relating to religion and people’s faith…. I don’t intend to engage in a partisan debate when it comes to religious discrimination.’
While it seems this front of the elite’s war on religion has gone quiet, the battle still rages. In July, the Productivity Commission, now led by former Grattan Institute CEO Danielle Wood, released recommendations in its Future Foundations for Giving Inquiry report that seeks to diminish the ability of religious groups to attract philanthropic support.
Despite all evidence suggesting that religious entities enrich lives and provide a vital source of support in the community, the Productivity Commission does not consider them to be in line with the federal government’s philanthropic goals. It declared that there was ‘no strong case for government support’ of activities which seek to advance religion through the deductible giving recipient system.
The Commission instead recommended the federal government expressly exclude ‘all activities in the subtype of advancing religion’ from deductible giving recipient status, ‘primary, secondary, religious and informal education activities’ and school building funds.
Worse still, the Report recommends the abolition of the ‘basic religious charity’ category and related exemptions. This would empower the regulator, the Australian Charity and Non-for-profits Commission, to suspend, appoint, and remove leaders of religious institutions if it declared they violated certain governance standards. Currently, basic religious charities have autonomy over their own leadership.
The report justifies this as an effort to bring basic religious charities into line with the regulatory framework, citing that ‘inconsistent treatment of basic religious charities lacks policy rationale’. However, the Productivity Commission’s proposal is not merely a regulatory technicality, but rather the deliberate blurring of the line between church and state.
The autonomy to select, appoint, discipline, and remove religious leaders is fundamental to religious liberty. The logical extension of the state being empowered to appoint and dismiss religious leaders is that it would be positioned to select ministers sympathetic to its political goals, and to remove others that challenge its authority.
As Australia drifts ever further down the path of moral relativism, it is crucial that the church remain free to proselytise its faith and ethos. The idea that some government bureaucrat would be empowered to appoint or dismiss a religious leader is anathema to liberal democracy, and is an eerie echo of the Council for Religious Affairs appointing priests across the Soviet empire.
The race to nobble religious liberty in our own backyard is being vigorously contested. While Australia’s aggressive breed of institutional secularism may not be covered in sequins and blue body paint, it has the same finishing line.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/australias-gold-standard-attack-on-religious-freedom/
****************************************Sydney University accused of ‘gold plating’ campus with foreign enrolments around 50 per cent
Sydney University has revealed its proportion of international students is about 50 per cent this semester as it fronted allegations it was swimming in “rivers of gold” from foreign enrolment fees.
Vice chancellor Mark Scott’s comments came at a Senate hearing into the proposed international student caps, which university chiefs say amount to giving the government “sweeping emergency powers”.
Scott said the university’s senate had in 2021 determined that about 50 per cent should be the ceiling for the proportion of international students at the institution, which is heavily reliant on Chinese enrolments.
“Our era of solid growth in international students was drawing to a close,” Scott said
“At Sydney, for some years now, we have not planned to move further beyond where we are now.”
In a fiery exchange, Liberal senator Sarah Henderson said the institution was getting “rivers of gold” and told Scott he was “gold plating” the university from foreign students’ fees – pointing to a $650 million medical research project – while smaller universities were “on their knees”.
Scott said revenue from foreign fees – $1.4 billion last year – propped up teaching, research and infrastructure projects.
“I don’t think there is a magic number here,” he said. “I don’t think social licence disappears suddenly when you pass a certain threshold.”
International students have become central to Labor’s plan to slash net migration from 520,000 in 2023 to 260,000 by June next year.
The bill to cap international students, introduced to parliament in May, was a significant escalation of the government’s bid to reduce foreign enrolments, which rebounded strongly after the COVID-19 pandemic.
The proposed legislation would give Education Minister Jason Clare sweeping powers to cap international student numbers at both an institution and course level.
Universities and other higher education providers are expecting to be told this week what next year’s proposed caps are.
Treasury officials told the hearings they had not undertaken detailed modelling on the impact of the caps on Australia’s economy, but would do so after they are announced.
After the hearings, Group of Eight universities chief executive Vicki Thomson labelled this a “scandalous admission” that showed international education was the subject of a “reckless gamble” by government.
University of NSW chief Attila Brungs said the institution had been forced to halt enrolment for three popular degrees due to uncertainty about the caps.
“That will have long-term ramifications for those courses. They won’t come back for three to four years,” he said.
“The international education market is such a complex, such a large and long-term thing, making changes at this late stage is very problematic to Australia’s reputation.”
Western Sydney University vice chancellor George Williams, a constitutional lawyer, said the international student caps bill was poorly drafted and not fit to be passed.
“When I look at this bill it’s remarkable in many respects … the concentration of power is surprising,” he said.
“It’s unfettered, coercive and being concentrated in a minister in a way that you would normally associate, in my experience, with a biosecurity act or a piece of national security legislation.
“You would not expect it in a piece of industry policy, particularly something directed at higher education.”
Education Department deputy secretary Ben Rimmer said he was confident providers would “find it possible to live with” the caps when they received them
*************************************************
Business goes to war on Labor’s IR laws
Business has launched a fresh attack on the Albanese government, labelling a suite of “radical” workplace laws taking effect on Monday as a “hellishly complex minefield” that will undermine productivity.
The Business Council of Australia, Minerals Council of Australia, Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Australian Industry Group condemned the impact of multi-employer bargaining, after the Fair Work Commission on Friday compelled three NSW coalmining companies to collectively negotiate workplace agreements with a union.
“What’s alarming about this decision is that it essentially says all of the businesses in any sector can be roped together and subject to the same determination because of these new laws,” BCA chief executive Bran Black said of the Friday decision, impacting Whitehaven Coal, Peabody Energy, and Ulan Coal Mines.
“Businesses should be on edge about this precedent, because it will slash productivity and undermine enterprise-level engagement between employees and employers.”
From Monday, employers will be bound by new laws that limit them from contacting workers outside normal work hours, clamp down on the use of independent contractors, provide an easier pathway for casual workers to become permanent, and empower the FWC to set minimum standards for gig economy employees.
Unions are calling on BHP to negotiate with them by using a loophole in the Albanese government’s workplace laws.
Workplace Relations Minister Murray Watt said the reforms were part of Labor’s pre-election platform of “getting wages moving again”. He claimed wage growth was “running above inflation on an annual basis”, despite wages in the year to June being lower than prices growth.
“When we think about cost?of?living, we need to be thinking about how much people are paying for things, the tax cuts they’re receiving from our government, the energy bill relief they’re being provided with as well,” Senator Watt said on Sunday. “But what’s just as important is what they’re earning at work. Some of the changes we’ve already made have been assisting to lift people’s wages, make their jobs more secure, to enable them to deal with those cost-of-living pressures.”
Ai Group chief executive Innes Willox said running a business would become “even harder with a new wave of confidence-sapping industrial laws rolling out across our workplaces, making employing people more difficult and achieving productivity growth even more elusive”. Writing in The Australian, Mr Willox warned the real consequences of the reforms would “only reveal themselves in the months and years ahead as unions weaponise them”.
“Nowhere in this mass of legislative change is a word on how our pathetic productivity performance will be improved. In fact, all of this is anti-productivity,” he writes.
“Without turning our productivity outcomes around, we condemn ourselves to falling living standards and risk perpetuating high inflation and an elevated cost of living.”
ACCI chief executive Andrew McKellar said the new laws would “crush productivity”.
“I think there’s also a significant risk that this could mean increases in input costs for some businesses, and of course in some cases that’s going to mean those costs will be passed on to consumers,” he said.
Opposition employment spokeswoman Michaelia Cash said the new laws were “designed to create confusion in workplaces across Australia”.
“The Coalition has promised to repeal the right-to-disconnect laws when in government,” Senator Cash said.
“Mr Albanese’s changes to casual employment are designed to destroy casual jobs … For small-business employers in particular, those employing casual workers can no longer rely on their employment contract to determine their employment status.”
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Albanese’s inevitable slide into a Whitlamesque economy
A common mindset held by too many on the left is that production is inevitable, and will be maintained irrespective of the taxes levied and regulations imposed upon productive processes.
For many, the issue for activist politicians is simply how do we divide people’s incomes between the part they are permitted to retain, the part for promoting the political class’s preferred ideologies, and the part for the all-important task of maintaining themselves in power.
This may explain why the first and immediate act of the Albanese government was to grant favours to Labor’s key paymasters, the union movement, including putting in place arrangements which make the non-unionisation of the workforce more difficult to avoid. This has been followed by pay increases for certain workers, initially those in childcare, but only if their employer is union-friendly.
In requiring greater unionisation, there has been little concern about the effects of this on costs to the governed as both consumers and taxpayers. Nor is productivity a high priority… In the case of construction unionisation, we have seen reductions of 30 per cent as a result of the conditions required by the government including granting designated unions monopoly rights over who may work and the conditions of the working arrangements both for direct employees and subcontractors’ workers. National productivity, according to the latest figures, is falling.
In concert with this, we see with the CFMEU that alleged corruption is apparently tolerated until it is exposed for all to see and politicians’ averted gaze can no longer be sublimated to the notion that the prerequisite of an omelette is breaking eggs. Even then, politicians who have worked side-by-side with the miscreants now profusely claim ignorance of union misdeeds with political leaders straight-facedly insisting that they are unaware.
A rapid increase in spending is the hallmark of Labor governments other than (for the most part) the Hawke-Keating era. Albanese has been no exception, with the size of the Commonwealth rising to comprise over 26 per cent of GDP – and with even less of this than previously devoted to the most important feature of government – national defence. And arrangements are in train for further damage in providing greater scope for the government to control and therefore expand the money supply by suppressing interest rates with its attendant implications for inflation and wealth destruction. Depreciating the currency for short-term gain is the eternal temptation of governments and the Treasurer is only just getting started.
Politicians’ lack of awareness of (or indifference to) the drivers of increased income levels brings the sort of decisions that Tanya Plibersek has recently made regarding a $1 billion gold mine program near Orange. Thinking that she can remove some of the bricks supporting the project without the venture totally collapsing, in defiance of the very development approval processes which she has in place, she capriciously required additional regulatory conditions to appease particular anti-development mini interests, promoting clearly confected issues.
The mindset behind such arbitrariness owes much to the fact that very few politicians, particularly on the green-left, have ever had to make the trade-offs, cost savings, or search for solutions that confront those in the private sector.
We see the very same contempt for those involved in production with squeezes on water supply from the Murray Darling (again part of the Plibersek portfolio). Similar measures crippling productivity are seen in Queensland, where avocado farmers are suddenly losing their water rights within a pristine river system in spite of having used them for generations. And gill net fisherman are being denied access to the fisheries, which have been sustainably harvested for many years, because of confected fears about loss of the Great Barrier Reef, which is in excellent health and in any event is hundreds of miles away
Using access to the machinery of government to perpetuate themselves in office is a primary goal of all politicians but those without the awareness of the damage that overrides commercial market forces are less prone to abusing their power.
Thus, forms of arbitrary regulatory damage compound that being fomented in subsidies and grants to non-commercial wind, solar, and hydrogen energy and to facilitating the collection and distribution of that energy via transmission networks. Previous governments had built those subsidies to a level costing over $9 billion a year, but the Albanese government immediately stepped this up to $16 billion a year with its Safeguard Mechanism, the direct renewable energy purchases through the $68 billion Capacity Investment Scheme, its Hydrogen Headstart scheme, and a massive new build of transmission to deliver the diffuse power these schemes entail.
The mania of decarbonisation is also being used to justify proposals to force off-road vehicles to pay the fuel excise that funds roads. While also providing short-term revenue gains to government, this means long-term damaging costs to competitiveness.
Ideological preferences were also behind the Voice to Parliament. Under this, a parallel government would be in place across large swathes of economic activity with all the additional work-gumming and patronage this would bring in its wake. And there has been the reckless attitude to Gaza visas where Australia, a nation that is geographically just about as far away from the conflict as any in the world, is granting 95 per cent of the visas to this troubled community.
All governments naturally seek self-preservation and this will always and appropriately mean setting policies that align with some form of majority opinion. And it is expected of those in power to exercise leadership on emerging issues. But the ALP has finely honed the notion of assembling the right array of interest groups to ensure a survival oblivious to the consequences of its policies on general welfare.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/albaneses-inevitable-slide-into-a-whitlamesque-economy/
****************************************26 August, 2024
Pauline Hanson's explosive call to SACK teachers for 'brainwashing' students with Welcome to Country rituals
These rituals are "softening up" -- designed to entrench the idea that Aborigines have property rights beyond what other Australians have. They are a prelude to "reparations" -- Transferring to blacks money that they have not earned
Pauline Hanson has demanded 'racist teachers' are sacked and banned for life for 'brainwashing' students with 'divisive' Acknowledgement of Country rituals.
The call comes as Daily Mail Australia can reveal every state school in the country is being officially urged to include the controversial ceremonies.
Primary school parents have reported they were stunned to see their children being forced to touch the ground and chant 'always was, always will be Aboriginal land' at the start of each school assembly.
In NSW, children as young as three are encouraged to take part in the ritual in taxpayer-funded pre-schools by declaring: 'Today we play and learn on [the local Indigenous people's] Country and pay our respects to our Elders past and present.'
Senator Hanson told Daily Mail Australia she was 'disgusted' by the practice and called for heads to roll.
'These racist activists - teachers and lecturers - know what they're doing,' she said.
'The activists are now coming for our kids so they can try again with the new generation they've brainwashed.
Pauline Hanson has called for activist educators to be sacked and banned from teaching for life, accusing them of trying to 'brainwash' the next generation of Australians
'They're getting inside kids' heads as early as possible to program them. It has to stop.
'Any teacher who tries to indoctrinate children should be sacked and never allowed to teach in Australia again.
'Schools are for education, not indoctrination. Children should be taught how to think – critical thinking – not what to think.'
Each state education department offers strict guidelines regarding the inclusion of Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country rituals in the nation's taxpayer-funded schools.
Welcome to Country ceremonies - which can only be performed by appropriate Indigenous Elders - were considered essential at all significant primary and high school events.
Meanwhile, an Acknowledgements of Country - which 'can be conducted by anyone (children or adults) who wishes to pay their respect' - were encouraged as part of the daily curriculum.
Queensland has the strictest rules in place, with the state's education department insisting 'an Acknowledgement of Country is to be provided at all [Department of Education] events'.
This includes graduation and award ceremonies, festivals and event launches, major conferences, significant community forums, and school and venue openings.
The guidelines say the proclamation can also be included at school assemblies, sports days, parent and citizens' committee meetings and fetes.
A Welcome to Country is also mandatory at all major school events in South Australia, while 'an Acknowledgement of Country is optional at other events, meetings and forums, including school assemblies'.
In Victoria, the rituals extend into the classroom, with the state's education department advising 'schools are encouraged to acknowledge the Traditional Owners of the land at...assemblies, at the start of class, school council meetings and parent information sessions'.
Western Australia's education department guidelines explained it 'supported' the inclusion of 'an Acknowledgement of Country at school assemblies, staff meetings and other internal events'.
Parents have told Daily Mail Australia that they were alarmed to find the ritual was now even being included in young children's birthday parties outside of school.
'I took my daughter to a friend's ninth birthday in Sydney's inner-west and all the kids had to participate in an Acknowledgement of Country,' one parent said.
'It was really strange - none of the children at the party were Indigenous - so it just seemed to be virtue signalling by the parents. It was surreal.'
Senator Hanson said she had told her grandson he did not have to participate in any of the rituals at this primary school.
'When my grandson told me he was being forced to touch the ground while reciting the divisive acknowledgment of country, I told him, "You don't have to do it; this is your land as well," and now he doesn't,' she said.
'I encourage all Australian families to do the same. They're your kids - not child soldiers press-ganged as cannon fodder in racist culture war.
'We must not allow future generations to be indoctrinated with racist divisions. Every Australian citizen born here or overseas has as much right to this land as anyone else.
'Most Australians have had enough of being told their country is not theirs.'
The One Nation leader has also called for a wider ban of the practice in all public, taxpayer-funded settings.
'They’re recited at the beginning of every parliamentary sitting day, every council meeting, and every zoom meeting held by public servants,' she said.
'We hear them at the conclusion of every domestic flight – you can hear the groans in the cabin every time.
'That’s why One Nation last year moved to call for a ban on Welcomes to Country, calling for the promise of leading Voice to Parliament campaigner Marcia Langton to be fulfilled.
'It’s become meaningless and offensive. It’s an activist device, and a vehicle for the same racial division Australians overwhelmingly rejected at last year’s referendum.
'Australia belongs to all Australians, equally. That’s been my position since I first entered Parliament in 1996: equal rights for all, and special rights for none.'
Professor Langton is one of the key architects of the Indigenous Voice to Parliament proposal.
The respected writer last year predicted many Indigenous Australians would no longer participate in Welcome to Country ceremonies if the Voice to Parliament referendum was unsuccessful.
This past week, Prof Langton told Daily Mail Australia she was 'not available' to comment on whether there had been any reluctance or refusal to officiate the ceremonies as suggested.
But Indigenous affairs academic Anthony Dillon said the Welcome to Country and Acknowlegment of Country ceremonies had become so overused they had both become largely meaningless.
'I'm not a big fan of the Welcome to Country or the Acknowledgement of Country,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
'They should be saved for special occasions. In the right circumstances, when done with sincerity, they can be powerful and beautiful.
'But unfortunately, they're overused and have become almost mandatory for any and every occasion.
'I've no problem with them being included in schools just so long as they don't get hijacked for political purposes and stretched into that whole "white man is bad, he must apologise" thing.
'If people want to do them at children's birthday parties, that's fine - I'd probably sit there and cringe a bit and, if they asked me, I'd say I wasn't into it - but that's up to the parents and its fairly harmless.
'At the same time, I'm also not a fan of people who want to make this a big political issue. It's not.
'Instead, what we should be focusing on is getting kids in schools and communities cleaned up.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13763899/welcome-country-pauline-hanson-ban.html
***********************************************The sun is setting on our renewables ‘superpower’ fantasy
Renewable energy superpower status is supposedly in Australia’s grasp now the government has given Mike Cannon-Brookes the green light to export solar power to Singapore.
Tanya Plibersek announced environmental approval for the tech billionaire’s eccentric proposal last week, taking a swipe at Peter Dutton’s “expensive nuclear fantasy that may never happen”.
By contrast, the Environment Minister would have us believe Cannon-Brookes’s plan to siliconise the NT Outback is a done deal. All that’s left to do is raise $35bn in capital, install 120 square kilometres of solar panels, build a modest 788km transmission line to Darwin, and lay a 4200km high-voltage cable on the seabed, and we’re good to go.
The Sun Cable AAPowerLink project feels like it was stolen from a Heath Robinson cartoon: a convoluted, unnecessarily elaborate, and impractical contraption designed to accomplish a mundane task. It may mark the beginning of the end of the renewable romance, the point at which the transition to wind, solar and hydropower collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.
There is increasing evidence the US has reached the point of peak renewables, as the pool of private investors shrinks and winning community approval becomes harder. Research by the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory showed roughly one-third of utility-scale wind and solar applications submitted over the past five years were cancelled, while about half of wind and solar projects experienced significant delays.
Sky News Business Editor Ross Greenwood says Australia's largest solar farm to date has been given the “green light” by the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek.
The US Department of Energy says the national electricity network needs to grow by 57 per cent by 2035, the equivalent of approximately 21,000 km a year. Last year’s total was around 200 km, down from just over 1000 in 2022.
Meanwhile, the challenges of grid synchronisation and storage remain unresolved, and the technical problems for offshore wind turbines, in particular, are mounting. Last week, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova announced an investigation into a blade failure in the 3.6GW Dogger Bank project in the North Sea off the coast of the UK. It is the third blade failure this year.
In July, a newly installed blade crumbled at the Vineyard Wind offshore plant, creating debris that washed up on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. At 107 metres long and weighing 55 tonnes, they are the most enormous blades deployed commercially. The failure of three in quick succession suggests the quest to increase output by installing ever-larger blades has reached its natural limits.
Yet the imperative of expanding generating capacity is hardening. The principal driving force is not electric vehicles but the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. AI requires at least 10 times the power of conventional computing programs.
In the US, data centres account for about 2.5 per cent of power and demand could rise to 7.5 per cent by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. In Ireland, data processing and storage use 12 per cent of electricity produced, forcing the authorities to limit the number of connections to the grid.
Silicon Valley has long abandoned the notion it can be powered by silicon photovoltaic panels while burying stray emissions in the Amazon forests.
In April, the tech giant Amazon paid the best part of $1bn ($US650m) for a sizeable block of land next to Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna nuclear power station. It will be the site for a data centre powered by up to 480MW of carbon-free electricity delivered reliably around the clocky.
Shares in US nuclear power companies such as Consolidated Energy, Talem and Vistra have soared by between 80 per cent and 180 per cent in the past year. So-called green energy stocks, on the other hand, are static or falling, while coal is making an unexpected comeback.
In May, the Financial Times reported that the retirement dates for coal-fired power stations are being pushed back as operators become concerned about grid security. Allianz Energy has delayed the conversion of its Wisconsin plant from coal to gas for three years to 2028. Ohio-based FirstEnergy announced in February that it was scrapping its 2030 target to phase out coal, citing “resource adequacy concerns”.
The effect of AI on electricity demand was largely unanticipated at the beginning of the decade. AI chips will undoubtedly become more efficient, but there is no telling how much further the demand for AI will grow since the technology is in its infancy. Nor can we begin to guess what other power-hungry forms of technology might be developed by 2050.
What we do know, however, is that if Australia’s demand for electricity exceeds 313 TWH a year in a 2050, we’re in trouble. That’s the target the Australian Energy Market Operator has set in its updated blueprint for the great electricity transition.
As Chris Bowen points out, that’s going to take a lot solar panels and wind turbines. The Energy Minister says we need 22,000 new solar panels a day and a new 7MW wind turbine every 18 hour s just to meet our 2030 target of a mere 202 TWH. For the record, the speed of the rollout in the first two years of Labor government is less than a tenth of that.
One of the hallmarks of the anointed is an unwavering conviction in the integrity of their analysis and the effectiveness of their proposed solutions. They feel no need to hedge their bets by factoring in contingency arrangements should their predictions turn out to be wrong. Nothing in AEMO’s Integrated System Plan indicates its experts have given any thought to scaling up electricity production in line with actual demand, which may well be considerably higher than they’ve anticipated.
If they had, they would have to acknowledge that there are limits to the renewable energy frontier determined by energy density, the demand for land and the requirement for firming. The silicification of northern Australia cannot continue forever, nor can we expect to rely on China for most of the hardware and pretend there are no geopolitical consequences.
As for our nuclear-phobic Prime Minister’s dream of turning Australia into the Saudi Arabia of green hydrogen, while simultaneously sitting at the cutting edge of quantum computing, forget it. In 2006, as the shadow minister for the environment, Anthony Albanese gave a speech at the Swansea RSL on avoiding dangerous climate change.
“Why on Earth would we want to take the big health and economic risk of nuclear energy when we have a ready-made power source hovering peacefully in the sky every day?” he asked.
If Albanese doesn’t know the answer to that question 18 years later, he probably never will.
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It’s a bad day for biology
Sall Grover, founder of The Giggle for Girls app, has been ordered to pay $10,000 in compensation plus legal costs after losing to transgender individual Roxanne Tickle. This falls a long way short of the $200,000 originally sought.
Sall Grover reacted to the decision on Twitter:
‘Unfortunately, we got the judgement we anticipated. The fight for women’s rights continues.’
Rachael Wong added:
‘I am sitting here reflecting on this morning’s verdict in Tickle v Giggle and flipping between being outraged at the fact that women and girls have no sex-based rights in Australia, are not even recognised as a legal category anymore in Australia, and sort of being like well we’ve already known this for some time.’
Roxanne Tickle, who was born male but has identified as a woman for many years, was excluded from the female-only app back in 2021. This exclusion, it was argued, constituted gender identity discrimination.
Justice Robert Bromwich said of the decision:
‘The indirect discrimination cases succeeded because Ms Tickle was excluded from the use of the Giggle app because she did not look sufficiently female according to the respondents.’
Effectively, this means that gender identity is superior to biological sex when it comes to discriminating against individuals in sex-segregated spaces.
‘What is a woman?’
The once simple question has now become a complicated matter of what the law determines a woman to be.
‘We’re with you all the way,’ said Victorian MP Moira Deeming, to Sall Grover.
Those who continue to fight for sex-based rights – in law – insist that biology is immutable, regardless of gender-affirming surgery or legal actions such as the changing of gender on a birth certificate.
This sits fundamentally at odds with the transgender movement which leans heavily into ‘Self ID’ where individuals assert their preferred gender based on a variety of actions that may or may not include physical alterations. In some cases, a declaration of gender identity is all that is required.
Where does this leave women’s rights for biological women?
Is there such a thing as a sex-segregated space in Australia?
These are the questions being asked in the aftermath of this case, particularly on the hashtag #IstandwithSallGrover which has been trending around the world.
‘[This is] a major step forward for the freedom and equality of all women,’ said Jackie Turner from Trans Justice Project.
Not all women agree.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/biology-bows-to-gender-identity/
*******************************************Trumpenomics: The implications of a second Trump term for Australia
David Pearl
As we know, Trump has a powerful – and seemingly debilitating – psychological effect on the great majority of commentators. Very few seem capable of detached, balanced and nuanced analysis.
Many of my fellow economists, the vast majority of whom are politically to the left of centre, have fallen over themselves to denounce Trump’s economics. In June, sixteen Nobel Prize-winning economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, issued an open letter arguing that Joe Biden’s economic agenda (which no doubt will be replicated by Kamala Harris, if elected) was ‘vastly superior’ to Donald Trump’s.
A second Donald Trump presidency, they asserted, risked ‘reigniting’ inflation given his commitment to raise tariffs and cut taxes, conveniently ignoring the alarming surge in inflation on Biden’s watch. Bizarrely, the laureates suggested that Biden has lowered ‘long-run inflationary pressures’ by subsidising wind and solar energy, which as we know is a proven strategy for raising, rather than cutting, power prices.
Australian economists have been no better, predicting variously that Trump will destroy the international trading system, take control of the Federal Reserve and even, according to one, refuse to leave office once his term is up. (The idea of Trump assuming direct responsibility for monetary policy – and therefore interest rates and inflation – is ridiculous. He may be a lot of things, but he is not stupid).
While the outlines of Trump’s likely agenda are well known, his plans for trade and illegal immigration have received almost all the attention.
Economists have seized on his intention to impose an across-the-board 10-per-cent tariff on US imports, and tariffs of up to 60 per cent on goods from China. While this is understandable, they have typically ignored the bigger policy picture.
Trump is a committed tax reformer, and will want to extend his 2017 personal income tax cuts due to expire in 2025 (these narrowed deductions and lowered rates across most brackets, with the top rate set at 37 per cent). He is likely to call for a further reduction in the corporate tax rate.
And if elected, Trump will comprehensively deregulate the US energy sector, including: removing regulatory restrictions on oil production, natural gas, nuclear power and clean coal; scrapping car emission and electric vehicle mandates; and, once again, pulling the US out of the Paris climate change accord.
How should we characterise Trump’s economic philosophy? His critics have usually described it as populist and protectionist. Sympathisers have characterised it as nationalist-conservative, suggesting Trump favours a big and intrusive government, but dedicated to right-wing instead of progressive causes. In truth, none of these labels fits the bill, or at least not entirely.
While I agree that Trump is no classical free trader, his support for lower taxes and energy deregulation is firmly in the Reagan tradition. True, Reagan deregulated the US finance sector, not energy (although, he famously removed the solar panels his Democrat predecessor Jimmy Carter had installed on the White House roof), but there are parallels between these agendas.
In the 1980s, the economic costs of financial regulations (many dating back to the Depression era) became crushing for the US and other Western economies, raising the cost of capital, misallocating resources on a vast scale and limiting growth. Today, it is the extensive network of energy regulations, designed to force cheap and reliable fossil fuels out of the market, which is doing the most economic harm.
The positive supply-side impacts of Trump’s energy deregulation plans, if realised, are likely to dwarf any negative effect of his tariff agenda. (Remember that for large economies like the US, the costs of protection, while not trivial, are far lower than they are for smaller economies like Australia.)
Fiscal policy provides another parallel between Trump and Reagan. Reagan cut taxes but did not touch entitlement programs, securing the support of millions of working class Democrats.
Trump plans to do the same thing. Before we reach for the smelling salts, we should keep in mind that the US’s international creditors, with China at the forefront, have been only too happy – through their continued purchases of US government bonds – to finance its budget deficits.
Should Australians fear or be optimistic about a second Trump presidency? Leaving aside the simplistic view of his haters, it will be a mixed bag.
While Trump is a protectionist, Kamala Harris is as well (judging by the record of the Biden administration). So there will be broad continuity here. And let’s not panic about Trump’s sabre-rattling on China trade, which in my view is more about positioning him for a bilateral deal than anything else, a two-step strategy he followed during his first term. Back then, of course, Trump exempted Australia from higher steel and aluminium tariffs. Given the weakness of its economy, I have no doubt China will be ready to negotiate.
If trade, under either Trump or Harris, presents some risks, the big policy shift will come in the area of energy. Trump’s plans in this area, if realised, will undermine, perhaps fatally, the global – in truth largely Western – emissions reduction crusade. By delegitimising wind-and-solar ideology, it may free Australia to pursue more rational energy and climate change policies.
This all said, it would be foolish to over-analyse what a second Trump presidency might bring. After all, the Covid pandemic, which arguably cost him the 2020 election, came out of the blue. And with the election still months away and recent polls tightening, Trump is no certainty to take office.
It is intellectually lazy, and an insult to the millions of Americans who will vote for him, to dismiss Trump as a fool or would-be dictator. He is neither.
But nor is he a political messiah. He is flesh and blood, a singular politician to be sure, but a politician nevertheless. His plans on tax and energy, if realised, will deliver enormous gains to the US economy and set a positive policy example for Australia.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/trumpenomics/
****************************************All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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25 August, 2024
Diversity is not our strength
It was encouraging to see Albo’s government recently appoint a Special Envoy for Social Cohesion, Wills MP Peter Khalil, in a nod to community harmony, which has been taken for granted in Australia for far too long. Equally, it was discouraging to see the same regime recklessly importing relatively unvetted Gazan migrants from a war zone, given that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has become the violent edge of ethnic division here. Stoking a problem at the same time as staunching it, then? Despite the protestations of our multicultural lobby, it is self-evident, after the 7 October massacre in Israel, that not all communities can coexist peacefully – or even want to.
Yes, Australian generosity and tolerance has created a successful multi-ethnic society, but growing divisions are emerging, as separate group identities, funded and promoted by multicultural ideologies and agencies, strain the ties that bind. Divisive Welcomes to Country, locking up ‘country’ such as Mount Warning away from other Australians, unruly pro-Palestinian protesters, two-tier policing, and massive migration numbers are straining this nation’s social fabric like never before.
At issue is our 50-year-long policy of multiculturalism: are we creating too many rival groups and enclaves, at the expense of a shared Australian national identity? One of the first great social philosophers, the 14th-century Arab Ibn Khaldun introduced a concept called ‘asabiyah’, the unifying feeling that binds a group and makes collective action possible. It can be religious, or racial, cultural or military. It’s the glue that makes a society work. The asabiyah of the terrorist group Hamas is the destruction of Israel and the Jews, for example.
A 2023 book, Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire, by US economist and researcher Jens Heycke, contrasts ethnic separatism (‘Multiculturalism’) throughout world history with a more integrationist (‘Melting Pot’) approach. Across the globe and through history, societies that preferenced separate identities fared far worse, sometimes catastrophically so, than more integrated ones. It is a woeful tale that makes you wonder how modern multiculturalism ever took hold.
The Roman and Ottoman Empires, Islam, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, the Balkans and more come under Heycke’s gaze. Expanding, successful Rome was assimilationist, explicitly including conquered peoples as citizens; the Greek Aristides wrote: ‘In your empire all paths are open to all.’ But separatism rose after the mass immigration of Goths and Huns in the 4th and 5th centuries; they failed to integrate or gain citizenship and in 476AD Rome fell.
Similar stories play out elsewhere. In Rwanda the Tutsi-Hutu enmity turns out not to be an age-old rivalry but a product of Belgium’s divide and conquer approach, in which the colonialists gave out ID cards distinguishing Tutsis from Hutus, and gave Tutsis job and educational preferences, thus setting the stage for an explosion of racial violence that killed up to one million people in 1994. A modern success story, Rwanda now has a strongly colour-blind policy, in which all must be Rwandans, no longer Tutsis or Hutus.
Similarly Sri Lanka, where the Tamils and Sinhalese had long coexisted relatively peacefully. After independence in 1948 a ‘Sinhala only’ language campaign arose, the linking English language was abandoned, and separate education systems for Sinhala and Tamil ultimately divided the two populations. The percentage of Tamils employed in the armed forces fell from 40 per cent in 1956 to one per cent in 1970. Finally in 2009 a bloodbath left some 40,000 Tamils dead.
Botswana’s story is extraordinary. Founder and first president, the black prince Seretse Khama, had to overcome British government skulduggery and racism in order to marry London clerk, Ruth Williams. As a result, Khama’s movement was welded to colourblindness, resolutely opposing racial, ethnic and tribal distinctions. Questions about race, tribe or ethnicity are banned from the official census, for example.
Heycke notes that the Botswana, Mauritius and Rwanda constitutions all mandate colour-blindness, and are among Africa’s freest, and most prosperous nations.
The economist then ‘costs’ ethnic division: ‘the data… suggest that ethnic diversity is strongly correlated with extensive violence, rampant corruption, poor economic growth and abysmal living standards’. The happiest countries, such as the Nordic nations, also turn out to be the most homogeneous.
A key insight concerns public goods such as health, sanitation, law enforcement, education and infrastructure. Highly divided nations do very poorly at providing such public services, with ethnic communities tending to focus on their own people, at the expense of the country at large. This impoverishes everyone. In this he builds on the work of sociologist Robert Putnam, as quoted in the New York Times. His 30,000-strong study across the US found ‘the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote, and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects’.
Heycke concludes: social unity is fragile; ethnic division elicits evil from ordinary people; group preferences favour powerful elites over the needy (as we see with the Aboriginal industry, where the monies never seem to reach those living in the dirt); ethnic preferences never solve the problems they were created for, and in practice are usually there forever.
The problem turns out not to be people’s diverse origins but tying benefits or disadvantages to group identities. This is the toxin that poisons societies. Heycke writes, ‘When a society maintains group distinctions, and particularly when it bolsters them with group preferences, people hunker down, adopting an “us versus them” outlook.’ Australia indeed dodged a bullet with the Voice referendum, which, had it succeeded, would likely have expanded society-inflaming race-based benefits. Such toxins can include, for example, the barring of non-indigenous from some parts of ‘country’, or, in the UK, ‘Two-Tier’ Keir’s punitive policing of native Brits, while allowing gangs of recent migrants, masked and brandishing weapons, to rampage without hindrance.
I grew up in a 1950s and 1960s white bread Australia with a level of safety, harmony and peacefulness unimaginable to young Australians now. My community had the second-densest migrant concentration in post-war Australia; I had Ukrainians over the road, Russians and Maltese on either side of our house; and local Aborigines at our school. The migrants were called New Australians then, an innate acknowledgement that we were all involved in building a new Australia. It was our asabiyah.
What is the point, then, of all this diversity, that is straining infrastructure and unity for everyone already here? It is past time to focus on our commonalities and unity, not ethnic and cultural differences.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/diversity-is-not-our-strength/
**************************************************Decolonising the nation’s history in pursuit of ‘truth’
It’s nearly a decade since Geoffrey Blainey, Australia’s leading historian, dismissed “talk of the history wars raging in Australia”. Writing in The Weekend Australian on February 21, 2015, he commented that the usage of the word war in this context was mistaken.
Blainey’s point was that “controversy, not war, will continue for a long time to come” since argument was part of “the nature of history and of most intellectual activities”. All the more so in Australia, “a nation where the main strands of history – Aboriginal and European – are utterly different”.
It’s much the same with usage of the term “the end of history”. Writing in The Australian on August 20, 2022, I made the point that the suggestion that someone was on the wrong side of history was just another way of shutting down debate. These days this word weapon is primarily embraced by the left – or liberals in US parlance.
History is in the news again following the revelation that, so far, 19 volumes of the Australian Dictionary of Biography are under revision. The initial general editor was Australian National University academic Douglas Pike. The inaugural publisher was Melbourne University Press, then managed by Peter Ryan.
The publication of the ADB was a terrific achievement for a nation of around 12 million of which only a small percentage of the population had a tertiary education. Moreover, it was essentially put together by those who devoted their time free of charge.
It came as some surprise, then, to hear ADB general editor Melanie Nolan say this on the ABC about the publication (which has been published by ANU Press since 2012): “Of the 14,000 ADB articles, probably a third will stand the test of time and won’t need much changing; a third of them are dreadful (and) a third of them need significant work.”
It’s a long time since a general editor of a historical dictionary fanged their own publication. Sure Nolan, who is a professor at the ANU’s National Centre for Biography, has been in the ADB position for only a few years. But she presides over a publication that gets about 1.2 million visits a year. Not a bad result for a publication the general editor of which reckons contains close to 5000 “dreadful” entries.
On August 19, Nolan was interviewed about the ADB by David Marr, the newly appointed presenter of ABC Radio National’s Late Night Live. The session was advertised as “Fixing up Australia’s written history”. The blurb declared: “History is subjective but in Australia we have a history of not just sanitising the past and its characters but censoring or at least covering up.” It was suggested “one significant project” to do with the de-sanitising was the proposed revision of the ADB.
Then Marr introduced Nolan by saying that “decolonising those 20 volumes, nine million words and almost 14,000 biographies can’t be done overnight”.
Nolan told Marr the project was overdue. She spoke about the need for “revisionism” and made the obvious point that “our values change”. She added: “It’s a long time since historians have been completely objective.” But she did not say when such a (utopian) time existed. Nolan acknowledged that the ADB was an unusual publication of its type in the 1960s in having the lives of representative Australians covered. By this she meant that not all entries were about the rich, powerful and famous. But Nolan criticised the ADB for having a celebratory past and added “people who were seen as disreputable were not included”.
The last claim is not the case. Bushranger and police killer Ned Kelly gets coverage (volume five), as does Sydney’s madam criminal Tilly Devine (volume eight) and murderer Jean Lee, the last woman hanged in Australia (volume 15). Nolan states that only 170 convicts are in the ADB. But it’s not zero. And she said women had been dreadfully underestimated.
The last matter has been addressed in recent years. And Nolan has foreshadowed already planned volumes on colonial women and convicts plus greater coverage of Indigenous Australians. Moreover, in 2005, when Diane Langmore was general editor, the ADB put out a supplementary volume covering people who were missed in the period 1788-1980. Also, through the years there have been a number of corrigenda issued.
In private correspondence about a late friend who has an ADB entry, Nolan advised me in writing that “the ADB does not unilaterally change an author’s text without their permission”. But it does so on occasions. After all, some errors have to be corrected.
It makes sense that, from time to time, historical dictionaries have to be brought up-to-date. The problem with what Nolan told Marr is that the ADB – which is largely funded by taxpayers’ money – now has an agenda to revise Australian history so it can present what Nolan has referred to as “truth”. Which would seem to mean truth as perceived by her and her contemporary colleagues.
Nolan told Marr that while the ADB “has patriotic origins … it’s in a university”. As such, “we are not just telling stories about people we value in the past but also analysing those because we are social scientists”. In view of the state of social science in most Western universities, this suggests that what Marr described as Nolan’s decolonisation project will involve yet more voices of alienated left-wing intellectuals condemning their own societies while on the taxpayer teat.
Then there is the question of what, in Nolan’s view, requires revision. Take historian Manning Clark, a key player in promoting the left-wing interpretation of Australian history. The current entry on Clark in the ADB online refers to his Meeting Soviet Man, published in 1960, as “a controversial book on the Soviet Union”.
It was more than that. Clark compared Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Lenin to Jesus Christ and made no substantial criticism of the communist totalitarian dictatorship that prevailed in 1960 under the heirs of Lenin and Stalin.
The Clark entry could do with substantial revision. But do not expect any. It doesn’t fit an Australian decolonisation project.
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Sydney school shows that old-fashioned teaching methods work best
Tracy Considine has made countless changes at Canterbury Public in her six years as principal, but she finds it easy to pinpoint those that have helped to lift the school’s maths and reading scores.
The latest round of literacy and numeracy exams shows the school has gained ground in both measures: the proportion of year 3 children above baseline standard in reading is up from 59 per cent to 87 per cent.
“We’ve targeted teacher practice with intensive professional development and making sure every teacher is trained in phonics instruction,” she said. “Parents have come along with us. We run workshops for families on core maths and reading concepts so they can help their kids at home.”
Considine said the school, which uses explicit teaching methods, had also worked hard to shift perceptions among teachers and parents that children “were either good at maths or they weren’t”.
“We’ve debunked myths and changed attitudes. We dispelled myths that only boys can achieve at the highest level in maths. Teachers now have high expectations of all students.”
The NSW Education Department has identified Canterbury for achieving significant growth in both reading and numeracy in the past year. About 80 per cent of year 3 students achieved proficiency in year 3 maths.
Last week’s release of the 2024 NAPLAN results painted a bleak picture of academic achievement across the country. One in three children in NSW failed to reach benchmarks in reading and maths. Ten per cent of year 9 pupils are functionally illiterate.
About 40 per cent of year 3 students did not meet expected standards in grammar tests, meaning they struggled to point out the correct location of a full stop or to identify proper nouns.
While Canterbury’s results are showing signs of bucking the statewide trend, outcomes nationally remain unchanged compared with 2023. The results once again lay bare the glaring gap between rich and poor students, and those in cities and remote areas.
The national scorecard has also intensified the fight between federal Education Minister Jason Clare and his state counterparts over the next schools funding deal.
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Gazan visa scheme is a sign of weak PM’s desperation
Peta Credlin
Be thankful you don’t have to watch parliament for a living like I do, because the past week has been a shocker.
We’ve got a weak Prime Minister who’s getting more and more desperate to hold onto power despite the real sense it’s slipping away from him. We’ve got ministers who are failing to get the basics right, like Health Minister Mark Butler who has allowed Australia to run critically low in essential IV fluids needed by our hospitals. And you’ve got those well-heeled Teals claiming misogyny because they don’t like the tone of political debate but, at the same time, are using slurs like “racist” against Peter Dutton.
What the Left don’t understand (and I include the Teals here as they are Gucci-Greens, not pseudo-Liberals) is that calling the Opposition Leader a “racist” because he wants security checks on people coming to live in Australia brands every one of us a racist.
Nearly every Australian has a migrant background of one sort or another. Migrants who’ve come the right way know just how rigorous the requirements were: the documents, the checks, the time taken before they got their visa.
So, when they learn that Anthony Albanese has granted 3000 tourist visas to people out of a terrorist-controlled war zone, they want assurances they were properly checked. Imagine their concern when they learn that these online applications were approved in as little as one hour, without a face-face-interview and that, once here, Gazans are already applying for permanent refugee status and all the taxpayer support that comes with it?
What’s more, the Albanese Government never actually told us they were doing this.
Australians only found out by accident when the story leaked out in the Muslim community. There was no official announcement, no transparency and no special visa class created, as done in the past, to properly vet any new arrivals.
What troubles me the most is the statement by ASIO chief Mike Burgess that “sympathy with Hamas” is not a deal-breaker when deciding the fate of these Gazans. Hamas is a listed terrorist organisation. That’s done under special legislation against a whole set of criteria that confirms it is the worst of the worst when it comes to the harm Hamas wants to do to countries like Australia.
In the past, we used to deport people that were sympathetic to al-Qaeda and Islamic State (both also listed terrorist organisations), so what’s changed? Was Burgess freelancing here or was he reflecting new government policy? Worryingly, when asked twice in parliament last week: “Does supporting Hamas pass the character test for an Australian visa?”, the Prime Minister completely evaded the question.
Can you imagine John Howard dodging a straight forward question like this? Instead of answering it, Albanese accused Dutton of being “divisive” and “negative”, but this is a big deal. Why is the Prime Minister and his government so reluctant to say that support for Hamas has no place in this country?
So, the question that must be asked, why is Albanese doing this?
Because Labor is under huge electoral pressure. In every major poll over the past eight months, they are behind and, at best, headed for minority government. They are facing a backlash in outer urban seats where cost of living is biting hard. The Greens have used the pro-Palestinian issue to drag young voters away from Labor and in a raft of seats in Western Sydney and Melbourne, Labor incumbents are vulnerable to a new pro-Muslim vote movement.
I don’t think they thought it would go like this. I know how the inside of government works, and I think this was something cooked up quickly last year by Albanese and then Immigration Minister Andrew Giles to trade visas-for-votes among the pro-Palestinian crowd. I think they thought they were being clever and used the backdoor (and fast) route of tourist visas without getting advice from our security agencies (remember at the time, the PM had thrown ASIO off his National Security Committee) or even the immigration department, as a former senior immigration official said last week. I doubt it even went to cabinet, there was no caucus debate, and certainly no public announcement, and it’s now all blown up in the government’s face.
As it should.
No one can call himself a leader and put at risk Australia’s national security. But that’s exactly what Albanese has done here. Hamas is deeply anti-Semitic; it also hates the West and thinks all westerners are evil. It exalts in depravity, slaughters women and children in ways I can’t even describe in print, and it won’t rest until it destroys Israel, or Israel destroys Hamas.
Not every Gazan is a supporter of Hamas but reputable polls say that the vast majority supported what Hamas did on October 7. It’s also an undeniable fact that Gazans elected Hamas as their government.
This is why asking legitimate questions about why we are now letting these Gazans into Australia without proper security checks isn’t racist at all. And anyone trying to claim it is, has something to hide.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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22 August, 2024
World’s biggest study finds array of harms from common plastics
This is yet another foray in the war against BPA etc. It appears to be based on a "report" that accepts as proven the harms alleged, depite the repeated failures of the central correlations to reach significant levels in research. See the originating article below:
https://annalsofglobalhealth.org/articles/10.5334/aogh.4056
The world’s first major scientific review into the effects of plastics and microplastics chemicals on human health has found that the chemicals in many common products are associated with a wide range of health risks, including poor birth outcomes and miscarriage, infertility, metabolic disease and endocrine dysfunction.
Australian researchers who carried out the study say it “categorically proves” that none of the chemicals examined, including BPA, flame retardants, PFAS and an array of other common chemicals found in plastics that infiltrate people’s bodies in small quantities every day, can be considered safe.
“This is a red flag for the world,” said Sarah Dunlop, head of plastics and human health at the Minderoo Foundation. “We must minimise our exposure to these plastic chemicals, as well as the many that haven’t yet been assessed for human health outcomes but are known to be toxic.”
The peer-reviewed study published in the Annals of Global Health by Australian doctors and academics associated with the Perth-based Minderoo Foundation was an umbrella review – considered the highest level of scientific synthesis – of almost 800 published studies and 52 systematic reviews into the effects of plastics chemicals.
“To our knowledge, this study is first to investigate the complete, high-level, evidence for human health effects of plastics and plastic-associated chemicals across a broad range of plastic chemical groups,” the authors of the study said.
It follows a Florey Institute study earlier this month that for the first time established a biological pathway between the plastic chemical bisphenol A (BPA) and autism spectrum disorder.
The umbrella review investigated five classes of chemicals including bisphenols and phthalates, PBDE, PCBs and PFAS, known as a ‘forever chemical’ used at defence bases that has been found in several crucial water supply plants. Also included were plasticisers and flame retardants – two classes of functional additive with the highest concentration ranges in plastic.
The study found that none of the investigated classes of chemicals are safe with statistically significant harmful impacts found for fertility in men and women, birth weight in babies, children’s neurodevelopment, and the development of Type 2 diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease and asthma.
Bisphenol A (BPA) – commonly found in food packaging, water bottles and cosmetics – was found to be associated with genital changes in infants, type 2 diabetes in adults, insulin resistance in children and adults, polycystic ovary syndrome, obesity and hypertension in children and adults and cardiovascular disease.
Phthalates plasticisers – found in a wide array of plastic products including nail polish, children’s toys, cosmetics and medical products – were associated with spontaneous pregnancy loss, genital changes in boys, and insulin resistance in children and adults.
There were additional associations between certain phthalates and decreased birth weight, type 2 diabetes in adults, precocious puberty in girls, reduced sperm quality, endometriosis, adverse cognitive development and intelligence quotient (IQ) loss, adverse fine motor and psychomotor development and elevated blood pressure in children and asthma in children and adults.
Other types of chemicals were similarly associated with pregnancy loss, decreased birth weight, endometriosis, bronchitis in infants, obesity, and the cancers Hodgkin’s lymphoma and breast cancer.
It is next to impossible for an individual to limit completely their exposure to harmful plastics chemicals, although experts advise reducing consumption of water in plastic bottles, reducing consumption of packaged food, and not heating plastic containers in the microwave.
Regulation of production and plastics chemicals in products is the only way to protect human health. But there is very little regulation of plastic chemicals in Australia or most other countries.
A Global Plastics Treaty is currently being negotiated that advocates of reform hope will set the stage for recognition of the substances’ harmful health effects and increase pressure on governments to regulate.
Professor Dunlop said there was now no doubt that plastics chemicals were harmful to human health.
“Plastic is not the safe, inert material we thought it was,” she said. “It’s made of 16,000 chemicals or so. We are exposed. We’re exposed across our lifespan, and there are health impacts across our lifespan.
“We’ve got to pull together and act fast, because plastic production is soaring. We need to really get the cause of the problem and reduce or cap plastic production.
“The second thing is to take a really good, hard look at the chemicals, because at the moment, unlike pharmaceuticals, which are highly regulated, industrial chemicals are being produced at a rate that is from this just outstripping our ability to identify what’s being produced and outstripping our ability to find out whether or not it’s harmful.”
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Coalition to launch an all-out blitz on teal seats
Peter Dutton will launch an all-out assault to wrestle back seats lost to the teals and edge the Coalition closer to winning government, with the Liberal Party bringing forward preselections, ramping up fundraisers and attacking Climate 200-backed independents.
The Australian can reveal opposition frontbenchers are preparing blitzes of teal-held seats in NSW, Victoria and Western Australia, with Kooyong and Curtin emerging as the top targets for the Liberal Party.
With Amelia Hamer, Tom White, Ro Knox and Tim Wilson already locked in for Kooyong, Curtin, Wentworth and Goldstein respectively, the NSW Liberal Party on Wednesday opened nominations for the northern Sydney seats of Mackellar and Warringah.
Nominations for the Labor-held central coast seat of Robertson close at 5pm on Thursday.
While winning Allegra Spender’s seat of Wentworth in Sydney’s east is considered unlikely, senior Liberal Party strategists have not given up on reclaiming historic blue-ribbon territory. If former NSW planning minister Rob Stokes or another high-profile candidate nominates for Mackellar, Liberal strategists are hopeful of ousting Sophie Scamps.
Senior opposition sources said there had been strong fundraising and volunteer support for Ms Hamer and Mr White, who are running in Monique Ryan’s inner-Melbourne seat of Kooyong, which she took from former treasurer Josh Frydenberg, and Kate Chaney’s Perth seat of Curtin.
Institute of Public Affairs' Daniel Wild has slammed the Teals calling them “cashed up Greens”.
Amid tensions among teals on key issues and recent attacks targeting Mr Dutton, Deputy Opposition Leader Sussan Ley attacked the independents for “betraying” their traditionally conservative electorates and teaming up with Labor and the Greens.
Ms Ley, the most senior woman in the Coalition who has visited the six key teal seats 31 times since the 2022 election, will travel to Kooyong next week and make her ninth visit to the Perth seat of Curtin.
Following recent scandals, the federal Liberal executive is increasingly likely to take control of preselections in NSW ahead of the election.
Amid expectations of a hung parliament following the next election and the Coalition needing to win back a swath of seats, Ms Ley accused the teals of becoming the “official opposition to the opposition” and having no right to “critique” parliamentary standards.
“It is clear we now have an official opposition to the opposition. This is a betrayal of the communities the teals were elected to represent – they promised their communities they would fight for them and their local issues, but instead all these communities have seen is an unhealthy teal obsession with Peter Dutton and the Coalition,” Ms Ley told The Australian.
“These members have enabled Labor and the Greens to evade scrutiny, reduce transparency and get away with policy decisions that specifically disadvantage Australians living in teal-held seats.
“By regularly giving Labor and the Greens cover in the parliament and in the media, the teals have clearly decided their pathway to re-election isn’t by holding this bad Labor government to account but by launching slurs at us.”
Sky News host Chris Kenny says the hypocrisy and cynicism was “flowing thick and fast” in Canberra today.
After a group of teal independents attacked Mr Dutton for what they claimed was poor parliamentary standards, Ms Ley said “the reality is that the House of Representatives is a robust chamber, a unique workplace, where MPs are sent here to fiercely advocate for their communities”.
“The fact is that the teals have not lived up to the tests they have set on ‘parliamentary standards’ in their comments about Peter Dutton and that is not good enough. Until they do that, I find it hard to accept their critique of the parliament.”
The attack on the teals came as the government introduced legislation establishing a new Independent Parliamentary Standards Commission – a watchdog recommended in the review into parliamentary workplaces conducted by then sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins.
Finance Minister Katy Gallagher told ABC radio the IPSC was a “significant structural reform” that would help to “change the culture in this workplace”.
The IPSC would be led by a “chair commissioner” who would be supported by between six to eight other commissioners.
All would be appointed on a part-time basis, with their pay set by the remuneration tribunal.
Current or former MPs, staffers, journalists, lobbyists, cafe workers, volunteers or interns employed within a commonwealth parliamentary workplace could be subject to allegations lodged with the IPSC.
If an allegation related to a current parliamentarian, the investigating commissioner could refer a finding of a serious breach to the Privileges Committee, which could recommend a fine of 2-5 per cent of an MP’s annual base salary, a discharge from a parliamentary committee position and a suspension from the parliament.
Teal MP Zali Steggall on Wednesday expressed concern the IPSC would investigate only allegations of conduct that did not form part of the proceedings in parliament.
She said she and many of her colleagues had experienced “heckling, bullying, shouting (and) intimidation” in the chamber.
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DNA whistleblower ignored
She should have been first pick
The scientist who exposed Queensland’s DNA lab disaster has been left ouf of the new authority tasked with overseeing forensic testing in the state.
Forensic biologist Kirsty Wright, who uncovered disastrous testing practices at the government-run lab that compromised thousands of criminal cases and potentially allowed killers and rapists to escape justice, has been excluded from the new advisory board overseeing the lab.
In parliament on Wednesday, Attorney-General Yvette D’Ath announced the 11-member council would be chaired by former District Court judge Julie Dick SC and include representatives from forensic services, law, policing and victim support.
The authority was a key recommendation of retired judge Walter Sofronoff in his 2022 commission of inquiry into the DNA testing debacle.
Mr Sofronoff’s inquiry was launched as a result of Dr Wright’s revelations on The Australian’s Shandee’s Story and Shandee’s Legacy podcasts, and prompted the state government to invest $200m to rebuild the lab.
Dr Wright said she was “obviously disappointed” her application to join the authority had been unsuccessful.
“I haven’t put a foot wrong so I am at a loss to understand what else I need to do to be considered,” she told The Australian.
“I want victims of crime and Queenslanders to know that I am not giving up on them and I am not going away. I will continue to represent them even if it has to be from the outside.”
Based on the Gold Coast, Dr Wright works for the Australian Army developing forensic capability for counter-terrorism and national security needs, and as an RAAF reservist squadron leader helps recover and identify fallen soldiers from historic and current conflicts.
She is a visiting fellow with the Genomics Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology, was involved in the response to the 2002 Bali bombings, led an international team identifying victims of the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami, was manager of the national DNA database, and was pivotal to identifying the remains of schoolboy Daniel Morcombe.
Premier Steven Miles said he was unaware Dr Wright had expressed interest in the role. Ms D’Ath said 45 people applied for positions and appointments were made “following a highly competitive international search”.
In his final inquiry report, Mr Sofronoff found catastrophic testing problems at the lab may have been avoided if a forensic science advisory board had existed.
“Indeed, it is difficult to see how many of the mistakes dealt with in this report could have lain undetected for long if there had been such oversight,” he wrote.
Forensic experts on the authority include forensic services director at the United Kingdom’s Metropolitan Police Christopher Porter and Adjunct Professor Alastair Ross, who is foundation director of the National Institute of Forensic Science.
The manager of the Queensland Police Service’s DNA unit, David Neville, who began to quietly review the lab’s unusual failure rate in detecting DNA in late 2021, was also appointed.
Other members include victim advocates Cathy Crawford and Rhea Mohenoa, Queensland Health’s chief medical officer Catherine McDougall and solicitor Patrick Quinn as well as representatives from police, the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions, and Legal Aid Queensland.
Crown prosecutor Gregory Cummings has been promoted to a new deputy director role at the DPP, which will focus on cases requiring retested DNA evidence.
Ms D’Ath said the establishment of the council was a “significant step toward reforming Queensland’s forensic services”.
“The council will monitor and review all FSQ policies and procedures relating to the administration of criminal justice, which should help to restore the community’s confidence in our state’s forensic services.”
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Facebook removes pro-nuclear energy content
Dozens of Facebook users promoting pro-nuclear lobby group Nuclear for Australia’s content have had posts removed for being “misleading”, triggering claims some people are trying to “suppress vital information that could change the future of our country”.
Months out from the federal election – in which nuclear will be a key issue – and after anti-nuclear groups had their content blocked or accounts temporarily deleted across social media platforms, Nuclear for Australia has received 44 complaints from supporters who have had posts taken down.
The users had shared a Nuclear for Australia petition to legalise nuclear energy and a video interview between the organisation’s founder, Will Shackel, and businessman Dick Smith supporting the energy source in June and July.
But a Meta spokeswoman played down the issue, denying it had censored the two posts The Australian was able to share with it.
“Based on the information available, we believe the content was removed due to a technical error by our automated systems. The error was identified and fixed in late July and all impacted posts were reinstated,” the spokeswoman said.
Facebook users were told their posts were removed because “it looks like you tried to get likes, follows, shares or video views in a misleading way” and “your post goes against our community standards on spam”.
“We want you to share freely with others. We only remove things or restrict people to keep the community respectful and safe,” Meta says in an automated response.
Mr Shackel will email supporters on Wednesday asking for contributions to “help us bypass the roadblocks and bring the truth to light”.
“The truth about nuclear energy could transform Australia’s future but has been blocked from reaching the people who need to hear it most,” he says in a copy of the email.
“This isn’t just a minor inconvenience – it’s a clear indication of the political will of some to suppress vital information that could change the future of our country.”
Mr Smith, whose face and voice have been used in fraudulent ads online, said it was impossible for the government to legislate against removal of material but they needed to step in and treat Meta and other tech giants as publishers, ensuring they were liable for what they put on their platforms.
“You end up with this situation where they let through fraudulent ads run by criminal gangs but at the same time they delete genuine posts,” Mr Smith said.
Renew Economy, which posts clean energy news and analysis, had the same automated response from Meta as Nuclear for Australia did when a post sharing analysis by University of Queensland economist John Quiggin was removed on July 22.
The analysis was headlined “Czech nuclear deal shows CSIRO GenCost is too optimistic, and new nukes are hopelessly uneconomic” and found building two to four megawatt nuclear plants in Australia would “probably cost $50bn-$100bn, and not be complete until well into the 2040s”.
The Climate Council had a TikTok video hitting out at the Coalition’s nuclear energy policy taken down on July 21 for violating community guidelines of “integrity and authenticity”.
The video reappeared a few days later after a staff member appealed, saying the video was science-based and had been reviewed by researchers at the organisation prior to it going live.
The Climate Council says it understands TikTok pulls videos only after users lodge complaints and is investigating how many complaints it takes to get a post removed.
The Australian Conservation Foundation had its account on X suspended on July 22 for violating the social media platform’s rules “against evading suspension” after a user reported them.
The organisation appealed the decision and after the ACF made contact with an Australian-based employee at X, the account was switched back on that night.
ACF’s X profile was suspended for a second time on August 4 with no warning and was down for nearly two days, with the social media platform saying its account had been flagged as spam by mistake.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen said at the time he didn’t always agree with the ACF but the suspension was “another outrageous example of social media trying to shut down voices for climate action”.
Mr Shackel posted on X: “Breaking: Australian Conservation Foundation has had its X account suspended. Perhaps the disinformation caught up with them …”
Communications Minister Michelle Rowland said the Parliamentary Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Online Safety was examining the influence and impacts of social media on Australian society, including how digital platforms influenced what Australians saw and heard online.
“Digital platforms have a range of community standards, terms of service and policies to support the integrity of the information and accounts on their platforms,” she said.
“Debate on matters of public interest is a hallmark of our democracy.”
Opposition communications spokesman David Coleman said social media platforms should not censor legitimate political debate, noting freedom of expression was fundamental to society.
“The last thing we need are digital giants telling us what we can and cannot say but the Albanese government sees things differently,” he said. “If its deeply flawed misinformation bill had become law, political censorship by big tech would have become rampant.”
Mr Bowen was approached for comment but his office referred The Australian to his previous remarks attacking the removal of Renew Economy’s Facebook post and the ACF’s X account.
Opposition climate change and energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said: “Labor and others should not rob Australians of their right to a mature conversation about the role zero-emissions nuclear energy could play in Australia as part of a balanced energy mix.”
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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20 August, 2024
Huge dispute erupts over a massive plot of land due to Aboriginal heritage laws
The future of a major open-cut gold mine in western NSW has been thrown into doubt after its owner said the project had been rendered unviable by a federal protection order.
ASX-listed Regis Resources said a decision by Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek to protect Indigenous heritage at the McPhillamys Gold Project, central-west NSW, would stop the mine going ahead.
The NSW Independent Planning Commission in March approved Regis's application to mine gold in the area despite opposition from some in the local Aboriginal community.
Regis chief executive Jim Beyer said the company was 'extremely surprised and disappointed' that, after nearly four years of assessment, Ms Plibersek had decided to effectively block the development.
'(This) declaration shatters any confidence that development proponents Australia-wide (both private and public) can have in project approval timelines and outcomes,' he said in a statement.
The minister's Indigenous-heritage protection declaration covers part of the Belubula River, which falls within the footprint for a proposed storage facility for cast-off material.
Regis has argued there are no other viable options for the facility and developing alternatives would require it to restart the lengthy assessments process.
'This decision does impact a critical area of the project development site and means the project is not viable,' it said.
Under the Regis proposal, an 11-year open cut mining operation would be set up in the Blayney-Kings Plains district, near Bathurst.
The project would create almost 1,000 jobs in the region, the company said.
The Association of Mining and Exploration Companies, an industry lobby group, said the government order 'lacks reason and commonsense'.
'(It) sets a truly terrible precedent for investment risk in Australia,' association chief executive Warren Pearce said in a statement.
Ms Plibersek had ignored the views of local traditional owners, the Orange Local Aboriginal Corporation, who did not oppose the project, he said.
'They could see the value and future prosperity that this project could bring to their people,' Mr Pearce said.
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Universal child care would only end up on Labor’s spending pyre
Judith Sloan
Anthony Albanese has foreshadowed on a number of occasions that universal childcare will be a centrepiece of his campaign for a second term in office. His stated intention is that universal childcare will become available midway through that term.
My strong advice to the Prime Minister is: don’t do it. It is ill-considered, badly targeted and unaffordable. And the biggest winners will be high-income earners who currently receive proportionately lower childcare fee subsidies than those on lower incomes.
It’s hard to see how that aspect will be a vote winner. The backdrop to this is the commissioning of a report, A path to universal early childhood education and care, from the Productivity Commission. A draft was released last year; the final report has now been sent to the government and is awaiting release.
One of the key findings of the draft report was that the U-shape that once characterised women’s workforce participation – there was always a dip during women’s early child-rearing years – has almost disappeared. To be sure, only a small proportion of children under the age of one attend childcare. But after that, the proportion rises significantly.
We can’t infer that this outcome is simply the result of the preferences of career-minded women. Rather the financial needs of most families to have two sources of income means a great many parents have no choice but to use childcare, particularly as cost-of-living pressures have escalated. This distinction needs to be borne in mind when thinking about policy options.
Another important distinction is between childcare and preschool. There are currently in place governmental agreements that guarantee 15 hours per week of structured preschool for three- and four-year olds. In many instances, these preschool programs are delivered by childcare centres, but there are still many dedicated preschools – around 4300 in 2022.
The developmental and educational benefits of childcare and preschool are not the same. Preschool does what it says – prepares little ones for school. The idea that there are developmental and educational benefits for one-year olds in childcare is much more fanciful.
The world’s leading academic in this area, James Heckman, has made the obvious point that the only real developmental and educational benefits for children attending childcare are for those who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Chaotic family environments, inadequate income, an absence of consistent nutrition, a lack of books and being read to – these are contextual features of children who benefit from childcare.
For other children, however, there is no beneficial effect on average. Indeed, they can be worse off because they are deprived of the constant attention of at least one parent, which would greatly benefit them. When Albanese claimed there are educational benefits from childcare because he observed some children playing with lettered blocks, he was merely demonstrating his ignorance in this field.
But here’s a key point: the participation of children from disadvantaged backgrounds in childcare is low compared with other children. Out of every 100 children who take up a subsidised early childhood education and care place, only 23 are from low-income families. As the Productivity Commission notes, “early childhood education and care is positive for many children but those who benefit most are least likely to attend”.
The under-representation of children from disadvantaged backgrounds is the result of a number of factors, including the relative dearth of childcare centres in poorer areas as well as the activity test, which many parents fail to meet.
The reality is that the benefits of government-subsidised childcare are largely snaffled by the middle class. Note here that this government extended eligibility for childcare fee relief to those families earning up to $533,000 per year, although the rate of fee subsidy is scaled down as income rises.
Another interesting fact about childcare is the dominance of private, for-profit centres, a dominance that has increased over time as community-managed centres have either closed or failed to grow. Family daycare is a relatively small part of the mix, at less than 6 per cent of childcare places.
What this means is that government childcare subsidies are mainly directed towards private businesses, which must meet capital and labour costs as well as deliver a return to shareholders. This is a very different beast to government funding of public schools.
In its draft report, the PC recommended that 30 hours or three days per week of quality early childhood education and care should be made available to all children aged between up to five years.
A 90 per cent subsidy rate would apply across the board save for those families with income less than $80,000 for whom there would be no fee charged. The estimated cost of this exercise is more than $4bn per year or around one-third on top of current outlays. But the main beneficiaries “would be higher-income families, as many low-income families receive subsidies at 90 per cent or higher rates”. In other words, this feature of the policy should give the Labor government reason to hit the pause button.
No doubt, government ministers will point to the supposed broader economic benefits of further subsidising childcare, particularly greater workforce participation. The modelling is clear that any impact on participation will be modest, perhaps as low as an additional 17,000 effective full-time workers. There are a variety of reasons for this outcome, including the shift towards centre-based care away from other forms of care, as well as the fact cheaper childcare means parents can work fewer hours and achieve the same net income.
The cost of providing three full days of universal care works out at more than $200,000 per job created. This is a very poor use of taxpayer dollars. As for any impact on productivity, it would almost certainly be negative as the most productive workers are already working long hours.
In the meantime, the government has committed to spending even more taxpayer dollars topping up the wages of childcare workers in line with a potential ruling from the Fair Work Commission. The cost of this exercise is put at $3.6bn over two years and, in exchange, centres must agree to enter into union wage agreements as well as keep fee increases to 4.4 per cent for one year. Topping up wages is likely to become a permanent commitment.
The bottom line is that childcare is yet another area in which government spending is out of control. In 2018-19, childcare subsidies cost less than $8bn; this financial year, they are expected to come in at $14.5bn, before adding in the wage subsidy package.
There are very serious questions about both the effectiveness and fairness of the policy settings, both current and proposed. For private providers, however, it’s a lucrative industry.
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Colourblind test: the word that must be uncancelled
Last year, Australians rejected a referendum to establish an Indigenous voice by a margin of 20 percentage points. The referendum came four months after a similar decision in the United States: the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
Without overstating the similarity between Australia and the United States, both the referendum and the Supreme Court decision brought to light an ideological fault line that has existed in both countries for at least a half century: colourblindness or race-consciousness?
As I discuss in my book, The End of Race Politics, not seeing race is the surest way, these days, to signal that you are on the wrong side of this divide. Indeed, the term “colourblind” has become anathema in many circles, and if you live in elite institutions – universities, corporations, the mainstream media – the quickest way to demonstrate you just don’t get it is to say, “I don’t see colour” or “I was taught to treat everyone the same”.
Once considered a progressive attitude, colourblindness is now seen as backwards – a cheap surrender in the face of racism, at best; or a cover for deeply held racist beliefs, at worst.
But colourblindness is neither racist nor backwards. Properly understood, it is the belief that we should strive to treat people without regard to race in our personal lives and in our public policy.
Though it has roots in the Enlightenment, the colourblind principle was really developed during the fight against slavery and refined during the fight against segregation. It was not until after the civil rights movement achieved its greatest victories that colourblindness was abandoned by progressives, embraced by conservatives, and memory-holed by activist-scholars.
These activist-scholars have written a false history of colourblindness meant to delegitimise it. According to this story, colourblindness was not the motivating principle behind the anti-racist activism of the 19th and 20th centuries.
It was, instead, an idea concocted after the civil rights movement by reactionaries who needed a way to oppose progressive policies without sounding racist. Kimberlé Crenshaw, for instance, has criticised the “colourblind view of civil rights” that she alleges “developed in the neo-conservative ‘think tanks’ during the ’70s”.
Although this public relations campaign has been remarkably successful, it bears no relation to the truth. The earliest mentions of colourblindness come from Wendell Phillips, the president of the American Anti-Slavery Society and the man nicknamed “abolition’s golden trumpet”. In 1865, Phillips called for the creation of “a government colourblind”, by which he meant the total elimination of all laws that mentioned race.
In the decades that followed, the idea of colourblindness propelled the fight against Jim Crow. Exhibit A: the 1896 Supreme Court case Plessy v Ferguson, in which the court – outrageously – ruled 7-1 that “separate-but-equal” was constitutional. The lone dissent in Plessy, the lone flicker of hope, which was written by Justice John Marshall Harlan, features the immortal sentence: “Our constitution is colourblind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among its citizens.”
Decades later, when the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s Thurgood Marshall was battling segregation in the courts, an aide recalled that he considered the Plessy dissent his “bible” and would read aloud from it when he needed inspiration. “Our constitution is colourblind”, his favourite sentence, became the “basic creed” of the NAACP. Among the main goals of the civil rights movement was the elimination of laws and policies that used the category of race in any way.
In fact, that was the first demand made by the original March on Washington movement of the 1940s (which successfully pressured Franklin Roosevelt to integrate the defence industry). It was also the first argument made by the NAACP in its Brown v Board appellate brief.
To paint colourblindness as a reactionary or racist idea – rather than a key goal of the civil rights movement – requires ignoring the historical record.
Yet this is precisely what today’s most celebrated public intellectuals have done.
Ibram X. Kendi, MacArthur Genius and best-selling author of How to be an Anti-Racist, argues that “the most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a white ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one”. In Australia, opponents of the voice referendum were often labelled racist, even as they articulated a belief of equal treatment under the law.
Critics of colourblindness argue it lacks teeth in the fight against racism. If we are blind to race, they say, how can we see racism?
Robin DiAngelo, in her hugely successful 2018 book, White Fragility, sums up the colourblind strategy like this: “Pretend that we don’t see race, and racism will end.” But this argument is no more than a cheap language trick. It’s true we all see race. We can’t help it. What’s more, race can influence how we’re treated and how we treat others. In that sense, no one is truly colourblind.
But to interpret “colourblind” so literally is to misunderstand it – perhaps intentionally.
“Colourblind” is an expression like “warm-hearted”: it uses a physical metaphor to encapsulate an abstract idea. To describe a person as warm-hearted is not to say something about the temperature of that person’s heart, but about the kindness of his or her spirit. Similarly, to advocate for colourblindness is not to pretend you don’t notice colour. It is to endorse a principle: we should strive to treat people without regard to race, in our public policy and our private lives.
In the American context, that meant rejecting policies such as race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In Australia, that meant, among other things, voting no on the voice referendum.
Colourblindness is the best principle with which to govern a multiracial democracy. It is the best way to lower the temperature of racial conflict in the long run. It is the best way to fight the kind of racism that really matters. And it is the best way to orient your own attitude toward this nefarious concept we call race. We abandon colourblindness at our own peril.
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Activists ‘stand in way of Indigenous economic empowerment’, says Roy Ah-See
Green activists are abusing land rights acts at the cost of economic empowerment and Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek is failing to listen to the Aboriginal authority on the lands of a vetoed $1bn gold mine, one of the most respected leaders of the Wiradjuri nation warns.
Despite her own department originally approving the project and the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council challenging the grounds of her decision, Ms Plibersek has said she declared an Indigenous protection order over a Regis Resources goldmining project near Blayney because of its importance to the Wiradjuri people of central NSW.
Ms Plibersek was holding firm on Monday as she came under attack from both the Business Council of Australia and the Coalition for her decision. BCA chief executive Bran Black warned of an investment drain and opposition Indigenous affairs spokeswoman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price called the veto a “serious threat to economic development for Indigenous Australians”.
Last Friday, Ms Plibersek said: “Because I accept that the headwaters of the Belubula River are of particular significance to the Wiradjuri/Wiradyuri people in accordance with their tradition, I have decided to protect them.”
Roy Ah-See – one of the most senior Wiradjuri leaders on the national stage and the former chair of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council – said the Labor frontbencher was wrong to prefer the views of opponents over the written advice of the Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council.
Mr Ah-See said he was not speaking on behalf of the group, but wanted to speak up for the recognised cultural authority of the local land council.
“If it’s got the support of the local Aboriginal land council that should be enough for the minister to listen to the recognised Aboriginal party,” he said.
“If you don’t have that structure, you have chaos … We can have anyone ringing up saying they’re Wiradjuri and it doesn’t feel right to me. That’s why the land council is so important because in order to become a member there are certain requirements and restrictions. They are the statutory authority.”
Mr Ah-See said environmentalists believed Aboriginal lands should be locked up.
But economic empowerment for Aboriginal people in Blayney should come first, he added.
“The green attitude is that all our land should be locked up for environmental national parks and that wasn’t the intent of the NSW land rights legislation,“ the Wiradjuri leader said.
“The environmental view is that Aboriginal people should be environmentalists, that’s not true. That shoe doesn’t fit. We are balanced. It is about economic empowerment for us.
“We want to create economic opportunities for the future generations and we are not going to do that by locking up our land and using them as environmental corridors or offsets for other developers. That’s crazy.”
The BCA predicted an investment drain due to unwieldy planning and regulation in the wake of the Albanese government’s eleventh-hour decision to stop the $1bn goldmine.
? Orange Land Council’s own heritage committee “truth tested” claims about the impact of the McPhillamys project, finding “they could not be substantiated”.
“The proposed development would not impact any known sites or artefacts of high significance,” the land council wrote to the NSW Independent Planning Commission last year.
Mr Black said that if projects were approved under federal and state law they shouldn’t then be put at risk by activist inspired lawfare. This followed an extraordinary statement to the Australian Stock Exchange by Regis Resources on Monday, criticising Ms Plibersek’s decision to declare an Indigenous protection order over the project, despite the minister having approved it under commonwealth environmental laws.
The resources sector has warned of a dangerous precedent set by Ms Plibersek’s intervention last week to accept a section 10 application under the 1984 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Heritage Protection Act to protect the land on which a tailings dam for the mine had already been approved by the NSW and federal government.
“I constantly hear from CEOs that Australia is missing out on major investments because our planning and regulation systems are difficult to navigate, duplicative and cumbersome,” Mr Black said.
Sky News host Chris Kenny says resource projects being blocked because of “Indigenous heritage claims” has the mining industry “worried” about the sovereign risk of trying to invest in Australia.
“We need an approval system which balances economic, environmental and social benefits of projects and provides transparent decisions.
“If projects are supported by communities and meet all the approval requirements, they should not be put at risk by activist actions or lawfare.”
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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18 August, 2024
Beloved school crossing guard banned from high-fiving students after parent complaint
An Australian school community has been left outraged after a cherished crossing guard was banned from high-fiving student following a parent complaint about the innocent gesture.
Students of Mount Dandenong Primary School in Greater Melbourne will no longer receive high fives from their beloved crossing supervisor, John Goulden, during drop off and pick up after he was reprimanded by Yarra Ranges Council.
Goulden, who was recently crowned one of Victoria’s top crossing supervisors, has been warned by the council against “initiating unnecessary physical contact” with the children.
Outraged parents have rallied behind the cherished lollipop man, with one beginning a petition to have the ban removed.
Parent and petition organizer Rohan Bradley said Goulden has an “infectious joy that leaves a lasting impression on students and parents.”
“His high fives in the morning and afternoon have become a tradition that many children look forward to, a small gesture that symbolizes the warmth and friendliness of our unique community,” he said.
“Sadly, this tradition is under threat. With our children’s happiness and wellbeing hanging in the balance, we need to take action.”
Bradley said it was not just about a simple high five but about “preserving our unique community’s spirit.”
“We implore those in charge to let John continue to high-five his students, preserving an act that sparks joy and promotes a more positive learning environment,” he said.
The petition has already gained more than 500 signatures as parents and students stand with the “community’s morale booster.”
In a statement, Yarra Ranges Council confirmed they had received a complaint from a parent at the school about the crossing supervisor dishing out high fives as students were being driven past him on Farndons Rd.
“Council’s internal policies and the Victorian Standards clearly states that unacceptable behaviors includes: Exhibiting behaviors with children and young people which may be construed as unnecessarily physical,” they told 9News.
“Council has reminded the contractor who is currently supervising children at the Mount Dandenong Primary School of expectations of the role regarding interactions with children.”
In July the council named Goulden the Region Four Crossing Supervisor of the Year for his “outstanding contributions to community safety”.
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Energy transition powered by wishful thinking
Changing an energy system is challenging. Governments have to ensure a reliable supply of electricity all day, every day. Ideally, in an orderly transition there would be like for like capacity replacement. The Albanese government has failed to balance the objectives of affordability and reliability as it embarked on its decarbonisation strategy. It legislated a 43 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 that needs renewable energy to reach the 82 per cent target.
The government’s focus has centred on meeting these targets regardless of costs to households, the economy and our national interest. Legitimate concerns are described as the actions of “bad-faith actors” using “mistruths and outright misinformation”. Such comments may find favour in a speech to a sympathetic audience but do nothing to advance an important debate about our country’s future.
Any serious analysis of the energy transition should be grounded in fact, not wishful thinking. Let the facts speak for themselves.
Anticipating the loss of 90 per cent of our coal-fired generation in the next decade and with looming gas shortages, we need to ensure reliable baseload power into the future. The evidence shows the unreliability of intermittent, weather-dependent renewables. In July, the penetration of renewables in the grid fell to a low 10.2 per cent. It would be folly to believe you could rely on a predominantly renewables grid to power the economy.
Neither can there be any certainty about power prices with weather-dependent renewables. Across the past few months increased demand for heating has driven huge price volatility. Together with the lack of wind generation and a small number of unplanned forced outages, spot prices spiked to record levels.
On July 29 all the national electricity market regions registered simultaneous spot prices hikes at 18:00. The figures, expressed in megawatt hours, ranged from $3500 in Tasmania to $4092 in South Australia. The next evening at that time, prices rose between $15,600 in Tasmania and $17,377 in Victoria. At 20:15 the SA price reached $17,499.94 a megawatt hour. SA, with the highest penetration of renewables, took the prize for the highest prices.
So much for Energy Minister Chris Bowen trumpeting that wholesale power prices were falling. In the June quarter wholesale prices averaged $133 a megawatt hour, 23 per cent higher than the corresponding quarter last year. Far from receiving a cut of $275, prices have risen by 22 per cent, up to $1000, and will continue on this upward trajectory. Our power prices are among the world’s highest.
Energy poverty will continue growing as the costs of 10,000km of new transmission are still to be passed on in our power bills.
Last year, with falling investment in renewables, calls for greater government support grew louder. Bowen came to the rescue with yet another subsidy. His capacity investment scheme is based on taxpayers underwriting a vast expansion of 32 gigawatts of renewable energy.
Future risk will be transferred from investors in renewables to the taxpayer in secret contracts for difference. If revenues fall below the floor, taxpayers will fund the difference. Gas critical for firming and the viability of manufacturing was excluded from the scheme. We’re still in the dark about the total system costs of the transition, with estimates ranging from hundreds of billions into the trillions.
What are the aggregate costs from the public purse? Labor’s promise of transparency and accountability is undermined by non-disclosure and secrecy. Hopefully the Senate can pursue the public’s right to know.
There’s little progress to date in meeting the 2030 emissions and renewables targets. In Labor’s first year emissions grew by four million tonnes, a 0.8 per cent increase to June last year. Emissions across last year fell by a mere 0.5 per cent, registering a 29 per cent reduction below the 2005 base level. The Climate Change Authority’s 2023 report said the government “was not yet on track to meet its 2030 targets” and its policy agenda had “not yet translated into the emissions reductions we need”. Any claim the government is on track to reach a 42 per cent reduction, just falling short of target, is not based on fact, just wishful thinking.
Renewables have reached the halfway point at 40 per cent, with six years left to meet the target. The minister previously advised the 82 per cent target required installing 40 7MW wind turbines every month and 22,000 solar panels every day to 2030 as well as the transmission links. That won’t happen. Opposition in the regions is growing, even in Labor’s heartland seats, while social licence declines. Every transmission project is well over time, storage capacity is inadequate, Snowy 2.0 is delayed for years and battery storage limited to two to four hours.
There’s a lot at stake in this energy transition, so it’s necessary to see through the spin. According to reputable experts, the 2030 targets won’t be met. Despite this, the government is considering raising the 2035 emissions target to between 65 per cent and 75 per cent.
If we’re to avoid the pathway to economic calamity it’s surely time for a plan B informed by independent energy experts. The country needs an orderly energy transition plan that’s grounded in reality, not wishful thinking.
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Outrage as Aussies are slugged with hidden tax: 'It's not fair'
A hidden 'sun' tax slugging Aussies who have made the switch to solar has been slammed by energy advocates as 'madness' and a 'rip-off', accusing energy companies of 'wanting to charge people' making energy from sunlight.
Distributors in some Australian states have moved in the sneaky tariff, known colloquially as a sun or solar tax, as households begin to embrace the shift to renewables in the hopes of power bill relief.
But the new measures will result in those households being slugged for sending the solar energy they generate back to the electricity grid during peak times - something providers hope will encourage households to store their self-generated power and use it, rather than hoping for a credit if it is exported back to the grid.
Renewable energy advocate Heidi Lee Douglas has been highly critical of the plan, saying it was 'not a bright idea' to penalise people for 'taking control of their power bills with cheaper, cleaner solar' during a cost of living crisis.
'Energy companies want to charge people with solar panels to make energy from sunlight, and that's simply not fair,' Ms Douglas, the chief executive of renewable advocacy organisation Solar Citizens, said.
'The new two-way tariff is a blunt instrument that charges people with solar panels for feeding their energy into the grid during the day, rather than supporting them to store their energy or feed it back into the grid at another time.
'Rather than stick people with penalties for not having batteries they can't afford in a cost of living crisis, households need more support to access the benefits of battery storage.
'People in NSW were absolutely furious, and Queenslanders will be livid when they find out more about the big tariff rip-off planned for households with solar panels.'
A sun tax refers to a new export tariff for customers using solar, part of a two-way pricing structure where users are effectively penalised for exporting solar-generated energy when the network is overloaded - such as in the middle of the day.
According to Canstar, the tariff also rewards people who export the energy produced by their solar panels back to the electricity grid during times of high demand.
Energy providers mostly pay households for electricity fed back into the grid in the form of rates called solar feed-in tariffs (FiTs).
Canstar states the tax is designed to prevent gridlock on electricity networks, encouraging households to use their own solar energy first, rather than sending it back to the grid.
Ms Douglas said one of the biggest impact of the sun tax was the message it sent to households thinking about installing solar.
She explained it would discourage them from doing so, saying: 'It's madness to charge people for sunlight.'
'What we really need to do in a cost of living crisis is accelerate the rate of rooftop solar installations by providing access to solar for those who have so far missed out - like renters, social housing, and apartments,' Ms Douglas said.
While the tariffs came into place in mid-2022, most households and businesses won't see any major change until next year.
This is due to distributors needing to submit a price proposal to the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) to demonstrate why they need it.
Some distributors in NSW and the ACT have already outlined the changes and how the costs would look for the average household or small business.
Ausgrid, the largest energy provider on Australia's east coast, revealed they were imposing such a two-way tariff in July - charging customers 1.2c/kWh for the electricity they produce during the peak export period of 10am-3pm.
The company said customers would receive a payment of 2.3c/kWh for electricity exported to the grid during peak demand hours between 4pm-9pm each day.
In a statement, Ausgrid said they wanted to encourage customers to use their self-generated electricity while providing a 'safe, reliable supply' to everyone.
Solar batteries are widely viewed as a way to store the unused energy generated from solar panels - so it can be used at another time.
But the measure is costly, setting households back anywhere from $8750 to more than $20,000 depending on the scale of the battery and the provider.
The NSW State Government has said it will introduce a rebate starting at $1600 for battery storage systems from November 1.
Queenslanders will not be slugged with a sun tax until 2025 but the state government rolled out a rebate on home solar battery systems allowing people to offset the cost of purchase and installation.
However, it closed in May.
'The Queensland government must find ways of getting more households powered by solar and create the incentives to shift people into having solar and batteries,' Ms Douglas said.
'About 60 per cent of the community is currently locked out of the benefits of solar, including renters and people living in apartments or social housing, and they have among the most to gain from reduced energy bills.
It comes as data from the clean energy regulator reveals many of Sydney's outer suburbs are embracing solar and battery storage.
In Marsden Park, in Sydney's west, households are 87 per cent more likely to have these systems in place, followed by Tumbulgum and Tweed Heads at an uptake rate of 71 per cent.
But in more established suburbs across the state, those rates were far lower.
Only 2.9 per cent of dwellings in Elizabeth Bay, Potts Point, Rushcutters Bay and Woolloomooloo had solar energy and battery storage in place.
In Ultimo, only 4.8 per cent of households had embraced the new technology while Darlinghurst and Surry Hills had 5.3 per cent of dwellings taking up solar.
David Sedighi, chief operating officer of power solutions provider VoltX Energy, said these figures could be put down to government mandates for new home constructions.
'Energy savings aside, solar has made these new homes more energy efficient, enabling people to meet compliance for a Building Sustainability Index (BASIX) certificate,' he said.
'We know having solar makes a new home more attractive to prospective buyers in the future too, as the cost of energy increases.
'The so-called sun-tax where energy providers charge customers a tariff for rooftop solar exported to its network will also drive demand for batteries.'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13753959/Sun-tax-solar-panel-green-energy.html
*********************************************Women’s rights rally sparks pro-trans counter protest in Melbourne
It's not a protest. It's just the usual Leftist activism
One woman has been arrested for allegedly assaulting a police officer and several members of a pro-trans counter rally have thrown eggs and water balloons at speakers at a women’s rights demonstration in Melbourne on Saturday.
Activist organisation Women’s Action Group planned a ‘Women Will Speak’ event to take place at Victoria’s state parliament on the weekend, which was met with a pro-trans protest.
A police barricade was formed to separate the Women’s Action Group event and the pro-trans demonstration organised by Trans Queer Solidarity.
A large police presence, included mounted officers, was stationed at Spring St and Bourke St.
“Around 20 participants initially attended the event about 11am. About 150 protesters from another group also attended the rally, throwing eggs and water balloons at the speakers involved,” a Victoria Police spokeswoman said.
“A 36-year-old Brunswick woman was arrested at the scene for allegedly assaulting police. She has been released pending further inquiries.
“Victoria Police is disappointed with the actions of the group and while it supports peaceful protests it has a zero-tolerance policy for violence or disruptive acts which impact the broader community.”
Details of the Women’s Action Group were shared online, and in response a ‘Trans Liberation’ rally was scheduled to take place at the same location.
The group was formed in 2019 and the organisation state their motivation is to fight against “the ongoing erosion of women’s rights in Victoria and in all of Australia”.
“Humans cannot change sex. Men can never be women,” a speaker said at the Women’s Action Group event told the crowd on Saturday.
“It is our inherent right to exercise freedom of expression … and policy and legislation must reflect reality not ideology.”
Most of the speeches were barely audible as members of the Trans Liberation gathering blared loud music, banged drums and shouted cries such as “f*ck off fascist”.
Women’s Action Group co-founder Michelle Uriarau said the purpose of the counter rally was to intimidate women.
“We are there to to facilitate a platform for ordinary woman to come and speak, to listen and to be heard, and as seen yesterday, that is currently not allowed.” Ms Uriarau told The Australian.
“Some of the signs that they that they brought along with them, more or less was threatening us with death.
“Men who pretend to be women hate woman ... and they prove us right time and time and time again.”
Ms Uriarau said that everyone should be able to exercise their right to freedom of expression.
“They absolutely have a right to protest us. What they do not have a right to do is be violent and behave aggressive towards us,” she said.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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15 August, 2024
Labor’s unfair superannuation tax set to fail after public pressure plus Teals and Independents
Robert Gottliebsen
Today I want to congratulate my wonderful readers in The Australian. I have been writing regular articles pointing out the looming national disaster that would follow if we decided to create a world precedent by taxing superannuation on the basis of unrealised capital gains.
After every commentary, vast numbers of readers took the time, not just to offer support, but to add suggestions and highlighted other aspects of the looming government mistake.
Together we played a role in encouraging the Teals, and two independents in the House of Representatives plus two cross benches in the Senate – David Pocock and Jackie Lambie – to unite and publicly commit to join the Coalition in opposing the bill.
They are taking this stand in the national interest for the right reasons. Unless the government cements its head in the sand, revenue is not endangered because it is easy to amend the bill.
There is no opposition to the original thrust of the proposal which was to continue to tax all superannuation in the normal way, but for those with total superannuation balances exceeding $3m, the tax rate would be 30 per cent instead of 15 per cent. And for the proposal to be fair, and not infect vast numbers in middle Australia, the $3m had to be indexed to the CPI.
The government will have the numbers in the lower house, so the vote of Pocock and Lambie in the Senate becomes vital, assuming the other crossbenchers who have already indicated they would vote in the national interest hold their ground.
Pocock and Lambie will be put under extreme pressure to change and act against the national interest but given they have now publicly committed to act together with the Teals and the lower house independents. I think there is a very good chance that they will all hold their ground.
And with a touch of humour, there is already an abundance of bike tracks in Canberra, so a government offering more bike tracks in exchange for the superannuation vote will not succeed.
Jim Chalmers should be grateful because his is being forced to go back to his original proposal instead of looking after mates with connections to large funders of the ALP.
Sensible and fair superannuation taxing will not cause a budgetary shortfall.
Indeed, a properly constructed tax might in fact raise more money because it would be regarded as fair for people with more than $3m in superannuation.
A blatantly unfair tax would encourage superannuation members into tax reduction schemes, which over time would impact superannuation tax revenues.
If the bill is properly amended, many of those people will leave their funds in superannuation and pay the extra tax.
The amendments required to restore fairness are simple. Any person with funds in superannuation exceeding an indexed $3m who can calculate clearly (with properly audited accounts) their realised profits will be taxed at 30 per cent on the proportion of income that applies to amounts invested above an indexed $3m.
The methods of calculation do not change. There would be no tax on unrealised gains. Those that can’t provide that detail will be taxed at 30 per cent on unrealised against.
The detail is easy for self-managed funds but even for the retail and industry funds lumbered with poor accounting systems it would not be difficult to establish a separate fund for members with total funds above an indexed $3m that can invest the money in the way that the members dictate within the policies of a fund.
It’s important that the Teals, the independents and the Senate and crossbenchers do not throw in the towel on indexation. Without indexation, this becomes a tax on middle Australia and over time will greatly damage the superannuation movement.
In my recent comments, linked above and also including “Why Aussies are furious over tax on super balances over $3m”, I set out some of hidden Chalmers victims including:
* Around 17,000 small farmers who have their farms in the family superannuation fund. If the value of their farm rises, many will have to pay tax on that increased value by selling other assets or borrowing. States with many small farms, like Tasmania, will be the hardest hit.
* Small businesses, including farmers, have $88bn in direct investment commercial real estate. Usually it is the real estate used by their business. Like the farmers, if the value of their property rises, the family must find the cash to pay the tax on the unrealised gain. Selling the property is not an option unless they want to go out of business.
* Three years ago, there were 80,000 Australians with superannuation balances above $3m. That figure has now risen to around 100,000 – an annual growth rate of about 6 or 7 per cent.
* Retired public servants in defined benefit funds suddenly have a new tax using a calculation definition that is designed to be impossible to understand. They are furious.
Meanwhile, if sensible superannuation rules are established, it will remove from Peter Dutton one of the potential keys to the Lodge at next year’s election.
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Tasmania, the ‘drop out state’, promises more phonics, as NAPLAN failure fuels reform calls
Tasmania has vowed to use phonics to teach all children by 2026, after trailing national averages in NAPLAN numeracy, writing and reading results, amid demands for “root and branch” reform.
Labelled “the drop-out state” for its low year 12 attainment, Tasmania again performed badly in this week’s NAPLAN results, trailing the national average in numeracy, writing and reading across all year groups.
“If Tasmania wasn’t at the bottom of everything, (it was) in the bottom three in everything,” independent economist Saul Eslake told The Australian.
“This just underscores the need for root and branch reform of Tasmania’s school education system.”
Education Minister Jo Palmer defended the state’s performance but held out the promise of improvement from a rollout of “structured literacy” including phonics.
This would reach 25 per cent of all government primary schools in 2024. “By 2026, all students across all school years will be taught to read in a structured, systematic, and explicit way, within a framework that ensures every student gets appropriate additional literacy support when they need it,” Ms Palmer said.
“Schools are being supported to make transformational change to the way children are taught to read through professional learning sessions, resources and collaboration with educational experts and sectors.”
Under pressure to lift the state’s educational outcomes, the Liberal state government has promised to review the school system, which still sees some high schools end at year 10, forcing children to attend separate years 11 and 12 colleges.
There are fears the review will be not be independent, broad or resourced enough to deliver the reform needed and tackle vested interests identified as barriers to change.
Mr Eslake and others claim the Education Department, the education faculty at the University of Tasmania and the Australian Education Union are “blockers” of reform, claims rejected by the organisations.
Those advocating change want abolition of colleges in favour of all high schools going to year 12, a faster and better supported shift to structured literacy, a lower school starting age and more intervention to help struggling students catch up before they progress a grade.
Labor Opposition Leader Dean Winter called on the government to “get moving” with its inquiry, which appears yet to start but is due to report by year’s end, and reverse plans to cut $75m from education.
“Tasmanian students continue to be let down by the state government, with results below the national average across all areas. Young Tasmanians are not getting the opportunities they deserve to excel in learning and life,” he said. “After 10 years in government, the Liberals need to accept responsibility for these outcomes.”
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Adelaide University considers anti-Israel motion from pro-Palestine students
Adelaide University has become the latest tertiary institution to consider adopting an anti-Israel motion, as hundreds of pro-Palestine students urge it to sever ties with the Jewish state.
The vote for the motion coincided with the Jewish holy day of Tisha B’Av on Monday, which was condemned by leading Jewish representatives as a way to silence their voice.
Students associated with a pro-Palestine group organised a general meeting to sign on to the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
Just over 200 students unanimously voted to pass the motion, with the university saying it “supports lawful freedom of expression” in response.
“Following the meeting, the matter is now for the students, the Student Representative Council and YouX to consider. Should the matter progress, the University of Adelaide will give it due consideration,” a spokesperson for the university said.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said the motion would have “precisely zero impact on the lives of Palestinians”.
“The sole reason they do this is to send a message to Jewish students and academics that they are outsiders, unwanted and unwelcome,” Mr Ryvchin said.
“We fully expect the university to make a statement denouncing this behaviour and asserting its support for a peaceful and tolerant campus environment.”
Australian Jewish Association CEO Robert Gregory said BDS movements have no place in the Australian education sector.
“Boycotts of the Jewish state are the latest manifestation of an ancient hatred,” Mr Gregory said.
“It’s disappointing that this vote was scheduled for a Jewish holy day which prevented some Jewish students from attending. Jewish students are understandably concerned about their place at the University of Adelaide.”
Vice-chancellor Genevieve Bell said the ANU Council had agreed to update its policy, since “community expectations around what socially responsible investment means are evolving and expanding”.
Last week, up to 800 Sydney University students voted to support “one Palestinian state” and affirmed the right of armed resistance at a rare general meeting that caused the institute to seek police advice on the legality of the material used.
The university was strongly criticised by the ECAJ after it entered into an agreement to allow students to review their investments and security activities, as part of a deal to end encampments.
The students were inspired by a similar general meeting at the University of Queensland in May, which included up to 1500 attendees.
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Doctor under 'emergency' five year suspension finally goes to trial over social media posts
Melbourne doctor Jereth Kok was suspended under emergency provisions by the medical regulators in 2019 after two anonymous complaints triggered an investigation into his social media posts.
Neither complainant was a patient, and Dr Kok, 43, has never had a complaint made against him by a patient in his 15 year medical career, including ten years as a general practitioner (GP, equivalent of American PCP).
The posts reflected Dr Kok’s conservative Christian views on abortion, gender medicine and sexuality, raising questions over whether Australian medical practitioners are free to publicly express their religious views.
Five years later, Dr Kok finally stood trial in a five day hearing at the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT), held last month, with another hearing expected to be held later this year before the matter can be settled.
However, even if Dr Kok’s suspension is lifted, the five year process has already effectively ended his career.
”I think that the hurdles would just be insurmountable” he told me, listing the requirements to renew memberships, update his training, find a practice who will take him now that he has a black mark against his name, and the inevitable reeducation and practice conditions required by the regulator. “It’s been a defacto deregistration, hasn’t it?”
The process is the punishment
A spokesperson from the Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency (AHPRA) said that, “Suspension is an interim action that can be taken by a national health profession board (National Board) or a tribunal to protect the public.”
AHPRA is the umbrella bureaucracy over the National Boards (medical, physiotherapy, nursing, dental and so on), which together regulate all registered health practitioners in Australia.
AHPRA did not provide an estimate of average suspension time, but said that “the length of the suspension will vary dependent on the individual circumstances of the matter.”
However, the regulators have come under criticism in recent years for slow walking this “interim” process, resulting in some doctors being sidelined without income for years without any avenue to defend themselves against the accusations levelled at them.
Shockingly, a study into distress caused by AHPRA’s complaints process found that 16 health practitioners took their own lives while subject to investigation between January 2018 to December 2021, with another four self-harming or attempting suicide.
Subjects complained of the stress caused by the excessively prolonged process, and the unfairness of ‘double standards’, where the time allowed for them to provide information was short, contrasted with long gaps in correspondence from AHPRA.
“It's a joke,” said Dr Kok. “I just don't see why it had to take this long. If you're going to use the emergency power, you can't then go and take five years to finish the process off. You've made it so difficult to ever come back to it that most people won't.”
Dr Kok described the experience as a "road test" for his faith. “I've had to rely on God through three years of unemployment, through the grief of suddenly losing contact with all my patients, and through being slandered,” said the married father of two.
As the sole income earner in his family, Dr Kok had to retrain and is now working in the software industry.
Dr Kok also worried about the impact on his patients, explaining that the “abrupt” nature of his suspension meant there was no opportunity for him to do a proper hand over for vulnerable patients with complex medical problems.
He recalled an elderly patient who he regularly visited in a nursing home telling him of her fear that he would leave her. Dr Kok said he felt “dreadful” when her fear was realised without him being allowed to contact her to explain what had happened or to say goodbye.
Dr Kok first found out he’d fallen afoul of AHPRA when he received a letter from the regulator the week before Christmas in 2018. The letter informed Dr Kok that he had been under investigation for nine months after an anonymous complaint was lodged against him in 2017 for comments he made online about the same sex marriage plebiscite.
Another anonymous complaint was made in 2019, this one relating to an article Dr Kok wrote, titled ‘A medical perspective on transgender,’ for Christian news site Eternity News, and other comments he’d made online. Following the second complaint, the Medical Board took immediate action to suspend Dr Kok’s medical registration.
“They are not alleging that I've done any harm in the clinic,” said Dr Kok, clarifying that the complaints and subsequent investigation focused solely on his online posts.
AHPRA launched a far reaching search into Dr Kok’s social media posts and online comments, commissioning forensic IT investigators Ferrier Hodgson to compile a dossier, at an estimated cost of $4,800-$6,000. Ferrier Hodgson also suggested subpoenaing Facebook for complete access to all posts made by Dr Kok from 2014 onwards.
In February 2020, Dr Kok unsuccessfully appealed his emergency suspension. He offered to sign undertaking to remove the offending posts and not to make any further online posts about contentious topics while the investigation was underway.
However, the Medical Board argued that this would not suffice because the “fundamental issue” was Dr Kok’s “character,” “values” and “views,” and what Dr Kok might have “already said to members of the community who might attend on him in his general practice, or the medical profession more generally.”
The Board’s barrister argued that Dr Kok’s suspension was therefore necessary for “public confidence,” but assured that that the investigation would be “concluded very quickly.”
Twenty two months later, in December 2021, Dr Kok was finally told that his case was being referred to the tribunal (similar to a court but less formal). By this time, AHPRA had added posts Dr Kok had made about Covid vaccines and restrictions to add to its brief.
Now, three years on from his referral to the tribunal, and five years since his initial suspension, Dr Kok has finally had the opportunity to defend himself against the regulators’ accusations.
On trial for ‘inflammatory’ social media posts
During his VCAT hearing last month, Dr Kok was accused of professional misconduct related to 85 social media posts and online comments he wrote between 2010 and 2021, including memes, and a sarcastic comment which the regulator took seriously. Most of the posts were made on Dr Kok’s social media network under private ‘friends and friends of friends’ settings.
In one post, Dr Kok highlighted the fact that the AstraZeneca Covid vaccine was “derived from the desecration from a murdered human being,” referring to a cell line from an aborted foetus. Dr Kok believed this fact to be in the public interest, particularly for Christians, many of whom choose not to take medicines derived from aborted foetuses for religious reasons.
In a comment under an article on Christian website Culture Watch condemning the use of Australian aid money to fund family planning measures (including contraception and abortion) in Africa, Dr Kok sarcastically stated,
“Soon, our civilisations will be vanquished, and the Earth will be overrun by Black people. The solution is clear: we must take “family planning” to poor countries and exterminate them before it is too late!”
The regulator condemned the statement as a call for racial violence and genocide, an allegation that Dr Kok said was covered by medical news sites, resulting in him being “defamed.” However, Dr Kok told the tribunal, “I was simply echoing the point [the article] made,” that being that the aid is a form of genocide.
Several memes by U.S. conservative satirical site the Babylon Bee digging at gender ideology and Covid restrictions were also brought up in the hearing.
Medical journalist Heather Saxena, who attended several days of the VCAT hearing, reported the contents of some of Dr Kok’s other posts which were discussed in the hearing for AusDoc (here and here):
“…Dr Kok had described doctors who performed abortions as “butchers” and then added: “What’s wrong with capital punishment for serial contract killers?”
“Dr Kok also referenced the “industrial-scale massacre of babies by doctors,” called Melbourne’s Royal Women’s Hospital the state’s “premier baby killing facility,” and claimed that doctors who performed gender reassignment surgery were “crooks engaged in mutilation.””
In another post, Dr Kok used the term “child abuse” in reference to same-sex couples with children.
Saxena reports that the Medical Board’s argument was not that any individual post constituted professional misconduct, but that in toto, Dr Kok’s language denigrated doctors and could discourage patients from discussing certain procedures with doctors. The board’s lawyer also argued that Dr Kok’s posts encouraged violence to racial groups and expressed anti-vaccine rhetoric.
During the hearing, Dr Kok conceded some of his language was “inflammatory” and “inappropriate,” such as calling abortion doctors “serial killers,” calling gender reassignment surgery “medical butchery,” and using the term “child abuse” in connection with same-sex families.
In his witness statement, Dr Kok said that some things he wrote “did amount to a denigration of other medical practitioners,” and that he would refrain from using such perjoratives in the future.
However, Dr Kok defended his religious convictions, maintaining his stance that marriage is for heterosexual couples only, that gender reassignment surgery is harmful and unethical, and that he does not condone abortion. Dr Kok also defended his long standing opposition to vaccine mandates, stating “I believe in patient autonomy ... to choose or decline treatment.”
Dr Kok’s barrister, Stephen Moloney, argued that “There is no law in this country that says [Dr Kok] is not allowed to say that abortion is morally wrong,” and that speaking on medical topics was a right “given unambiguously to the practitioner under the code of conduct.”
Dr Kok also rejected the Board’s assertion that his public stance on gender, abortion and sexuality would deter patients from seeking care.
“It might undermine their willingness to see me, but I’m not sure it would undermine their willingness to see other doctors,” he said, adding that if a patient asked him about abortion, he would refer them to a GP in his practice who provided abortion care.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-147356247
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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14 August, 2024
Greenie antisemitism
Police were called to a Sydney council chambers on Tuesday night after a Greens-led pro-Palestine protest turned ugly, forcing the abandonment of the meeting amid safety concerns after Jewish speakers were targeted, before officers escorted out staff and councillors.
The protest, co-organised by Inner West Greens councillor Dylan Griffiths, had been weeks in the making and designed to whip up frenzied support for his Boycott, Divest, Sanction motion, described previously as a “campaign ploy” before September’s local government elections.
It comes after Anthony Albanese’s criticism of the party’s inflammatory rhetoric, and The Australian’s special report, ‘Greens Extremes’ which revealed how its grassroots members had prioritised “revolution” over rates, roads and rubbish at a council level.
About 100 protesters took to the Inner West council’s final pre-election meeting on Tuesday in Ashfield, which was adjourned three times due to the partisan crowd, before eventually being abandoned.
Decked in keffiyehs, speakers – all of whom were allowed to speak by Labor mayor Darcy Byrne, a break in protocol in an olive-branch move – included those behind the Prime Minister’s electorate office picket, and hurled epithets including “baby killers” and “Nazis” toward Labor councillors, and claimed that they were paid “blood money” and had “sold their soul to Zionists”.
The mayor was forced to abandon the five-hour-long meeting about 11pm after the motion, which sought to investigate cutting council’s ties companies or products associated with Israel, was voted down, prompting pro-Palestine chanting of “river to the sea”, shouts of “shame”, and swear words.
Labor’s eight councillors, including the mayor, who voted against the motion, were forced to stay in chambers – as were council staff and elected colleagues – before the police arrived and escorted them out to their cars, given safety concerns with the large and angry crowd.
One pro-Palestine activist rubbished concerns and the experience of anti-Semitism described by one Jewish resident who spoke against the motion, before she then evoked the mayor’s deceased parents, which drew an emotional call to order by a taken aback Mr Byrne.
The few speakers who spoke against the motion, understood to all be Jewish residents, were booed by members of the gallery and one was called “Ms Netanyahu” for saying that while she supported Palestine she felt a BDS policy would worsen local social cohesion.
Others waved Palestine flags in the faces of Jewish residents speaking against the motion while some gallery members made a triangle symbol with their hands, eyewitnesses alleged, which is often associated with Hamas’ inverted triangle symbol.
On Wednesday, Mr Byrne said the actions and behaviour of the gallery, and organising group Inner West 4 Palestine, were “extreme”.
“The intimidating and abusive conduct of this group was unsafe, dangerous and undemocratic,” he said.
“The harassment and abuse of Jewish citizens who attended the meeting was appalling and completely unacceptable.
“There is no place for racism or religious vilification of any group in the Inner West.
“Overrunning the council chamber and preventing democratic decision making from taking place is not a political tactic that should be normalised in Australia.”
It had been the longest public gallery in the history of the council and the BDS motion meant council’s anti-racism strategy was unable to be discussed or voted on.
The Greens’ new slate of candidates for September’s election were also involved, pictured seated in the front row as activists hurled abuse at councillors.
ALP insiders have previously said the Greens would routinely stoke tensions and encourage targeting of electorate offices and other forums, like seen at Inner West Council, before wiping their hands clean of any responsibility.
“They go ‘That’s nothing to do with us, we had no idea’,” one Labor source said.
It was a full-circle moment for the Inner West after Marrickville Council, which now makes up part of the Local Government Area, introduced its own BDS policy in 2011, but later revoked it after uproar.
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Epic fail: NAPLAN reveals one in three students below standard
At least 400,000 Australian children have fallen so far behind at school they require catch-up tutoring, as governments squabble over the reforms and funding required to reverse decades of educational decline.
In “shocking” results that spell trouble for struggling students, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) – has identified one in 10 children who “need additional support to progress satisfactorily’’.
In addition, nearly a quarter of the 1.3 million children from 9431 schools who sat the tests for years 3, 5, 7 and 9 this year are deemed to be “developing’’ and “working towards expectations at the time of testing’’ – educational jargon for failing to pass minimum standards.
Overall, one in three students who failed baseline standards for reading and maths in this year’s NAPLAN tests.
Migrant kids are leapfrogging Australian-born students, while Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children are failing at four times the rate of non-Indigenous classmates.
Boys are almost twice as likely as girls to start high school functionally illiterate. By year 7, one in eight boys requires remedial reading lessons.
Trapped in a circle of intergenerational disadvantage, teenagers whose parents dropped out of high school are reading and writing at a level two years behind their classmates with university-educated parents.
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare will use the dire results to strongarm stubborn state governments to commit to “practical reforms” such as phonics checks and numeracy checks, evidence-based teaching and catch-up tutoring’, in return for $16bn in bonus commonwealth cash over the next decade.
“Your chances in life shouldn’t depend on your parents’ pay packet or the colour of your skin, but these results again show that’s still the case,’’ Mr Clare said.
“These (NAPLAN) results show why serious reform is needed and why we need to tie additional funding to reforms that will help students catch up, keep up and finish school.’’
Ninety per cent of Indigenous children in remote communities have failed to reach minimum standards of literacy and numeracy this year, with three out of four requiring remedial intervention.
Across Australia, the average Indigenous teenager in year 9 has the reading ability of a non-Indigenous 10-year-old in year 5.
The NAPLAN data reveals strong links between children’s academic success and parental education and income.
By the time they finish primary school, students with a university-educated parent are typically reading at year 9 level. But year 9 students whose parents failed to finish year 12 have the reading ability of a primary school student in year 5, on average.
The children of migrant parents who speak a foreign language have twice the chance of excelling in year 9 maths, and even outperform their classmates in English.
Overall, one in three students has fallen below the standard expected, averaged across test results in all years for reading, writing, numeracy, spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Extrapolated across the nation’s 4.09 million students, the NAPLAN results reveal that one million students fall below the baseline for literacy and numeracy, including 420,000 who require intervention to catch up.
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which administers the annual NAPLAN tests, said this year’s results were “stable’’ compared with 2023 but could not be compared to previous results, due to a change in scaling and proficiency levels last year.
“The 2024 results continue to show strong performance from Australian students in literacy and numeracy,’’ said ACARA’s new chief executive, Stephen Gniel.
“The challenges remain with supporting those students identified in the ‘needs additional support’ category and tackling the ongoing educational disparities for students from non-urban areas, First Nations Australian heritage and those with low socio-economic backgrounds.’’
Federal opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson said the results were “shocking’’ and demanded a “back-to-basics education sharply focused on literacy and numeracy, underpinned by explicit teaching and a knowledge-rich, commonsense curriculum’’.
“Getting back to basics also means ridding the classroom of indoctrination and other activist causes,’’ she said. “Every child deserves to reach his or her best potential – that is why it is vital to support our nation’s hardworking educators with evidence-based teaching resources so they can excel in the classroom.’’
The NAPLAN data, to be made public on Wednesday, exposes the Northern Territory and Queensland as the worst performers for Year 9 literacy. Six out of 10 teenagers in the Territory, which has the largest proportion of First Nations students, failed to meet the year 9 baseline reading standard.
Queensland, which insists on teaching an outdated version of the national curriculum, was the worst-performing state, with 36.8 per cent of year 3 students struggling to read properly, 37 per cent of year 7 students below-par at the start of high school, and 42.2 per cent of year 9 students reading at a level below the national standard.
The national curriculum was revised in 2022 but Queensland has given schools to 2027 to adopt the changes, which focus on phonics-based reading. Despite the poor results, Education Minister Di Farmer said that after extensive discussions with teachers, principals, and education unions, Queensland was taking a “phased approach” to implementing version nine of the curriculum “allowing greater flexibility for schools to manage workload’’.
Queensland has also been late to adopt a national “phonics check’’ to test whether year 1 students can sound out the alphabet and letter combinations of words.
Western Australia, which mandates teaching through “explicit instruction’’, and has a focus on phonics, boasts the best results of any state, with 28.5 per cent of year 9 students reading below the minimum standard – on par with the ACT. WA Education Minister Tony Buti said the state had been the first to introduce a minimum standard of literacy and numeracy as part of the senior secondary certificate of education. Students miss out on a certificate unless they pass NAPLAN in year 9, or pass a similar test before leaving school.
At Mount Lawley Senior High School in Perth – where students performed above or well above the national average in every testing domain last year – principal Lesley Street fosters a culture of excellence, respect, learning and perseverance. “We focus on trying to meet each student’s needs and ensure they feel a sense of belonging,’’ she said. “We have strong links with our local primary feeder schools, where we liaise with them to identify students with weak literacy and numeracy for immediate intervention when they arrive in high school.’’
Students in years 7 and 8 are nurtured in a “middle school’’, where “every teacher views themselves as a teacher of literacy and numeracy, not only a subject specialist’’. Students struggling with reading, writing and numeracy are taken aside for catch-up tutoring during school hours, and the school provides a homework club in the library.
In NSW, which has banned mobile phones in schools, delivered teachers a pay rise and recently announced a fact-filled, simpler syllabus, 81 per cent of year 3 students recorded “strong” or “exceeding” results in writing. NSW Education Minister Prue Car is leading a state revolt against Mr Clare’s Better and Fairer Schools Agreement, which would see the commonwealth increase its share of spending on public schools from 20 per cent to 22.5 per cent of running costs in return for states hitting higher targets for literacy and numeracy, school attendance and Year 12 completion.
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Staggering number of migrants that have arrived in Australia since Anthony Albanese rose to power
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has allowed a record 1.15million migrants to enter the country since he came into power.
Labor has already exceeded its migration target for the last financial year, according to an analysis of migration patterns by parliamentary term.
The net migration intake from July 2023 to May 2024 was 445,510 - a figure that is well ahead of the 395,000 Labor committed to in the Budget.
In just 27 months, Mr Albanese has brought in more migrants than the entire Hawke-Keating years - which lasted five times longer at 156 months.
The data also revealed almost one-third of Australians - 31 per cent - were born overseas - a nine per cent increase to 1983 figures.
Albanese's government also recorded a whopping 62 per cent more migrants than the Rudd-Gillard term - who held the previous record with 1.04million people.
In the previous financial year - 2022 to 2023 - the countries representing the largest group of migrants were India with 92,940 (18 per cent), China with 64,320 (12 per cent) and the Philippines with 40,890 (8 per cent).
The top ten countries of migration to Australia included Nepal, Colombia, the UK, Vietnam, Pakistan, New Zealand and Thailand.
Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs Dr Kevin You accused the Albanese government of adding pressure to Australia's inflation and strained housing crisis.
'The Albanese government has no plan for economic growth, other than the shortsighted, lazy approach of bringing in record amounts of migrants, rather than doing the hard yards of real economic reform,' Dr You told the Daily Telegraph.
'The record surge to migration is taking place at the same time as housing and rental prices are at record highs and housing construction is at 1980s levels.
'Australians are suffering through cost-of-living crisis brought on by unplanned mass migration'.
Dr You slammed the prime minister for vowing to halve the annual migration intake in the next financial year, claiming the promise was 'not worth the paper it's written on'.
Four months ago, Mr Albanese promised Australia's net overseas intake would be slashed to just 250,000 in 2024-25.
'It's yet another broken promise from a government which is making it harder for mainstream Australians to get ahead,' Dr You said.
'The latest data reinforces that Australia's migration program is being run in the interests of big business and universities bureaucracy, not the Australian people.'
Dr You admitted that while migration has and will continue to play a critical role, the current migration intake was causing immense pressure on Australians.
'Record migration intake is placing immense pressure on housing and infrastructure, and has not solved our worker shortage crisis and is leaving Australians worse off,' he said.
Immigration and Citizenship shadow minister Dan Tehan said Labor had a 'Big Australia' policy by stealth, but no plan to deal with its impact.
'Labor claim they don't want a big Australia but judge them on the facts not their words,' he said.
'There's no plan for where they will live, or how to deal with the impact on government services or the environment.
'This at a time Australians are either struggling to find a place to live or they're being hit with crippling rent increases.'
In April, Mr Albanese told Melbourne 3AW radio host Tom Elliott his government aimed to halve net overseas migration levels, after being pushed on a figure.
'Well, we're not going to just pluck a figure out of the sky, but what we are projecting is that the NOM, the net overseas migration, is projected to come down to 250,000 in the coming financial year in 2024-25,' he said.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton in his May Budget reply speech promised to reduce the permanent intake to 140,000, down from 185,000.
But overall net overseas migration, which covers skilled migrants and international students, could still be above 200,000 - or double the levels of the late 1990s.
The consumer price index grew to 3.8 per cent in June, putting it even further above the Reserve Bank's 2 to 3 per cent target.
The latest headline inflation numbers, released in July, were worse than March quarter's 3.6 per and marked the first quarterly deterioration since 2022.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13740703/Migrants-Australia-Anthony-Albanese.html
**********************************************Chatbots ‘making things up’, education department warns parents
Artificial intelligence will be used to plan lessons and set homework tasks in more Australian schools, despite concerns it is failing complex maths questions and “making things up’’.
Western Australia will follow NSW and South Australia in trialling the use of a generative AI “chatbot’’ to save teachers time planning lessons, assignments and homework.
But a trial of a Microsoft chatbot in NSW public schools – known as NSWEduChat – this year has revealed the technology can “struggle with subjects that require specific answers’’.
The NSW Education Department has advised teachers to double-check the chatbot’s answers to questions – especially in maths.
“The app responds best to questions that could be answered in many ways rather than one specific answer,’’ it states in a summary of early trials.
“Therefore, it will struggle with subjects that require specific answers. Users should review every output produced using generative AI to ensure accuracy.’’
The department has identified subjects where “extra caution should be taken’’ using the chatbot. “Currently, those subjects are Maths Extensions 1 and 2,’’ it says.
SA – the first state to trail AI in schools last year – has warned parents about privacy and exposure to “inappropriate content’’ from commercially available AI such as ChatGPT and Quill.
“Every school determines how their teachers and students can use AI,’’ it states. “Chatbots sometimes provide answers that can’t be tracked back to the source information.
“They can produce false references to support answers. They can also make things up, which is known as an AI ‘hallucination’.
“AI responses shouldn’t be taken as a source of truth.’’
SA Education warns parents not to let children enter personal information into AI chatbots, or to use any images or videos of students, staff or family members.
“Chatbots may produce inappropriate content for students based on the questions asked, because they’re trained using large data sets and they’re not fully moderated,’’ it states in advice to parents. “AI responses may hold biases against individuals or groups in the data.
“Image and video generators could be used to create offensive or inappropriate content, which may not be intentional.
“They could also be used to produce copyrighted materials.
“You shouldn’t use images or videos of students, staff, schools, family members or members of the community.’’
SA still allows teachers to experiment with different forms of AI, even though it trialled a custom-built Microsoft bot aligned with the state curriculum.
The federal and WA governments will spend $4.7m building a customised bot that gathers its information from the curriculum, for trial in eight schools, including the WA School of Isolated and Distance Education.
WA Education Minister Tony Buti said AI would save teachers time in preparing lessons. “We want our teachers to be teaching our kids,’’ he said on Monday.
“To do this, unnecessary administrative burdens must be reduced, and we hope this new pilot program can support our teachers and ease their workload.’’
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare said the federal government was giving schools across Australia $30m in a “workload reduction fund’’ for teachers.
“AI will never replace a great teacher, but it can help cut down the time they spend doing admin so they can spend more time in the classroom,’’ he said.
NSW Education Minister Prue Car called on the federal government to also support her state’s trial of AI in classrooms.
The NSW chatbot only responds to questions that relate to education-related content.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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13 August, 2024
Agreement with Mayor Trevor Pickering wanting to ban "Welcome to Country"
It seems stupid tokenism to me too. Why do I need someone to welcome me to my own country? My family have been here for generations -- JR
Trevor Pickering, mayor of Croydon Shire Council in north Queensland, isn’t holding back on his views – and many Aussies are in furious agreement.
The topic of Welcome to Country – and whether it is overused – remains a lightning rod across Australia.
Mr Pickering said he is utterly convinced the huge majority of Australians would understand how people whose families have lived on a piece of country for 100 years might feel a little confronted by having someone “welcome’ them on a regular basis to the place they already live.
His views sparked a passionate response.
Many readers were quick to congratulate him and insisted he raise his hand for Prime Minister.
“Get rid of WTC – we’re all over it! And fed up listening to it! And truth telling – exactly wot is that,” Ted wrote.
Others said the whole issue needs to be resolved, while some claimed it’s up to him to get with the times on the debate.
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Wind energy enters its mid-life crisis
When I first heard that China was installing a two-headed wind turbine, I thought the Babylon Bee was having a laugh.
The Mingyang twin-rotor floating wind turbine platform isn’t a prank, it’s another grotesque evolution of the ‘Net Zero’ at any cost philosophy which has started creating sea monsters.
More likely, it’ll be a speed bump in the ocean – a metal iceberg – a bit of jetsam bobbing about while the world goes to war over wobbly lines in the South China Sea.
Articles praising the installation insist that it’s built to withstand 287 km/h winds, leaving ‘plenty’ of safety over the strongest record typhoon in the area of 260 km/h – but they add a bit of wriggle room by insisting that ‘weather systems are flying off-kilter as climate change continues to advance’.
Remember, if it ends up in bits, you gotta blame ‘climate change’.
If you’re like me and thought this green fable sounded familiar, you may remember the Donghae TwinWind Project planned for the coast of Norway in 2021. The same technology is on track for the Celtic Sea (with support from the UK government) due for completion in 2030.
There have been other designs for twin-headed rotors. A Chinese-made land-based turbine experienced a dramatic failure in which it caught fire after two months.
My point is not that technology is always perfect, only that I’m glad these new air-mounted machetes will be a long way out to sea and not hovering over unsuspecting cows in a paddock.
Besides, two-headed turbines are nothing compared to the ‘wall of wind turbines’ – or as I like to call it – ‘Resident Seavil’.
A Norwegian company has decided to mount 117 turbines on some scaffolding. It’s the stuff of nightmares if you identify as a seagull.
Wind Catching Systems’ wall of turbines dubbed ‘Windcatcher’ has won certification from the world’s leading technical authority on wind power – DNV. At 300 metres high and 350 metres wide, you can only imagine the engineering that will need to go into securing it to the ocean floor.
To me, it feels as if we’re entering the mid-life crisis version of wind energy where everything has to be bigger and have more sharp spinning bits. The crazier, the better. This behaviour is more common than you think. The dinosaurs entered a size-based arms race, and so do our bros at the gym when they skip leg day and end up walking around like they have implanted their girlfriend’s silicon breasts under their biceps.
Back in the real world, Australia’s previously approved wind farms are being cancelled as landholders and communities nix their support.
A 55-turbine wind farm application near Armidale tabled by Ark Energy has been withdrawn when nine residents changed their minds.
The Clean Energy Council seemed surprised, saying: ‘I haven’t heard of too many instances where landholders have changed their minds.’
They might need to get used to the word ‘no’. Despite these projects paying property owners a fortune per turbine (presumed to be around $35,000 per turbine per year), the reality of these turbines is harder to live with.
Not only that, neighbouring farms get nothing despite shouldering a major imposition from wind farms – not least of all, how they look. This creates community tension.
Suddenly mountain ranges are being interrupted by dozens of skyscraper-sized turbines. Farmland is blanketed in solar panels. Battery farms sprawl out across the landscape. And worst of all, ugly and intrusive transmission lines are being draped across properties – not only destroying the natural beauty of these areas – but also creating a fire hazard. You remember all those little wildlife walkways draped over the freeway to help nature navigate highways? What a cruel joke these environmental projects are in light of Net Zero.
Big Wind is not fitting the Utopia of ‘green energy’ that people were promised.
With households struggling to feed their families, images of Australia’s world-leading farmland being covered in solar panels has raised questions about whether the government’s obsession with Net Zero and use of public money to prop up these projects is the right thing to do.
Shouldn’t we be helping the agricultural sector return to profitability after decades of abuse and neglect? That way they wouldn’t be tempted by Big Green barons to calve up Australia’s most important agricultural resource.
These renewable energy projects might be flashy and eye-catching, but getting the fabric of civilisation right is the most important thing.
The fat has come off the Australian economy.
There is no more room to waste public money or squander our natural resources on ‘feel good’ technology.
Cheap power, plentiful food, and a self-sufficient nation must top the list if we’re going to make it through the next century without becoming a vassal state of Pacific communists who have used the shiny lure of ‘Net Zero’ to hook our single-minded, short-sighted political class.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/wind-energy-enters-its-mid-life-crisis/
***************************************************Gold Coast Mayor Tom Tate is under official investigation for improper conduct – for jokingly calling a fellow councillor a “ranga”
To me it just means red-haired -- JR
He faces potential disciplinary action after the state’s council watchdog upheld a complaint that the term “ranga” refers to an orangutan, is associated with “discriminatory feelings” and Cr Tate’s use of the word was “not funny” and “extremely derogatory”.
The mayor has vowed to fight the matter, saying he “had no idea that the term ‘ranga’ was offensive to some people”.
The probe follows the complaint to the Office of the independent Assessor into lighthearted comments the mayor made at a media conference in April after the council elections.
Cr Tate was asked his views on a Facebook post by Surfers Paradise MP John-Paul Langbroek who welcomed new councillor and close friend Joe Wilkinson by describing him as “ranga”, with the hashtags “#diversity” and “#multiculturalism”.
The mayor responded by saying he “didn’t even know he (Cr Wilkinson) was a ranga” but it was good for the Coast’s “diversity”.
Cr Tate said former councillor William Owen-Jones had retired and “he was a ranga”.
“You know, lose one ranga, get another ranga. What the hell. That’s what the Gold Coast is all about,” he told journalists.
Mr Owen-Jones also weighed in, posting on Mr Langbroek’s Facebook page: “Wait til they start picking on the elected representatives with the hyphenated names … #RangasRuleTheWorld”.
But an anonymous complainant did not see the humour and lodged an official gripe with the OIA.
It recently wrote to the council to say it had assessed the complaint and confirmed it as a suspected breach of the councillor code of conduct.
The OIA said Cr Tate was suspected of having contravened standards of behaviour requiring councillors to “treat people in a reasonable, just, respectful and non-discriminatory way”, to “treat fellow councillors, local government employees and members of the public with courtesy, honesty and fairness” and “have proper regard for other people’s rights, obligations, cultural differences, safety, health and welfare”.
“While the conduct may well be argued to be in jest or intended to be humorous, it was considered in assessing this matter that the term (ranga) was still capable of being discriminatory and unreasonably causing offence to particular groups,” the OIA said.
“The complaint raised various concerns about the use of the term “ranga” by the mayor, including its references to orangutans.
“The complaint also made reference to other similar terms often used which are also associated with ‘discriminatory feelings’ and how others in the public eye have been dealt with as a result.
“The complaint referred to the mayor’s behaviour as ‘not funny’ and ‘extremely derogatory’.”
The OIA noted it was “not the first time” Mayor Tate had made comments in the media that were “considered discriminatory to others”.
It said it had referred a complaint to the council in 2021 after Cr Tate said: “You wouldn’t want to put a Chinese (person) next to someone who’s got a cat, you know. She might be breakfast’.
The OIA noted Cr Tate had apologised for that comment as a “poor joke” and the matter was discontinued, but “the nature of such comments make it particularly relevant for Mayor Tate’s fellow councillors to consider and decide if the commentary is in line with the community’s expectations for an elected official”.
The OIA has referred the “ranga” complaint to the council to investigate. If found guilty, Cr Tate could face a range of sanctions including having to issue another public apology or a be issued with a misconduct warning.
Contacted for comment, Cr Tate vowed to defend the complaint and said he was “disappointed that the OIA has seen fit to have this matter further investigated”.
“When I went to school, people with red hair were called ‘Blue’ and sometimes particularly tall people were called ‘Stretch’,” he said.
“With my Asian heritage, I was often called more colourful things. I had no idea that the term ‘ranga’ was offensive to some people and I certainly did not intend to cause any offence. In using the term, I was actually responding to a direct question from a journalist.”
Cr Tate said he respected the OIA’s role but questioned the use of taxpayer and ratepayer-funded resources to investigate such “time-consuming and costly” complaints.
“I will be defending the allegation that I have committed a conduct breach and I am seeking (legal) advice in that regard,” he said.
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Life insurance in spotlight as living costs hit households hard
Surging living costs are threatening to rob Australians of the ability to afford life insurance, a new study has found.
Insurance safety nets for death, disability and income protection cover are being stretched by battered household budgets, poor understanding and lack of accessible advice as Australia’s supply of financial planners dwindles.
Commissioned by the Council of Australian Life Insurers (CALI), the independent study involved more than 5000 people.
It found more than two-thirds are concerned that cost-of-living pressures will affect their ability to pay for cover.
Almost one quarter of Australians would consider cancelling life insurance because of cost pressures, three-quarters did not realise that it could include mental health cover, and women were feeling the squeeze more than men, it found.
CALI chief executive Christine Cupitt said “people are crying out for help in making decisions about their life insurance, but they don’t have enough qualified people to turn to”.
“When they do find a way to obtain that advice, they are basically waiting in line to pay on average $3000 to see a financial adviser,” she said. “Half of new business last year was written by 480 financial advisers, so there’s a real crisis here in terms of people able to access that comprehensive advice.”
The report underpins the push for fast passage of federal government legislation allowing insurers to provide simple advice on products. It is hoped that consultation and draft legislation will occur within months.
The report says cost-of-living pressures are “coming from every direction” and this makes financial resilience more important than ever. “Women disproportionately feel that cost of living has impacted their ability to maintain insurance cover compared to men,” it says.
Social researcher Rebecca Huntley, who led the study, said a combination of Covid, cost of living and natural disasters over the past five years had prepared people to expect the unexpected and seek resilience.
“We know that women are much more aware of all of the cost-of-living increases across the board,” she said.
“Increasing school fees, increasing streaming services, whatever it might be, they’re more at the coalface of that, so they see what that means.
Independent Senator David Pocock believes the life insurance industry in Australia “wants to be regulated” after calls for a ban on them discriminating against people based on DNA.
“The cost of living is an existential threat. In 20 years of research – and I’ve lived through global financial crises – it’s never been this bad, and there’s no expectation that it’s going to end any time soon, even with an interest-rate cut.”
The lack of knowledge about mental health cover from life insurance could be addressed by more open discussions, Dr Huntley said.
“It probably is something that policy makers and the insurance industry more broadly haven’t really spoken about as much,” she said.
CALI says last year life insurers paid more than $12bn to more than 91,000 people, but millions remain unprotected.
“We know we have a growing underinsurance problem,” Ms Cupitt said.
She said the trigger points for taking out life insurance or reviewing your cover included key life milestones such as having children, signing up for a mortgage and starting a business.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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12 August, 2024
‘It’s taken six months and $100,000 in legal costs to clear my name’
Her research into late-term abortions provoked controversy. It provoked complaints even though it was perfectly scholarly. Her university's response to the complaints was a series of oppressive "investigations" which eventually attempted to penalize her
In 1964, Robert Menzies gave a speech at the University of NSW defending academic freedom and the pursuit of truth in all areas of human endeavour as a fundamental principle for Australian universities.
“It is of the most vital importance for human progress in all fields of knowledge that the highest encouragement should be given to untrammelled research, to the vigorous pursuit of truth, however unorthodox it may seem,” the prime minister said.
Law professor Joanna Howe is claiming a modern-day victory for this ideal after securing a breakthrough in the Fair Work Commission case she brought against her employer, the University of Adelaide.
Howe argues she has secured a win for academic freedom at a key moment for Australian universities given a new age of political polarisation, campus cancel culture and an elevated focus on the protection of students from content they may find offensive.
In June, she lodged a stop bullying application against the university with the industrial umpire and sought the removal of the corrective actions imposed on her. But this was just the straw that broke the camel’s back.
Across a period of 4½ years, Howe endured six investigations conducted by the university as a result of complaints made against her research into the politically contentious topic of abortion.
While Howe was cleared by all of the investigations, the sixth to be conducted by the university required her to complete a research integrity course within 30 days. The aim was to provide further education on how not to do biased research.
This corrective action was imposed on Howe despite the investigation dismissing allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation of facts in a submission she made to a parliamentary inquiry in South Australia. The investigation found there was no breach of the Australian Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research. Howe fought against the requirement to complete the online re-education course, but the battle took a heavy personal and financial took.
After first being notified of the complaint against her on January 24, Howe spent more than half a year dealing with and responding to the investigation process. She racked up legal costs of nearly $100,000 in her bid to resolve the dispute.
“I appealed internally on four occasions and was never given any reason for why my appeals were rejected or corrective actions were imposed,” she tells Inquirer. “My appeals raised serious concerns with the university’s failure to follow its own procedures, including the requirement to dismiss complaints that were made vexatiously or in bad faith. Every time my appeals fell on deaf ears.”
An FWC conciliation process now has produced an agreed statement between both parties making clear that the university accepted commissioner Christopher Platt’s recommendation “not to require Professor Howe to comply with the corrective actions and that no further action will be taken in this matter”.
“The parties have agreed on a process regarding the investigation of complaints moving forward,” the statement says.
“The University of Adelaide supports academic freedom, as reflected in its Enterprise Agreement 2023–2025 and its Freedom of Speech and Academic Freedom Policy.”
Following the resolution of the dispute, Howe has embarked on a fresh campaign to have a new process for the dismissal of bad-faith complaints adopted more broadly across the nation’s universities. She sees the reform as a key instrument for the defence of academic freedom.
In a letter sent to Universities Australia chairman David Lloyd on Friday, Howe says the “ability to research and speak out in areas that are unpopular or controversial benefits the whole community in our pursuit of truth”.
“While I accept that complaints are par for the course if one is researching in an area of controversy, what I do not accept is the choice by universities to investigate complaints that are made vexatiously or in bad faith,” she says.
“This choice, as I know all too well, places researchers under an unfair and unreasonable spotlight and distracts them from pursuing their research.”
Howe’s research has subjected her not only to criticism of her work but also personal attack across several years – including the release by activists of her place of work and family.
Since 2017, Howe has researched abortion in Australia including its different methods, the regulation and incidence of sex-selective abortion, the regulation and incidence of abortion after viability – known as late-term abortion – and the regulation and incidence of babies born alive after an abortion.
In 2021, she began research on the regulation of prostitution, including an examination of the merits of full decriminalisation of prostitution versus a partial decriminalisation model.
Howe’s primary field of research, however, has been at the intersection of labour law and migration law and in this field she is regarded as one of the nation’s leading experts. She holds a doctorate of philosophy in law from the University of Oxford, where she studied as a Rhodes scholar, and is the author and co-editor of three books.
In 2022 she was hand-picked by the Labor government to help lead the migration review headed by former top public servant Martin Parkinson that was delivered in March last year.
In her letter to Lloyd, Howe has made the following proposal: “I am requesting that Universities Australia work with the sector to introduce a new, specific requirement to mandatorily dismiss complaints which are made vexatiously or in bad faith about the research or conduct of academics.
“This simple yet significant reform would help free scholars who research in areas of controversy from the threat of being under constant scrutiny and investigation.”
Howe tells Inquirer the outcome at the conciliation in the FWC was “a significant victory for academic freedom but it’s a fight I never should have had to take on”.
“No one should have to go through what I have been through just to fight for the freedom to research and speak,” she says. “It should not have taken me six months … and nearly $100,000 in legal costs to clear my name.
“This outcome at conciliation confirms I was right to not submit to the university’s attempt at re-education by forcing me to do an anti-bias course.”
The complaints
Between November 25, 2019, and May 2 this year, the University of Adelaide undertook six investigations into Howe’s scholarship because of complaints – five of which were made within an 18-month period from July 2022. The wave of complaints from July 2022 came after Howe started to promote her research online, including on her website and on social media, to make it more accessible to a general audience.
Howe says this exposed her to harassment, verbal abuse and repeated threats to her employment. She was targeted in particular by individuals and activists from pro-sex work and pro-abortion organisations.
This resulted in several complaints from TikTok activists who accused Howe of misrepresenting facts for saying that abortion was legal in Australia up to birth and that the procedure was not limited only to life-threatening situations or where there was the prospect of serious congenital abnormality.
Howe has researched, collected and promoted data on the incidence of late-term abortions including those conducted for psychosocial reasons or in instances where healthy babies had medical abnormalities that could have been medically or surgically corrected.
“Having been subject to five investigations in two years because of the controversial nature of my research has substantially impacted and undermined my academic freedom to research and advocate on abortion from a critical perspective,” she tells Inquirer.
The sixth complaint
The sixth investigation related to a submission Howe made to a parliamentary inquiry in South Australia. The complaint was made by a TikTok and Instagram activist, whom The Australian has not named, over allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation in Howe’s submission.
Howe has strongly criticised the university’s handling of this complaint. She argues it made several errors that denied her procedural fairness.
First, while being notified in a January 24 letter from the university that a sixth investigation was being conducted into her, the letter did not identify the specific allegations being made against Howe’s research.
Howe was unable to provide responses to the allegations until February 14, after she had inquired a second time to discover their substance.
Second, the university’s preliminary assessment concluded in March that there was no breach of the Australian Code of Conduct for Responsible Research. But it did find there was a “minor departure from accepted academic practice in terms of appropriate citation and representation of primary sources”.
The assessment officer did not recommend any corrective action but, despite this, the university’s formal determination was for Howe to complete an online research integrity course within 30 days – a requirement imposed on her on May 2.
Third, the individual who made the complaint against Howe was notified by the University of Adelaide of its determination that the “complaint be resolved at the local level with corrective actions”.
The university neglected to mention that the allegations of plagiarism and misrepresentation had not been substantiated or that Howe was not in breach of the Code for the Responsible Conduct of Research.
“The university’s correspondence with the TikTok activist who made the original complaint in the fifth investigation was appalling,” Howe tells Inquirer. “It did not state that the investigation found I had not breached the Australian Code of Conduct for Responsible Research but stated that corrective actions had been imposed, which led to the complainant publicly releasing this letter.
“This led to a torrent of online abuse as pro-abortion trolls and activists harassed me and erroneously claimed that I had been found guilty of misconduct and that the university had ordered me to unpublish my research report.
“Neither had happened and yet the university refused to clear my name.”
Fourth, Howe appealed on four occasions within the university against its handling of the matter.
“My appeals raised serious concerns with the university’s failure to follow its own procedures, including the requirement to dismiss complaints that were made vexatiously or in bad faith,” she says.
“I raised concerns around a serious conflict of interest with respect to the responsible designated officer for my case.”
Howe has argued that the university failed to comply with its policy on academic freedom and that pro-abortion scholarship by others at the university was not held to the same standard. She says pro-abortion scholars also had diverted from best practice when citing primary sources on several occasions but had faced no consequences.
A new pathway
In a bid to ensure that important research at Australian universities is not stymied because of a stream of bad-faith complaints targeting individual academics, Howe is now urging Universities Australia to implement broader reforms to uphold academic freedom.
In her letter to Lloyd, obtained by Inquirer, Howe argues that universities should apply a common standard allowing them to “automatically” dismiss bad-faith or vexatious complaints.
This would include adopting common definitions of vexatious and bad faith.
Howe suggests definitions for both and says universities should bear several factors in mind when assessing whether the complaints meet those definitions.
She says universities should consider the reality of “differing views in relation to controversial research topics” and “whether the complaint has been brought with an ulterior motive and not in good faith by reason of these different views”.
In addition, universities should consider the need to uphold the “right of scholars to academic freedom, freedom of speech and health and safety”.
However, she also says the “designation of a complaint as being made vexatiously or in bad faith” should not be taken at the discretion of university management.
Howe says there is a growing urgency to the reform blueprint.
“This requirement to automatically dismiss complaints that are found to be vexatious or in bad faith is necessary given the central importance of academic freedom, recognised by the High Court in Peter Ridd v James Cook University and in the French Review of Freedom of Speech in Australian Higher Education Providers,” Howe says.
“I urge Universities Australia to consider this modest proposal to ensure better protection of academic freedom and free speech across the higher education sector.”
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Childcare pay rises won’t help nation’s families one jot
Albanese has little resistance to special pleading from vested interests such as the United Workers Union, whose campaign for better pay for childcare workers has secured a $3.6bn commitment from his government.
Won’t that be inflationary? Peter Stefanovic asked when Albanese appeared on Sky News to spruik the deal. “No,” he replied. “Because what it will do is keep costs down, importantly.” Stefanovic persisted, citing Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock’s concern that government spending is feeding inflation. “Yeah, that’s very different,” Albanese replied.
It turned out not to be very different after all. Break open one bread roll and before you know it everyone wants a slice. Albanese’s generosity to childcare workers prompted a demand for a similar deal from the Australian Services Union on behalf of 300,000 disability workers.
This is how inflationary wage spirals start and why decisions on public service wages are best left to tribunals, rather than stitched up in piecemeal deals between Labor prime ministers and unions.
Setting aside the questionable proposition that governments can stop the march of inflation by throwing money in its path, the ever-growing government spending on childcare raises far more important family policy questions that few are game to ask.
Is it sensible, for instance, to skew assistance in favour of working couples and away from single-income families? Is it fair that working couples with one child in care received an average subsidy of $8181 last year while the 30 per cent of mothers or fathers who chose to stay at home received nothing?
The growth in federal government spending on childcare took off under Julia Gillard’s government, driven by an enticing narrative about breaking glass ceilings buttressed with the superficially respectable economic argument that greater workforce participation boosted productivity and economic growth.
It does not. That’s because outsourcing household responsibilities does not create fresh economic activity. It simply brings it on to the books.
The most contentious argument in favour of professional childcare was that it was in the best interests of the child. Albanese persisted with this flawed line of reasoning in his round of radio and television interviews at the end of last week.
“Of course it’s good for kids,” he told Triple M Perth. “Ninety per cent of human brain development occurs in the first five years.”
Many experts in early childhood development would draw the opposite conclusion based on the salient fact that time spent building a stable, bonded relationship with their children is the best investment in a child’s future that parents can make.
In her 2017 book, Being There, US psychoanalyst Erica Komisar assembles a convincing body of evidence to show that excessively long periods spent in an institutional setting is, to put it mildly, a subprime option.
Yet childcare is more than just childminding, Albanese told listeners to 6PR on Friday. He cited the evidence of his own eyes, gathered during a fleeting visit to a childcare centre in the Perth suburb of Dayton. “There they were learning about the letter ‘L’ and the letter ‘U’, with a whole lot of little blocks about how to do that,” Albanese said.
The idea that preschool children must be institutionalised to learn the alphabet is an insult to generations of conscientious parents. An Australian Institute of Health and Welfare survey in 2017 found 79 per cent of children aged 0 to two years had been read or told stories by a parent on three or more days in the previous week, while 44 per cent of them had libraries of between 25 and 100 children’s books in their home.
Institutional early learning can accelerate the development of children from bookless backgrounds with inattentive parents, but children from low socio-economic groups and non-English-speaking homes are less likely to be at childcare centres, which draw their clients disproportionably from English-speaking, educated, professional homes.
The result of increased federal government funding has been a substantial migration of children from so-called informal care, most commonly grandparents, to professional care. While informal care halved between 1999 and 2017, professional care increased by around 70 per cent. Transferring familial obligations to the state and robbing children of the benefits of forming bonds with their grandparents is the unintended consequence of government interference in the market.
Sadly, a Labor government is probably incapable of fixing this expensive policy mess, just as it is incapable of fixing the National Disability Insurance Scheme where costs will blow out even further when the government caves in to the latest pay demand. It will fall to the next Coalition government to restore sanity to family policy. It will be a delicate conversation. Nothing will be gained by making parents feel more uncomfortable about the conflict between their twin responsibilities as parents and breadwinners.
Childcare centres provide an invaluable service and must be supported by government since an under-resourced, unregulated sector would be far worse. The dedication of childcare professionals must be encouraged and rewarded since, like good teachers, they are the hope of the side.
The Coalition might start by revisiting the intention behind Family Tax Benefit Part B, John Howard’s solution to the challenge of assisting parents without discriminating against those who chose not to work. It might seek to balance the level of subsidies with out-of-pocket costs for parents to ensure full-time parents were no worse off. It might consider family-friendly reforms to the tax system, including incentives to increase the birthrate. Australia is not the only country that has tried to kick this can down the road by encouraging migration. Yet, as we are beginning to learn, there are undesirable consequences to that approach – even in a well-adjusted country such as Australia.
Reforming family policy, with its entrenched subsidies and vested commercial interests, will be among the most difficult challenges faced by an incoming Coalition government. It will require the investment of substantial political capital. Yet for a party focused on the long-term interests of Australia, as a nation of well-balanced individuals living where possible in stable family units, there is surely nothing more important.
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Disturbing societal trends raising the risk of a terror attack
The disruptive role of the Greens in this process is very much in keeping with the Trotskyite attitudes and history of their leader, Adam Bandt
ASIO director-general Mike Burgess did more this week than raise the level of Australia’s terror threat. He redefined our security challenge to recognise an increasingly intolerant and divided country.
Burgess has been forced to broaden ASIO’s traditional focus to respond to a host of new and disturbing trends that, taken together, have undermined social cohesion and increasingly have normalised violence as a part of protest and public debate.
While some of ASIO’s grim assessment reflects the manifestation in Australia of violent trends in the US and Britain, it also has been influenced heavily by the extraordinary fire and fury ignited at home by the war in Gaza.
Burgess was adamant this week that his decision to raise Australia’s terror threat level from “possible” to “probable” was “not a direct response” to the local fallout from the turmoil in the Middle East. But in the same breath he made a powerful case as to why the heated local response to that conflict is the most “important”, “relevant” and “significant driver” of the country’s “degrading security environment”.
“The conflict has fuelled grievances, promoted protest, exacerbated division, undermined social cohesion and elevated intolerance,” Burgess says.
His comments have led each of the major political parties to point the finger at each other for their part in this outcome.
Anthony Albanese slammed the Greens for fuelling community divisions over Gaza while Peter Dutton said the government should share the blame for failing to tackle anti-Semitism decisively since the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7 last year.
Meanwhile, the Greens, who have refused to strongly condemn Hamas, anti-Semitism or the defacing of MPs’ office by anti-Israel activists, accused the government of politicising the issue, claiming their supporters were only “pushing for peace”.
ASIO’s assessment of this new volatile mood is stark, with Burgess declaring “politically motivated violence now joins espionage and foreign interference as our principal security concerns”.
But the critical part of his assessment is that this risk of politically motivated violence is no longer caused by a singular terror driver, such as the rise of Islamic State in 2012.
Instead it is now likely to flow from a range of growing social ills, including a spike in political polarisation and intolerance, violent protests and debate, anti-authoritarian beliefs in part fuelled by excessive Covid lockdowns, conspiracy theories, distrust of institutions and a normalisation of provocative and inflammatory behaviours. What’s more, many are combining these beliefs into what ASIO calls “new hybrid ideologies”, all amplified by the internet and social media, which remains the primary platform for radicalisation. Hard-to-detect lone wolf attacks with a gun or a knife are the likely method of attack, rather than old-style terror cell plots to blow up major landmarks or cause mass casualties.
The relevance of the Gaza conflict to ASIO’s assessment is not that it has created these dangerous trends but, rather, it has helped to fuel them.
The storming of the US Capitol building on January 6, 2021, on the basis of Donald Trump’s “Big Lie” about the 2020 election result was the first major global illustration of the emerging social trends Burgess talks about. These volatile social and political trends have continued to evolve in the US and are reflected in the savage and inflammatory language used by both presidential candidates, Trump and Kamala Harris, on the campaign trail. No one knows precisely why shooter Thomas Crooks chose to try to assassinate Trump last month, but the act was an illustration of the darker, more intolerant times ASIO speaks of.
Meanwhile Britain has been deeply shaken this week by violent anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim riots fuelled by online misinformation and extremist views following a deadly knife attack on children in Southport.
In Australia, ASIO says it has disrupted eight potential terror attacks in the past four months, all involving radicalised youths between the ages of 14 and 21.
This included the stabbing of an Assyrian Orthodox bishop in western Sydney in April by a 16-year-old who was interacting with extremists online. The boy was a part of an online group of fellow extremist youths called Brotherhood, and he used a smiling portrait of Osama bin Laden as his WhatsApp profile picture.
What ASIO fears most is that these dangerous new factors are being turbocharged by the divisions caused in Australia by the conflict in Gaza.
“We’ve been seeing all of the trends that Burgess spoke about in his address for quite some time now, they pre-dated Covid and were certainly accelerated during Covid,” says Lydia Khalil, director of transnational challenges at the Lowy Institute. “The Gaza conflict is similar, it is a contentious societal and political issue contributing to the legitimisation and the normalisation of the use of violence to achieve political ends.”
The Hamas massacre of Israelis on October 7 last year triggered the first ugly manifestation of this in Australia when a flag-burning mob celebrated the Hamas killings and chanted anti-Semitic slogans outside the Sydney Opera House.
Since then there has been a record spike in anti-Semitic attacks across the country, including bashings and verbal abuse of Jews, online harassment, the forced closure of Jewish businesses, the targeting of Jewish performers in the arts and Jewish students on campus during the university encampments.
The pro-Palestinian movement in Australia since October 7 has expressed legitimate concerns about the high civilian death toll during Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza. But the activist rump of this movement has gone much further than legitimate protest and has embraced exactly the sort of “provocative, inflammatory, intolerant, unpeaceful and uncivil” behaviour that Burgess warned of when he raised the terror threat level.
These pro-Palestinian activists have proved to be anti-Israel activists above all by failing to distinguish between Israeli politics and the Australian Jewish community. They repeatedly have encouraged chants advocating the eradication of Israel and the carrying of blatantly anti-Semitic signs and slogans.
The sort of politically motivated violence Burgess has warned about erupted in Melbourne’s Jewish heartland of Caulfield late last year when pro-Palestinian protesters were arrested for charging at Jewish counter-protesters during a provocative rally outside a synagogue.
Shortly afterwards, pro-Palestinian activists confronted Israeli family members who had lost their loved ones in the October 7 massacre, storming into the Melbourne hotel where they were staying and placing dolls covered in fake blood on the floor.
This ugly activism is driven by what intelligence agencies describe as a “self-righteousness” about the pro-Palestinian cause that blinds these protesters to the normal standards of protest behaviour. Hence, we have seen acts such as the bizarre and offensive defacing of Australian war memorials with pro-Palestinian slogans when these memorials have no relevance to the current conflict in the Middle East.
More ominously for ASIO is the movement’s support for the vandalisation and defacing of the electorate offices of more than a dozen federal MPs and ministers, some of whom can no longer work from those taxpayer-funded workplaces.
In June pro-Palestinian activists set fire to the electorate office of Melbourne Jewish MP Josh Burns and painted horns on his image in a poster. ASIO would have noted Burns’s response when he said: “I’m nervous about someone getting hurt or worse. How is this a peaceful act? It didn’t bring about peace in the Middle East. If it did, I would have vandalised my own office.”
The government shares part of the responsibility for the rise of this out-of-control racist activism because from October 7 it has failed to call out anti-Semitism as strongly as it should have, fearing an electoral backlash from Muslim voters in its western Sydney electorates.
But it is the Greens who have done more than any other political group in the country to fuel this increasingly violent protest movement and undermine the country’s social cohesion that Burgess has warned about.
The Greens have refused to call out the excesses of pro-Palestinian activists including the defacing of war memorials, where Greens leader Adam Bandt glibly dismissed the issue, saying the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader “were more agitated about graffiti than they have been about the slaughter of people in Gaza”.
Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi has even refused to say whether the listed terror group Hamas should be dismantled.
Former ASIO chief Dennis Richardson says political leaders need to avoid any actions that can lead others down a pathway to violence. But he also says those most likely to carry out acts of terrorists or politically motivated violence don’t usually take their leads from politicians.
“It’s always a bit difficult in a liberal democracy because part of the liberal democracy is robust public debate, and part of that robust public debate is politicians having a go at one another. But I don’t think it’s appropriate for politicians to be encouraging those who would seek to essentially blockade electoral offices,” Richardson says, without naming the Greens. “That strikes me as being fundamentally anti- democratic.
“And if you’re going to encourage people to do something like that, you do run the risk of perhaps even unintentionally creating a framework in which it’s easier for people to rationalise what other things they may want to do. So you’ve certainly got to watch that.
“But, equally, I doubt whether too many of those who do engage in politically motivated violence get their lead from politicians.”
Richardson says the key question for ASIO is whether the local passions inflamed by the Gaza conflict could spill over into a deadly act.
“I think (Burgess) was in part saying, ‘Look, there are people out here who at the best of times are borderline, and developments such as we see in Gaza can amplify in their own minds and make it more likely that they might do something.”
For example, Richardson says Australia “would be a much better place if no one in the country had any sympathy for a terrorist organisation like Hamas”.
However, he says among those who do have some sympathy for Hamas in Australia, there’s “a whole spectrum of views”.
“These could range from just being sympathetic to Hamas, through to actually being prepared to do an act that might put people’s lives in jeopardy and actually kill people,” he says.
“The great challenge for ASIO and law enforcement is to monitor a whole range of people who exist right along that spectrum and try to identify those who might actually take that fatal step. And that’s a pretty tough challenge for any organisation.”
The Lowy Institute’s Khalil agrees that this new and broader range of potential security threats identified by ASIO makes the agency’s job of protecting Australians more difficult.
“There are manifestations of political violence now in our society, or concerns around them, that go beyond terrorism,” she says. “It’s becoming an increasingly blurry line between what is legitimate in a democratic society and what should be proscribed, and that is one of the things that makes responses a bit more difficult, because it’s not like it was in the past, where you had these discrete organised groups which would try to conduct various plots and attacks. Now it’s very muddy.”
Khalil says there are now numerous triggers for the type of grievance extremism that Burgess refers to.
“A lot of people are frustrated with the way that democracy is working and they’re increasingly believing that it doesn’t meet the needs of the average person, that it’s really focused on elite interests,” she says. Perceptions of growing inequality and cost of living have led to frustration with governments, fuelling anti-authoritarian views and a wariness of institutions.
“I think it’s not just an issue for ASIO, they’re just one part of the broader spectrum of the response,” Khalil says. “This isn’t just a security issue. So while ASIO will deal with the pointy end of it, where people are radicalised to violence based on whatever mix of grievances they have, that is just one end of this issue. The rest of it is really a broader societal issue.”
Burgess is at pains to say this new range of potential threats is “significant but not insurmountable” and that a terror threat level of probable does not mean inevitable.
But his conclusions are a wakeup call to the real-life consequences of the country’s drift towards intolerance, violent political rhetoric and crumbling political and social civility.
“Like you, I still think we live in a paradise and I think we are the lucky country,” he told Sky News. “But this is stretching us and testing us.”
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About 800 University of Sydney students vote to support ‘one Palestinian state’
Nazis
Almost 800 Sydney University students have voted for their student body to support “one Palestinian state” and affirmed “the right of Palestinians to armed resistance” at a rare student general meeting, as the uni seeks police advice on the legality of material used to promote the event.
Students overflowed into four lecture theatres on Wednesday night, voting against an amendment to “condemn Hamas” almost unanimously.
The pro-Palestine Student Representative Council will now “endorse the call for a single, secular democratic state across all of historic Palestine and affirms the right of Palestinians to armed resistance as an occupied people under international law”, after the motion by activist group Students Against War passed at the meeting with only a few votes against it.
Ahead of the SGM, SAW circulated pamphlets on campus with the Hamas triangle symbol on it, and their motion defended the views of a student expelled by Australian National University for saying Hamas deserved “unconditional support”.
Following the meeting, the University said it does “not tolerate any pro-terrorist statements or commentary, including support for Hamas - and any demonstration of support will result in disciplinary action and other possible legal consequences.”
“The University is investigating reports of inappropriate conduct at the meeting, and has sought police advice on the legality of certain material used to promote the event,” a spokesperson said.
The motion by SAW said to “win” the campaign for Palestine at Sydney University, student activists “must commit themselves to building a mass, militant student movement on campus” that “affirms the right of Palestinians to armed resistance, and backs the call for a single, democratic, secular state from the river to the sea”.
After hearing from two affirmative speakers, students elected to go to the vote without further debate due to a lack of time.
A separate motion by pro-Palestine encampment group Students for Palestine USYD repeated demands made throughout the student protests for the university to cut ties with Thales and weapons companies, and Israeli academic institutions, and divest from financial investment in the Jewish state.
An amendment raised to “condemn Hamas” was voted down.
Only two speakers in opposition were given the stage.
“We have just witnessed is this room voting against an amendment condemning a registered terrorist organisation and one of the worst attacks on Jews since the Holocaust,” the first speaker, who did not identify himself, said.
In response, a Students Against War representative in the front rows spat towards the speaker.
A second negative speaker, who spoke from the front of the lecture theatre draped in an Israeli flag was called a “Zionist” and told to leave the stage.
Following the event, organisers led students in a march on vice-chancellor Mark Scott’s office, and could be heard chanting “We don’t want your two states, we want all of ‘48”.
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-CEO Alex Ryvchin told The Australian “this travesty disgraces the university”.
“It raises serious questions about the failure of its administration to stop this open support for terrorism.”
“Jewish students and academics should not be subjected to motions from fellow students effectively supporting the destruction of their national home and calls for Palestinian terrorism which has always targeted both Israel and Jewish targets abroad,” he said.
“The silence of the university leadership is beyond pathetic. It is negligent and a total abrogation of their duties to their staff and students. The fact that the vice-chancellor could not even issue a statement condemning these motions and reassuring the overwhelming majority of students who find this repugnant is astonishing.”
Wentworth MP Allegra Spender said the university administration needed to do more to provide leadership to their students.
“People in our community were horrified by last night’s student motion at Sydney University,” she said.
“Last night’s motion excuses the actions of Hamas and was passed without meaningful debate. No thoughtful person who considers the facts could support such a motion.”
“I urge the university administration to do more to create constructive and respectful conversations on campus. It is their responsibility to provide leadership to their students.”
A University of Sydney spokesperson said the student representative council did not represent majority of the student body.
“Less than one percent of our student population attended the SRC meeting yesterday - student representative and student-led groups are independent of the University and certainly don’t represent our institutional position nor do they represent the majority of our student body,” their spokesperson said.
“Their members are required to abide by our policies and codes of conduct and we don’t hesitate to take action if there has been a breach.”
The Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) wrote to the SRC president again on Thursday “reminding them of their obligations”.
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My main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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11 August, 2024
Doctors are calling for tougher regulation of the chemical BPA amid health harms
They are not looking at what the Florey researchers themselves said. I quote:
“I do want to stress it’s not the cause of autism,”
etc.
Detailed debunking of the Florey-based claims here:
https://pcwatch.blogspot.com/2024/08/bpa-plastic-chemicals-in-womb-have-been.html
The nation’s top doctors’ group has called for an overhaul of plastics regulation in Australia as growing evidence indicates that neuroendocrine-disrupting chemicals found in disposable water bottles, food containers, canned food packaging and cosmetics are linked with the development of autism.
Groundbreaking research published by Melbourne’s Florey Institute this week found children with low levels of a key brain enzyme who were born to mothers with higher levels of plastic chemicals in their wombs were six times more likely to develop autism by the time they were a teenager.
The study is the most extensive undertaken on the connection between prenatal exposure to the plastic chemical bisphenol A and the development of autism in children worldwide, and for the first time established a biological pathway between the substance and autism spectrum disorder.
BPA can disrupt the body’s hormonal balance and spark epigenetic changes that may be associated with a wide range of diseases, including cancer.
The study found that BPA suppresses a brain enzyme called aromatase – particularly important for boys’ development – and is associated with anatomical, neurological and behavioural changes in male mice that may be consistent with autism spectrum disorder.
The Florey study has prompted scrutiny on Australia’s regulation of BPA, which is significantly more lax than tough revised European limits recommended following a scientific review by the European Food Safety Authority that declared BPA “a health concern for consumers across all age groups”.
The EFSA said in February that its review considered “a vast quantity of scientific publications, including over 800 new studies published since January 2013”.
The European regulator slashed the tolerable daily intake of BPA in February this year to 0.2 nanograms per kg of body weight, and in June a European Commission member states expert committee voted in support of a proposal to ban some bisphenols, including BPA, in food contact materials.
The ban would cover plastic and coated packaging and other types of products like food processing equipment. Australia does not have a mandated TDI for BPA or maximum levels in the Food Standards Code.
Australian regulator Food Standards Australia New Zealand says there are no safety concerns regarding BPA at the levels people are exposed to. In 2010, it initiated a voluntary industry code to remove BPA from baby bottles.
The Australian Medical Association along with leading Australian fertility experts and endocrinologists are calling for a review of Australia’s regulation of BPA in the light of the Florey research and the revised position in Europe.
“In Europe, authorities are considering banning BPAs in any surfaces that contact our food – that should shock all of us in Australia,” said AMA president Steve Robson, an obstetrician-gynaecologist and fertility specialist.
“FSANZ needs to have a good hard look at the protections proposed for Europeans. In view of the data it’s time that FSANZ considers stricter regulation to bring us in line with European standards.
“BPAs are so ubiquitous now that it’s difficult for us to find people who haven’t been exposed – that makes studies difficult. But the absence of evidence doesn’t mean there’s an absence of evidence of their effects.”
“BPAs disrupt the healthy function of our hormonal systems and that should be a huge concern. We have lines of evidence that they may reduce our fertility and with one child in every 18 in Australia an IVF baby, we absolutely have to take this very seriously. Links have also been drawn with breast cancer, which so often is hormone-dependent.”
The chair of the Division of Medicine at Austin Health, endocrinologist Jeffrey Zajac, also called for a review of Australia’s regulatory position. “It is clear some chemicals … do affect endocrine function, particularly in regards to fertility,” said Professor Zajac. “The link is difficult to prove, but one potential explanation is these chemicals. If there is evidence a particular level of chemical exposure has been shown rigorously to influence endocrine function, that’s a reason for regulating it.
“If our rules are different from Europe, it’s possible EU rules are something we ought to consider.”
Australia’s food regulator said it established mandated maximum levels for contaminants only when it had been determined there was a potential risk to public health that should be managed by a standard. “Since no public health and safety concerns have been established for Australian consumers, FSANZ has not established an maximum level,” a spokesperson said.
“While FSANZ will continue to monitor the emerging situation with respect to BPA, surveys undertaken in Australia have shown that very few foods contain detectable levels of BPA, and that the levels do not present a human health and safety concern.”
Responding to doctors’ concerns, the regulator noted that EFSA assessment included a significant number of human studies that investigated neurotoxicity and developmental neurotoxicity.
“EFSA concluded that the evidence examining children with exposure during pregnancy or post-natally did not suggest any endpoints related to neurodevelopment as critical for risk assessment,” the FSANZ spokesperson said. “Further where an association was observed it did not occur in more than one study and subsequent research failed to replicate the results.
“FSANZ has not yet had an opportunity to review the Florey paper but will consider the conclusions as part of the overall weight of evidence with respect to neurodevelopment as a critical endpoint for BPA risk assessment. FSANZ will undertake a review if new evidence indicates it is warranted.”
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Award-winning playwright Andrew Bovell calls for rethink on trigger warnings in wake of ‘cannibalism’ claim
Leading playwright Andrew Bovell felt “upset”, “confused” and “physically shocked” when he went to a production of his internationally acclaimed play, When The Rain Stops Falling, and heard a recorded trigger warning state the work portrayed cannibalism.
“I object to my work being depicted as something it isn’t,’’ Bovell said. He added that he found the warning – which revealed “all of the play’s secrets and reveals” just as the show was starting “absurd” and “extreme”.
The Edge of Darkness and Lantana screenwriter joked ruefully: “Maybe they should have issued a trigger warning about the trigger warnings.’’
Yet when the award-winning South Australian writer raised his concerns with the Flinders University Performing Arts Society, which staged his play in July, it “stood by (its) choice to associate the play with cannibalism’’.
The controversy concerns a scene in which a grieving character mixes the dead ashes of her lover into her soup and consumes them. In the foreground, a mother learns about the death of her son.
Bovell said that scene “is a beautiful image and speaks to the poetics of the moment’’ and symbolises the lover’s deep grief.
“All the more worrying, then, that this moment is now described as an act of cannibalism.’’
The Weekend Australian revealed to a startled Bovell that the same cannibalism content warning was used by Brisbane community theatre company Brisbane Arts Theatre, which also staged When The Rain Stops Falling this year.
Brisbane Arts Theatre describes itself as an “iconic, independent theatre company” and its warning about the drama said: “This play contains sensitive and disturbing themes including murder, cannibalism, and child sexual abuse. Viewer discretion is advised.’’
Bovell was told it was likely the Flinders University production copied that content warning, despite the fact that murder and child sex abuse are not directly depicted in the play.
When The Rain Stops Falling, a multi-generational family saga about secrets, betrayal and forgiveness, premiered at the Adelaide Festival in 2008. It toured nationally and to London and New York, where it won five off-Broadway excellence awards and Time magazine named it the best new play of 2010.
Bovell said that despite the claims of the two content warnings, “we don’t see an act of child abuse (in the play). A key character is revealed as being a pedophile. We don’t see any child murdered but there is an insinuation that a child was killed. This (the recorded Flinders University warning) was a premature reveal of a shocking moment and its warnings went on (with) themes of child abandonment and so on … it was so absurd.’’
Bovell stressed he was otherwise happy with the Flinders production and has no interest in pursuing a generational dispute with younger theatre workers.
However, he felt it was time for theatre writers to “push back” against the escalating trigger warning trend in theatre, because such warnings were often inaccurate, contained spoilers and could damage a play’s reputation.
Bovell’s objections come as leading arts figures have spoken out about the escalating trend in Australian and UK theatre. The Weekend Australian recently reported how trigger warnings have been slapped on everything from a fake moth dying on stage to the Nazism theme in the family musical The Sound of Music.
Leading director Neil Armfield said they were a “pet hate’’, while Australian Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett said the growth of such warnings reflected “a lack of mutual respect” between artists and their audiences.
Bovell said he feared such warnings would “infantilise” audiences. He said that in future he may have to “check the trigger warnings before I agree to issuing the rights’’ to theatre companies.
The man who wrote The Secret River stage script was “heartened” by the overwhelmingly supportive response he received to a Facebook post outlining the dispute. On Facebook, actor and writer Noel Hodda said trigger warnings were “anti-theatre” while Rachel Healy, former co-director of the Adelaide Festival, told him: “I would definitely encourage you to push back (against the two content warnings).”
Director Merrilee Mills, who has directed When The Rain Stops Falling, said she was “horrified” by Bovell’s experience, while singer Bernadette Robinson asked: “What’s the point of going to theatre if not to be exhilarated … shocked, challenged? Really, I’m against (trigger warnings).’’
But Brisbane Arts Theatre president Paje Battilana said the drama company puts it content warning on its website and on signs in their venue because “we, like all businesses in our current world climate, do everything we can to ensure the safety of our audiences; this includes mental and emotional safety.”
Asked if the company consulted playwrights about content warnings to ensure they were accurate, Battilana replied: “Unfortunately we rarely have access to playwrights, as plays’ rights are acquired through distributors.’’
Even though The Weekend Australian informed the company about Bovell’s concerns on Thursday, the contentious content warning remained on its website on Friday.
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Leftist racism undimmed
Neil Brown
This is the story of the column I almost wrote, but which was overtaken by events. It all started a few weeks ago with a well-placed leak that the Albanese government was moving on from the disastrous result of its failed referendum on the racist Voice. The Voice was, of course, only Plan A of its triple-headed monster of Voice, Makarrata and Treaty. The entire plan was to elevate one race above all others, denigrate European settlement, vastly expand government spending on bureaucracy, consultants and conferences and give us a dose of enforced wallowing in grief and guilt about being born or having migrated here.
The leak, then, was that the government was going to move on to Plan B: the Makarrata, otherwise known as truth-telling. That should have given us due warning by itself. When governments and their lackies – in the Aboriginal industry and anywhere else – start talking about truth-telling, we know that what they actually mean is lying. As with the eponymous Department of Truth immortalised in George Orwell’s 1984, the plan was to set up another bureaucracy whose only role was to rewrite history, paint a story of false oppression and deny the immense value of settlement that has been given to Australia’s Aboriginals since its foundation.
My response to this proposed twaddle, in the column I was going to write, was to issue a challenge to oppose the Makarrata: to get ready to fight against this unwarranted expansion of the powers of the federal government; get ready to argue against the coming waste of vast sums of money and, above all; to reignite the argument that had been so successful in the anti-Voice campaign, that we simply do not want our public policy based on race, we do not want more power being given to unelected officials and we do not want any more denigration of non-Aboriginal Australians.
But, lo and behold, the leak has miraculously faded away and it is now clear that Albanese has got cold feet about setting up a Makarrata as the next step on from the Voice. How ironic it is that his foray into truth-telling should begin with a lie! His cringe-making speech to the Garma festival tells us that after all the hype, after all the promises to implement the whole Uluru Statement word for word, as he promised on the very night of his election, we are not going to have one Makarrata, or at least not yet, and that what we will have instead is a series of little ones, mini-Makarratas, where there will be lots of coming together, broad concepts and lots of dialogue. Or, as one of his more trenchant Aboriginal critics put it, a ‘vague vibe (and) casual conversations’. The vibe, apparently, is Albanese’s next big thing.
This new proposal is a threat that has to be opposed and defeated. In fact, it is a far more substantial threat than the Voice, as it will be set up simply by government fiat and will not be subject to approval by the people at a referendum, which saved us from the Voice. Moreover, at least with the Makarrata, there was going to be a body that you could identify and where the wild allegations and re-writing of history that would inevitably be made would be open to cross-examination and competing evidence. But the mini-Makarattas will not be subject to any such restraints. They will essentially be private meetings where federal officials will agree to newly funded programs, new powers for so-called representatives of the Aboriginal people and more symbols and ceremonies, if there could possibly be any more than we already have, and where we will continually be reminded that we live under a justly deserved cloud of guilt and shame.
And when you get down to the details that Albanese has condescended to give us, it is even more ludicrous. And closer to being a giant fraud. He says, first, that corporate Australia will have to step up and link arms with the Aboriginal movement. We all know what that means: compulsory and tokenistic appointments of Aboriginal directors and shareholders who will force companies into making decisions that favour only one race.
Next, Aboriginal enhancement will magically be advanced, he claims, by the government’s policies on climate change and the environment, policies that are in reality designed to stop industrial progress and development. First up, you can kiss good-bye to any hope of ever getting Woodside’s Browse gas field up and running.
Thirdly, we are told, the new mini-Makarratas will have to work in with the government’s new Nirvana of ‘Made in Australia’; surely every Australian would want to buy Australian, but what on earth will be the Aboriginal contribution to quantum computers, solar panels and AI and why, like everything that Albanese touches, does it have to be defined by race?
What, then, would be a better policy on Aboriginal affairs than Albanese’s racism? Here are a few policies that are not only based on sound principle, but (Liberal party, take notice!) would be very popular with the electorate:
– a National Declaration that we are one nation, not a collection of rival camps and tribes;
– the sole objective of Aboriginal policy will be better outcomes and results;
– an end to race-based policies and funding;
– no treaties between the nation and its own citizens;
– no more empty gestures like comedic public welcome to country and smoking ceremonies;
– we will celebrate Australia Day on 26 January;
– one Australian national flag, the one we already have;
– the ABC will use the real and official names of cities and regions, not Dreamtime fantasies, as the source of news;
– and the one guiding principle that will influence all government decisions from now on will be to encourage the strength of individual Australians of whatever race or colour, and provide them with real incentives to improve their standard of living. And their happiness.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/brown-study-294/
*************************************************Alice Springs police arrest the whistle-blower
Principal Gavin Morris warned of cops’ inaction, days before his shock arrest
A week before his shock arrest on Thursday for allegedly physically assaulting five young children, Gavin Morris recorded an interview in which he did not hold back.
Filmed on a phone on the grounds of Yipirinya School in Alice Springs, where Dr Morris has been the outspoken principal for the past three years, he told of his fears of an unfolding child protection crisis.
Dr Morris said he believed a man with access to some of the nation’s most vulnerable children needed to be thoroughly investigated over a raft of serious allegations raised by students and staff.
He had made a report to police about the man, an entrenched community figure, involving a number of children, and he and other staff and students were interviewed by detectives and gave statements.
“What we saw around that cluster of disclosures last year was a real spike in youth crime and anti-social behaviour targeted at our school,” Dr Morris said.
“The students involved, who stole buses, who drove around the community, put themselves at harm and the broader community in danger, they were trying to tell us something. They were saying ‘we want you to listen, you aren’t taking action, we shared our stories, we trusted you with our most vulnerable stories’.”
In the interview with The Weekend Australian on August 1, Dr Morris was frustrated by what he saw as a lack of action by Northern Territory police and the Territory Families department about the serious allegations.
?With inquiries still ongoing into the concerns, Dr Morris’s comments had not been aired when he was hauled into the Alice Springs police watch-house and charged.
NT education minister Mark Monaghan said Friday he was advised Dr Morris had been stood down on full pay by the school council.
Dr Morris’s registration as a teacher “won’t be a question at the moment … We will wait for any … processes to take place before we take any action, if we do indeed take any action.”
The former NRL referee with a PhD in Aboriginal trauma and bachelor’s and master’s degrees in education has rarely been far from either the media spotlight or a fight in his time at Yipirinya.
His series of running battles have generally centred on dire living conditions in Aboriginal town camps in Alice Springs, which he says is a central cause of a crime wave that has led to two recent government-imposed curfews.
It has earned Dr Morris, 46, both powerful friends and powerful enemies, some of the latter suspecting him of political ambitions.
But in no battle have the stakes been personally higher than the one he now faces for his livelihood, career and reputation.
Allegations against Dr Morris are understood to revolve around incidents of vandalism or trouble at the school, where the 375 enrolled students are taught in English and four Aboriginal languages.
One incident allegedly involves Dr Morris restraining children after windows had been kicked in and smashed, and another is alleged to have happened after paint was smeared throughout a room. Police said they had started looking at him only in late June.
The arrest of the principal leaked out when he was still in the watch-house waiting to be charged.
It was followed by two media releases from police and led to a storm of publicity, including commentary from NT Chief Minister Eva Lawler, two weeks out from a Territory election that is expected to be dominated by crime.
In Alice Springs, break-ins, hold-ups, car thefts, armed robberies and assaults involving children as young as eight are being documented daily on mainstream and social media, and some residents are in fear in their own homes, workplaces and public spaces.
Police initially announced “six victims” of Dr Morris were aged between eight and 13 “at the time of the assaults”, which were alleged to have occurred on “multiple separate occasions in 2023”. A police statement later reduced that to five counts of aggravated assault.
Dr Morris serves on the Alice Springs Town Council and took leave from his job as a lecturer at Charles Darwin University to lead Yipirinya. He spent hours in a cell waiting to be processed before being bailed.
Around the same time, police in Alice Springs had moved against another man in the community, laying a charge that flew entirely under the radar.
On Wednesday, July 31, this second, longstanding member of the community was served by police with a notice to appear in court on a charge of aggravated assault against a 13-year-old girl.
The 73-year-old has been accused of grabbing the girl by the arm and trying to drag her out of a car after a Sunday church service at the Aboriginal town camp known as Old Timers in February last year. He was not arrested or taken to the watch-house, and there were no public police statements, political commentary or any media coverage, unlike in Dr Morris’s case.
The Weekend Australian discovered the charge only after coincidentally approaching the ageing community figure at his home later that day to ask him about concerns in Alice Springs over his interactions with children.
Before being told what the concerns involved, the man replied: “We take them out for bush trips. I never molest them. I never touch them.”
Asked if someone had raised allegations of that type with him before, he said: “No. I love the kids. It’d be false accusations.”
He then volunteered that two police officers arrived at his home that morning and gave him a notice to appear in court in September for aggravated assault.
The officers “didn’t think it was very serious at all” and he was confident nothing would come of the charge.
He had “got angry” with a young girl who took other children away from town camp church services, he said. “I don’t think I ever touched her or anything. They’ve made a false accusation. She’s got some mental things. She’s caused trouble everywhere too,” he said.
Yipirinya School staff are among those who have been raising questions and concerns about the man, who has lived in Alice Springs and spent time in town camps for the past 40 years.
Dr Morris was talking to The Weekend Australian about these issues before his own arrest.
The principal said that in August last year, after a series of alleged disclosures at the school about the community figure, he spoke to staff and then phoned the acting commander of the Northern Territory police southern region, James Gray-Spence.
“He (Spence) was in the school 10 minutes later, and that night I had two detectives at my place interviewing me for a couple of hours,” Dr Morris said.
“They’ve subsequently come and interviewed staff and students. But nothing’s happened. Our community is crying out to find out what’s going on.”
The Weekend Australian put it to the community figure who Dr Morris had been talking about, that among other things he had been accused of hitting children.
“I’ve never done that. What I’ve done is, when they muck up in (his vehicle) I’ve got a wooden spoon, just a tap on the hand. Because they’re swearing or fighting. Once they see me waving it, they straighten up. Or if they are real naughty, they might hide under the seat,” the man said.
The man has a current Ochre Card from the government that clears him to work with children, he said. He denied he was ever alone with children, saying he always had another adult present.
‘I’m looking after the kids for them. I’m feeding them. He’s a neglected kid.’ – Accused community figure
?However, only a day earlier, two Alice Springs residents say they saw him driving around in his vehicle with a young boy who should have been at school, with no other passengers.
Staunchly supported by some in the community including Aboriginal families he helps, the man said the allegations were “the devil’s work” and that he was not guilty of anything.
For an unknown reason he was being slandered and targeted as “payback”, he said. His cars had been stolen and written off, his home vandalised and two weeks ago a young boy he knew turned up at his home with a wheel spanner and “tried to kill me”.
He confirmed he had many interactions with children, from taking them swimming at the town pool to long drives to the isolated Ilparpa Claypans and Simpsons Gap. Regularly taking kids to McDonald’s and Hungry Jack’s, purchasing frozen drinks for children had become “one of my biggest expenses”, he said.
“Every Saturday we go out somewhere. I’m looking after the kids for them. I’m feeding them.
“The reason I take kids out is because I feel for them. They’re bored at the camps and hungry. I’ll get (a mother) and we’ll take them out and give them a treat.”
The man could not think of a reason the children he said he was helping were targeting him with home invasions and robberies.
“I know who’s done it. They have nothing against me, it’s just the stuff that they do,” he said.
When pressed to answer why he insisted he was never alone with children, he became angry, saying: “Get out.”
Then he calmed down and decided to continue to talk.
“If I have kids, it’s for their welfare, to feed them, look after them,” he said. “They’re making it up to condemn me, to slander me, because I’m a man of god, standing up for truth. The devil’s working, the enemy’s working.”
Residents say that over the past two years they have made a series of reports to the Northern Territory government about the community figure.
In the Territory, it’s legally required to report incidents of suspected child harm or abuse.
But the efforts of authorities so far have not been able to assuage doubts in the community that he is fit to have access to highly at-risk children.
“My experience has been that you make a phone call to Territory Families, through mandatory reporting, and you don’t see immediate action,” Dr Morris said.
“You certainly don’t get any follow-up in terms of whether something has been followed through or not.
“A lot of my staff come back to me dismayed. In this instance, for example, there were many comments made from the Territory Families representative that this story is well known.”
At about the same time that police were called to Yipirinya about the community figure last year, students broke into their school three times.
One group entered the office block, smashed open a key safe, randomly vandalised equipment and stole a vehicle.
In a separate incident last August, five children aged 10 to 12 ploughed a stolen car into a tree at 80km/h, none of them wearing seatbelts. Local residents say it was the community figure’s car.
The children were wheeled into hospital in neck braces and with green whistles for pain relief. Medical staff said they were lucky to be alive, Dr Morris said.
“It’s not normal to have 10, 12, 14-year-olds breaking into businesses and homes because they’re trying to get a message across,” the principal said before his arrest.
“I wouldn’t put my name and my face on the line here, if I wasn’t 100 per cent convinced that there’s a very serious story here that needs to be, firstly, uncovered and secondly, actioned upon.”
In a statement on Friday, the school council said it was “deeply concerned” by the serious allegations levelled against Morris and that “the safety, wellbeing and education of our students is our highest priority”.
Both the principal and the separate community figure now face battles to clear their names.
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8 August, 2024
Warning on attempts to reduce the level of proof required for a rape conviction
Australia’s peak legal body is challenging a movement to reshape the administration of rape trials in the wake of #MeToo, declaring that the presumption of innocence and the rule of law must remain sacrosanct, as the country’s law reform commission looks to overhaul legal frameworks governing sexual violence.
In extraordinary comments amid a Labor-led push to improve outcomes for rape victims, the Law Council of Australia says that, while some fundamental principles underpinning the criminal justice system may have “some impact” on complainants, any reforms must protect critical rights of defendants.
The Law Council, in its submission to the Australian Law Reform Commission inquiry into justice responses to sexual violence, proposed reforms including better funding community legal services and implementing “early intervention strategies and services” including consent education.
“All law reform proposals must be carefully considered and critically evaluated to ensure they do not undermine key safeguards of the criminal justice system,” the submission reads.
“The presumption of innocence, the right to silence, the right to a trial by jury, the burden of proof resting on the prosecution, and the criminal standard of proof (beyond reasonable doubt) are all essential to the integrity of the criminal justice system.”
Other submissions tendered to the inquiry, predominantly written by sexual assault advocacies, have called for a “civil” approach to rape cases – with a different standard of proof – to be introduced, and a crackdown on “inappropriate” defence questioning.
There have also been suggestions that “bad character” evidence relating to a defendant, such as the fact that they are a heavy drinker or use illicit drugs, could be admitted, and an accused person’s right to silence be “reviewed”.
Some members of a “lived-experience” sexual assault advisory group set up by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to speak directly with the commissioners of the inquiry have also called for prerecorded evidence for complainants to be allowed, and for the introduction of specialist sexual assault courts.
The Law Council – representing all state and territory bar associations and law societies, and advocating for more than 100,000 lawyers across the country – said that, while protecting the presumption of innocence might “have some impact upon complainants”, it is “a cornerstone of our criminal justice system” that should not be diminished.
“The criminal justice system was developed at a time when the impacts of trauma upon complainants and victim-survivors were not well understood,” the submission reads. “Improved understandings of the impacts of trauma require that trauma-informed practices and principles are embedded within the court system, legal profession and police practices.
“The criminal justice system has a responsibility to protect the fundamental rights of an accused person. There is also a responsibility – however complex this may be – for justice systems in each Australian jurisdiction to better support complainants and victim-survivors whilst upholding fundamental criminal justice principles to ensure a fair trial.”
Two long-term judges presiding over the review – Australian Law Reform Commission president Mordecai Bromberg and part-time commissioner Marcia Neave – said in June the inquiry would investigate the “non-engagement” of rape victims with criminal solutions, and examine whether alternative civil remedies could bring them justice.
The Law Council said it supported “strengthened access to alternative pathways to the criminal justice system including restorative justice and civil compensation”.
In a statement accompanying the submission, it affirmed the “importance of adopting an approach that centres on the experience of complainants and victim-survivors”.
It also said it held “grave concerns” about “the persistent inadequate funding” of legal aid services, and supported “the operation of support services and other initiatives that assist victims navigate and understand the criminal justice system and mitigate re-traumatisation”.
“We consider that victim-survivors and complainants are more likely to be re-traumatised and to experience adverse impacts resulting from unmet legal needs in the context of a chronically underfunded justice system,” the submission reads.
One of the Law Council’s core focuses is on “early-intervention strategies and services” including consent education, family support services, behavioural-change programs for offenders, and “fully resourced representation for complainants and victim-survivors at certain stages of the criminal process”.
In regards to “inappropriate” defence questioning, the Law Council “generally considers existing safeguards, for example, rules with respect to disallowable questions, to be adequate”.
“However there is scope to continually improve the application of such rules,” the submission reads.
“The Law Council notes that a primary function of the trial judge is to control questioning that could jeopardise a fair trial and that their judicial authority, independent of objections raised by counsel, requires them to ensure that counsel observe accepted standards in the manner in which evidence is elicited.”
The Law Council said it did not support prerecorded evidence for adult sexual-assault complainants becoming the norm, saying it could cause delays and be ineffective. However, it acknowledged that prerecording evidence could “reduce the re-traumatisation of vulnerable persons” by ensuring they do not have to give evidence multiple times.
The Law Council does not support the introduction of specialist sexual assault courts, saying it could “exacerbate existing disparities” for people who live outside metropolitan areas, and could “create significant risks of ‘burnout’ and trauma for staff consistently working in such courts”.
“Instead, we support greater focus on raising standards of trauma-informed and culturally safe practices across all criminal courts,” the submission reads.
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Big coal miner retreating from "Green" policies
Glencore chief executive Gary Nagle will test the ESG purists as he reverses plans to jettison coal and instead focus on harvesting the rivers of cash it generates.
Some of Australia’s biggest investors, including super funds will be quietly cheering him on.
For now Glencore’s own investors are happy to let yield win out over green investing, but that also marks a decisive shift in how big money is approaching ESG.
Big investors including Australian super funds have shown they have a higher threshold for energy pragmatism over green investing than their European counterparts.
Through its history as a commodities trader dating back to pugnacious long-time boss Ivan Glasenberg, Glencore, the world’s biggest thermal coal miner, has long resisted pressure to shun coal and was a reluctant mover on ESG conventions.
Despite taking the green hits, Glencore stuck with it and now the investors are moving in Glencore’s favour. Nagle has broken ranks with the mining pack on coal and in doing so has given his investors cover.
It’s been a twisted path for Glencore to get to this position.
Last year’s $US7bn ($10.7bn) buyout of Elk Valley Resources from Canada’s Teck was pitched to help the Anglo-Swiss Glencore bulk up on steelmaking coal to give its existing operations scale and more investor appeal to be spun out.
However, Nagle had a change of heart after citing overwhelming feedback from Glencore’s own shareholders that “supported the retention” of the thermal and met coal businesses. Shortly after the November deal he started getting approaches from big shareholders, but it was Australian activist investor Tribeca that led the charge urging Glencore to stick with coal.
Tribeca also pushed for Glencore to move its primary listing from London to the ASX where super investors were prepared to run a wider lens over coal’s role through the energy transition.
Think of the model of AGL or Origin Energy, where big super has been prepared to back the profits of today’s dirty coal-fired power plants in order to harvest the cash to fund the transition to a renewable energy future.
In AGL’s case, the giant Loy Yang brown coal plant will stay open for another decade.
Last year Macquarie Group made more profit from oil and gas trading and storage than it did green investing, yet it kept pushing record highs.
Glencore says keeping the coal operations “should enhance Glencore’s cash-generating capacity” to fund opportunities to buy greener friendly metals such as copper.
The coal operations where prices have remained elevated will also “accelerate and optimise” the return of excess cash back to shareholders.
So too the long-mooted coal exit was inconsistent with ESG principals, Glencore added, given its stated plan to run down its thermal coal mines over their life. This policy replaced a Glasenberg-era climate pledge of keeping an annual cap on coal production at 150 million tonnes annually.
Glencore’s move will certainly clear the path to put investor pressure on other diversified miners looking to exit coal. BHP has already sold off its lower-quality met coal operations to Whitehaven. Its Mt Arthur thermal coal mine is slated to close by 2030.
Elsewhere, Anglo American is in the process of selling its met coal operations for a mooted $5bn, which includes Australian mines. BHP’s since-shelved takeover of Anglo spurred on the exit. Other names such as Rio Tinto and South 32 have already exited coal.
To show the mood is changing among investors, even New York-based BlackRock, the world’s biggest asset manager that has been at the front of ESG push, is quietly curbing some of its green animal spirits.
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink’s full-throated approach to ESG investing in the past has seen him subject of political attacks which was impacting the $US10 trillion ($15 trillion) investor as some US state governments cut pension plan mandates.
This year has been one of transition for Fink. He has pulled back from ESG advocacy to acknowledge there is a balance that needs to be struck between energy transition and the need for energy security, particularly in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Where gas was once shunned, it is now a key plank in the transition, Fink says.
Glencore is now adding coal to the mix.
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Government retreats on solar panels as China fires up
It took less than six months for the Albanese government and some of Australia’s biggest climate investors to change their mind on a solar panel manufacturing plunge.
The government and the project backers discovered the enormous costs in challenging China in the areas where it dominates the market and slashes prices to keep others out.
Given the base facts were known six months ago, the speed of the reversal of the decision to make solar panels in Australia has shocked those who believed that the “Made in Australia” plan can be based around climate investing.
Already, BHP has mothballed its nickel plans because the nickel market is being flooded with low cost Indonesian nickel funded by the Chinese.
China has vowed to further increase investment in manufacturing products such solar panels batteries and electric cars, despite the losses that are being incurred because of the low prices. If Donald Trump is elected president, he will take on China and use tariffs to thwart the Chinese. What Kamala Harris will do if she wins is not clear.
I will describe below China is also set to make the “Made in Australia” investment in rare earths costly and has announced a big rise in Chinese funded rare earths production.
“Made in Australia” is also in trouble on another front.
As I set out on Wednesday, the nation is set for a substantial fall in Australian manufacturing as the Victorian government hits the manufacturing base by starving the manufacturers of assured gas (by stopping gas developments) and imposing high taxes. The Commonwealth also lands blows on manufacturing via its industrial relations legislation.
The Victoria, Premier Jacinta Allan, has been fully briefed on the impacts of what she is doing but has other priorities.
The Albanese government decision to direct its controversial $1bn Solar Sunshot incentives program towards taking solar panel technology group SunDrive into panel manufacturing was high risk given what is happening in the global solar market.
The announcement was made by Anthony Albanese, Industry Minister Ed Husic and Energy Minister Chris Bowen, but it was Bowen who set out the strategy most clearly.
“A lot of people ask me why don’t we make more solar panels in Australia, and we should”, he said.
“And so Solar Sunshot will support making solar panels and solar cells in Australia and as a result a great Australian company called Sun Drive, that makes the most efficient solar panels in the world, have now said they will move to open a new factory on the site of the old Liddell power station in Muswellbrook and that new factory will employ more people than used to be employed at the Liddell power station.
“So there is a lot more to do, but we are going to bring back solar panel manufacturing to Australia and Solar Sunshot is going to the policy that gets it done for us”, Bowen declared.
The announcement surprised the solar panel world because of the strong group backing SunDrive, including Atlassian founder Mike Cannon-Brookes, venture capital groups, Blackbird and Main Sequence, Canva founder Cameron Adams, former PM Malcolm Turnbull, and Tesla chair Robyn Denholm, plus the federal government-backed Australian Renewable Energy Agency and Clean Energy Finance Corporation,
SunDrive this week announced a “strategic review” to focus on developing technology to transform panel manufacture rather than producing the physical panels.
Significant retrenchments took place as a result of the reversal. It was a very sensible decision, and I suspect the wiser heads among the shareholders prevailed.
In rare earths, China is planning to maintain its domination of supply and treatment by expanding in Africa in association with Australia’s Peak Rare Earths company.
China’s Shenghe group has acquired half of Peak Rare Earth’s $US300m Tanzania project, and China effectively finances the project. The Chinese cover most or all of Peak Rare Earth’s capital outlays.
This year, the Chinese have stepped up production of rare earths and the prices have plunged, sending many rare earth company shares lower and making it difficult for new developments – exactly what the Chinese are aiming to do.
The Australian government’s investment in rare earths will face similar hazards to those it encountered in solar panels, but in rare earths we are clearly supported by the US, which is determined to be independent of the Chinese.
The economics of each project only make sense if the United States and/or other buyers are prepared to pay above the market for the materials they require to ensure independence from the Chinese.
In just the same way, the solar panel manufacturing plunge only made sense if buyers were prepared to pay above the market for the SunDrive solar panel technology that was unique and produced better panels than those made by the Chinese.
But once again, buyers must be prepared to pay for the better technology to justify the manufacturing investment.
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Fraud and sex slaves: blitz on dodgy training colleges
Dozens of dodgy training providers have been shut down over ties to organised crime, fraud and bogus qualifications, as cash-starved universities threaten to sack staff.
Home Affairs officials have revealed that sex trafficking and slavery among international students – along with housing shortages – are the main reasons the Albanese government is rationing enrolments of international students in Australian universities, training colleges and schools.
The admission came as the Australian Skills Quality Authority told The Australian it was “actively managing more than 170 serious matters’’ involving 140 private non-university training providers.
An ASQA spokeswoman said 33 providers had been struck off the Commonwealth Register of Institutions and Courses for Overseas Students during 2023-24.
ASQA is still investigating another 140 colleges, including 60 per cent that deliver training to international students. “More than 70 per cent relate to alleged fraud, including bogus qualifications, cash for (qualifications), fabrication of assessments and evidence, ghost colleges, funding fraud and visa/migration risks,’’ she said.
Half ASQA’s investigations relate to the “disruption of criminal networks’’.
These include Operation Inglenook – a Border Force initiative to rescue students brought to Australia as sex slaves – and Fraud Fusion, a multi-agency taskforce to stop National Disability Insurance Scheme frauds.
ASQA’s crackdown coincides with federal government plans to ration the number of international students who enrol in individual universities and training colleges.
University vice-chancellors on Tuesday demanded that federal Education Minister Jason Clare back down on plans to slash foreign student numbers by January 1. “They are draconian, interventionist and amount to economic vandalism on the day when we’ve seen Wall Street suffer its worst result in two years, creating massive global economic uncertainty,’’ Group of
Group of Eight Chief Executive Vicki Thomson speaking at The Australian’s Strategic Forum. Picture: Nikki Short
Group of Eight Chief Executive Vicki Thomson speaking at The Australian’s Strategic Forum. Picture: Nikki Short
Eight chief executive Vicki Thomson told a Senate inquiry into the draft legislation on Tuesday.
“Let’s be clear, the archetype of shonks and crooks is not representative of the university sector, and certainly not the Group of Eight.’’
Ms Thomson said universities supported the government’s plan to crack down on compliance in the higher education sector but not to cap the number of international students.
Mr Clare said the government’s reforms would “ensure quality and integrity’’ in international education.
“Once the legislation passes, the intention is to set limits for every university, higher education and vocational education provider that educates an international student,’’ he said.
Universities Australia chief executive Luke Sheehy told the inquiry that 14,000 university jobs were at risk as a result of a 23 per cent drop in visas granted to fee-paying international students over the past year.
He said the reduction of 60,000 students due to start their studies next year “would represent a $4.3bn hit to the economy and could cost the university sector alone over 14,000 jobs’’.
The Home Affairs Department’s group manager of immigration policy, Tara Cavanagh, told the Senate hearing that two independent reviews had revealed exploitation of international students living in Australia.
She said there was evidence of “poor quality education products, false promises of pathways to permanent residence, sex trafficking, bonded labour and slavery-like conditions’’.
“Such activity and funding is supporting networks of criminal activity inside and outside of Australia,’’ she said.
“(The) reviews have shown there are large numbers of education agents and providers acting in collusion to lure young people to Australia with the promise of full-time work and not study.
“Those students have been found to have been enrolled in what are essentially ghost colleges.’’
Ms Cavanagh said Home Affairs had found unscrupulous training providers poaching legitimate students from universities.
“An (immigration) agent from another provider swoops on them, convinces them to change into a lower level course, channels them into full time work, puts in the system that the student is studying but in reality they’re enrolled in a ghost college and working often for very low wages,’’ she said.
The government’s legislation responds to growing public concern that soaring numbers of international students are pushing up rents in a cost of living crunch.
Immigration data shows that 780,104 international students are living in Australia – a 21 per cent surge in just 12 months, and 16 per cent more than pre-pandemic numbers.
The housing shortage is so severe that the University of Sydney is now appealing to its alumni to rent out their spare bedrooms to students struggling to pay commercial rents.
Alumni will be able to charge students $290 per week, without meals, or $360 a week for homestays including meals. Hosts will have to undergo criminal background checks and home inspections.
Chief University Infrastructure Officer Greg Robinson said the homestays could be a “rich cultural exchange of students and hosts’’.
“It’s essential our students can access safe and affordable housing,’’ he said.
The university announced its billeting program after it was exposed by National Union of Students national president Ngaire Bogemann during the Senate hearing in Canberra on Tuesday.
Ms Bogemman had described the rent-a-room scheme as a “horror story’’.
“At the University of Sydney, alumni have been asked to provide student accommodation in their own homes because there’s a lack of available beds close to campus,’’ she said.
“That is quite alarming and not something students should be pushed into.’’
National Tertiary Education Union public policy director Dr Terri MacDonald told the hearing that “bad actors’’ are cashing in on foreign students.
“International students are our second-largest group of migrant workers,’’ she said.
“They’re also most exposed to trafficking, wage theft and labour exploitation. With these factors in mind, many of the recent changes the government has made to international education are sensible and supported by the NTU
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7 August, 2024
Cuts backs at Victorian universities, Labor’s CFMEU links and poor energy policy to hit economy
The state government mismanagement of Victoria has been a national joke for some years, particularly in Canberra.
A bad situation in our second-largest state by population now looks set to become much worse and will seriously impact the national economy. If it develops as expected, it will make the Reserve Bank’s task of guiding the economy extremely difficult because a major part of Australia will be different to the rest.
The first of the ‘killer blows’ to hit the state is industrial gas rationing which will be followed by much higher power prices, and is driven solely by Victorian government incompetence. But, the second – the smashing of its tertiary education industry which could turn the greater Melbourne CBD into a ghetto-like ‘no-go’ area – has being devised and will be implemented mainly by the Albanese government.
To its great credit the local press, including The Age and Herald Sun, have done a wonderful job exposing the links between organised crime, the CFMEU and the funding of the state ALP but have yet to alert the state of the two looming ‘killer blows’ and correctly allocating the blame.
The impact of the two blows will be made doubly serious by Victoria’s rampant and reckless borrowing, which has left the state in a situation where it is in desperate need of strong revenue.
The ‘killer blows’ could see many high taxpayers and enterprises leave the state, reducing the revenue base.
Victoria cannot afford to seriously shrink its natural gas-using industries or its extensive university structures. Yet, both are set to be crippled.
Victoria has up to 10,000 businesses which depend on gas, and they add almost $10bn to the local community, contributing more than $3bn in state revenue.
Most of those businesses face the high likelihood of periodic gas rationing next year because the burden of gas shortages will be borne by business (and their employees) and not consumers.
Alarmed by the alerts from the national energy regulators, the Victorian industry bodies asked 500 Victorian businesses which depend on gas for fuel what they would do if they were subject to gas rationing. One in five enterprises said they would go offshore or close permanently.
A big majority of the rest said they would slash their operations and their work force.
The state cannot afford the revenue reduction, which will be made worse by the unsustainable payroll and property taxes, which have been imposed to cover the existing revenue shortfalls.
On payroll tax, the government announced the tax-free threshold would be increased from $700,000 to $900,000. But, it did not highlight the fact the threshold would diminish once payrolls passed $3m.
So, for a business employing 50 staff with a payroll of around $4.8m the tax bill goes up by $30,000. It’s not sustainable.
The Australian government now knows Victoria not only has the immense gas reserves I have been highlighting for years, but there are additional onshore reserves just as big.
The government had plenty of warning gas supply cuts were inevitable, but energy and resources minister Lily D’Ambrosio has constantly blocked development of Victoria’s immense reserves and appears to rank the state’s financial and employment issues a distant second to other agendas.
Premier Jacinta Allan has been fully briefed on the looming energy crisis and its impact on the state, but is not strong enough to overshadow the immense ALP power of D’Ambrosio.
Treasurer Tim Pallas has been desperately trying to take advantage of the Japanese offer to process Victorian brown coal and export it in briquette form. But, the power of D’Ambrosio is again too great.
Victoria is now relying on onshore wind generation to reduce dependence on coal and gas for power generation.
But, as often happens, in recent times the wind has not been blowing, causing a massive increase in gas consumption for power generation.
So far this year, the state has used 67 per cent more gas than the energy regulator had forecast for the whole of 2024.
The reserves held for demand fluctuations are down to 10 days worth.
The ageing brown coal generators are being forced to produce flat-out, with Victoria’s emission rate now way beyond anything anyone forecast.
D’Ambrosio has responded with tenders to establish wind generators in the Bass Strait, which will be incredibly expensive and saddle the state with much higher power prices for a generation or two.
If the energy minister was given another portfolio and Victoria immediately started to work on its gas reserves, it would take two more years to get its gas to market.
Immense gas reserves are being developed in the Northern Territory and the pipelines are being adjusted and expanded to take the gas south, but, by the time the gas reaches Victoria it will be too late and naturally will be much more expensive.
It would seem the premier cannot politically take action to replace D’Ambrosio until the crisis has actually taken place.
When it comes to the education ‘killer blow’, big parts of the greater Melbourne CBD revolve around the University of Melbourne and RMIT.
Both are set to be forced by the Albanese government to slash their numbers of overseas students, which are essential to their current financial viability.
As I pointed out last month this will impact medical research, but the impact on the Melbourne CBD will be even greater because in addition to the top universities, the institutions providing lesser qualifications are also being slashed by the federal government.
Melbourne has one of Australia’s best student accommodation networks. It has been specifically designed for the sector and injects vibrancy into the CBD.
The forced tertiary education slashing will require substantial staff retrenchments and leave vast areas of student accommodation empty and/or replaced by social housing not necessarily compatible with student accommodation.
In many cities overseas when such a trauma has taken place ‘no-go’ areas develop which, if it comes to pass in the Melbourne CBD, could conceivably threaten the existence of both universities.
Combine this with the union-dominated Victorian government being prepared to accept much lower productivity via working from home freedom, the CBD of Melbourne is in danger of being greatly challenged as a safe venue for arts and dining.
Victorians have only themselves to blame for electing the now-retired Daniel Andrews as premier for a third term, but the potential destruction of Melbourne’s CBD partly rests on Anthony Albanese.
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Sacking Officeworks employee will achieve nothing
Sacking the Officeworks employee at the centre of last week's brouhaha would turn her into a poster child for the anti-Semitic left, writes Janet Albrechtsen:
If Officeworks sacked the young woman at the centre of last week’s storm for refusing to serve a Jewish man, that might satisfy some people – particularly the noisy ones on social media.
A dismissal could demonstrate a serious consequence for an egregiously offensive action.
But it will, most definitely, also turn her into a martyr, a poster child for the anti-Semitic left. So, let’s pause and think.
If anyone thinks sacking this employee will settle this issue, they haven’t been paying attention to what has been going on in schools and homes, universities and workplaces, and courtrooms too.
Caught on camera, the young woman’s language is a clue. The staff member, in her early 20s, can be heard telling the Jewish customer who wants to laminate a page of The Australian Jewish News featuring his trip to Israel, that she is pro-Palestinian and “I’m not comfortable doing that”. She says it’s company policy that she doesn’t have to do a job that makes her uncomfortable.
There is an opportunity here to consider something fundamental: how does a woman in her early 20s come to think that because she feels “uncomfortable” she has a right to refuse service to a Jew? Answering that question is much harder than issuing a dismissal notice.
Harder because blame extends well beyond this deluded young woman. It reaches into management ranks of Officeworks, into the boardroom of its owner, Wesfarmers – and into every company where workplace codes routinely use touchy-feely language that may lead an employee, especially a young one, to imagine that if something, or someone, makes them feel uncomfortable they can object.
Officeworks’ Print and Copy Terms and Conditions state that a customer must not provide material to an employee that “is unlawful, threatening, abusive, defamatory, invasive of privacy, vulgar, obscene, profane or which may harass or cause distress or inconvenience to, or incite hatred of, any person”.
Officeworks employs thousands of young people. How do they determine what is “threatening, abusive, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, profane”?
Why was this young woman empowered to decide what material might “harass, cause distress or inconvenience to, or incite hatred” to “any person”?
This is not to defend this young woman – refusing to serve this Jewish customer was abhorrent. But let’s not forget that Officeworks has a policy that this woman believes empowers her to act in this abhorrent manner.
It’s a big enough ask expecting young employees to fairly determine what is incitement to violence when courts have offered no clue because prosecutors are loath to use the existing provisions that ban such actions.
At the other end of the spectrum, what are inexperienced employees to make of the legal free-for-all when it comes to subjective feelings such as “causing distress or inconvenience”?
Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi is suing Pauline Hanson under section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act claiming Hanson offended her. Faruqi has threatened action against this newspaper’s Johannes Leak, too, again claiming she was offended by a cartoon. Jewish groups are considering using 18C to prosecute words that they say offend and insult them.
Why are we outraged that a member of a generation raised in the shadow of the legal system that put a person’s feelings at the centre of laws to punish people for causing offence might think that their feelings trump all too?
We could have altered this offence trajectory. Instead, moves in 2017 to rein in the “offence and insult” part of section 18C went nowhere. Liberal MP Julian Leeser – who in recent days called for Officeworks’ chief executive to “hang his head in shame” – celebrated when feelings remained central to 18C. So did Jewish groups.
Politicians, poorly named human rights activists and Jewish groups still insist that we keep feelings at the centre of laws that can be used to punish people for causing offence. The young woman at the centre of the Officeworks brouhaha has simply moved the feelings bar a tad further down the line from actions that “offend” to those that make her “uncomfortable”. And why not, given that Officeworks policies do it too?
As a society, we can hardly pretend we didn’t see this coming. We have spent the past few decades turning a young generation into a fragile one. Social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and lawyer Greg Lukianoff wrote about this 10 years ago. Their essay in The Atlantic, The Coddling of the American Mind, laid out what was happening on American campuses. It’s little different in Australia.
Haidt and Lukianoff wrote about the frailty of university students raised by over-protective parents, where the “flight to safety” happened at school too when playgrounds became risk-free. These “social-media natives” cocooned in silos might be different, the authors said, “in how they go about sharing their moral judgments and supporting one another in moral campaigns and conflicts”. They need only look around to see a legal system where being offended provides an entry into a courtroom to make someone pay for hurting their feelings.
In September 2015, Haidt and Lukianoff warned that “attempts to shield students from words, ideas and people that might cause them emotional discomfort are bad for students”. They warned that it would be bad for workplaces, too, when students stepped into the real world, inevitably confronting what they were shielded from on campus.
It would be bad for democracy, too, the authors predicted with laser-sharp accuracy. “When the ideas, values, and speech of the other side are seen not just as wrong but as wilfully aggressive toward innocent victims, it is hard to imagine the kind of mutual respect, negotiation, and compromise that are needed to make politics a positive-sum game.”
Ten years on, we can remove “campus”, “college” and “university”, and “students” from The Coddling of the American Mind thesis and insert “workplace” and “employees”. We have reaped as we have sown.
To turn this around, Haidt and Lukianoff said it was critical to “minimise distorted thinking” so that those who felt discomfort “see the world more accurately”.
Maybe, then, sacking this Officeworks staffer is too easy – and also misguided. Maybe visiting the Melbourne Holocaust Museum is a better way to challenge this young woman’s distorted thinking. Her scheduled visit there (agreed after an earlier complaint) took place after the one caught on camera. If learning some history, gaining an insight into a deeply complex problem made her feel uncomfortable, all the better.
It’s certainly preferable to turning her into an unemployed martyr for the left.
This doesn’t get Officeworks or Wesfarmers off the hook. They need a new set of terms and conditions to make clear that just because something might cause distress – or discomfort, as this woman called it – that is no reason to refuse service.
Parents, politicians and universities have some important work to do, too. Complicit in raising a coddled generation, a good place to start is reminding kids, students, and adults that, as Haidt and Lukianoff wrote, “subjective feelings are not always a trustworthy guide; unrestrained, they can cause people to lash out at others who have done nothing wrong”.
Oh, and we should repeal section 18C.
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Outdoor education teaches valuable life skills, but enrolments are declining due to academic pressure
Long, manicured nails are hastily clipped as sweaty palms clutch onto climbing ropes draped over sandstone, the students' lifeline on the cliff face.
Dangling in mid-air, their tears, screams and the odd expletive are eventually replaced by cheers, giggles and hugs.
These teenagers are climbing up and abseiling down a mountain for their outdoor education subject.
But despite the subject's benefits, students wanting to participate in it face increasing barriers.
These girls from Clonard College in Geelong have travelled nearly four hours to climb Mount Arapiles, a famed mountain in western Victoria that for decades has drawn rock climbers from around the world.
"I had a panic attack, but it wasn't that bad, my instructor was really good," year 11 student Kenzie Pinkerton says.
The day begins with a dozen girls sitting on wooden benches braiding each other's hair; their backpacks, shoes, helmets, and harnesses are tossed in the centre.
Scaling 100-metre cliffs is unlike anything the girls have ever done before. It is the practical component for their Victoria Certificate of Education (VCE) outdoor education, a non-compulsory subject that suits students who learn by "doing", by allowing them to plan and participate in outdoor activities.
"The thing outdoor education gives you, that other subjects don't, is life skills," says Shelby Hackett, the girls' outdoor education teacher.
"Life isn't just books and computers. Life is in the real world, where you've got to communicate with people, you've got to adapt and be flexible."
Ms Hackett believes the skills and experiences learnt in outdoor education better prepare young people for life after study, but students who want to participate are finding it harder because of increasing academic workloads.
Life outside books and computers
Ms Hackett explains that the girls learn to cook, set up camp, cooperate with others, manage their time, and negotiate study and work commitments.
"Communicating with [their] teachers to catch up on work — they're all important life skills that will most likely make them more successful at university, than if they just do straight study in a classroom," she says.
The girls also build confidence, independence, and resilience.
"In the middle of the cliff I was about to give up, but I pushed through it," says Alisha Rowe, a year 10 student. "I had to be responsible for the next person who came after me. Now, sitting at the top, I'm really proud of myself," says Bailee Bonanno in year 10.
"A big factor for them is getting them to be OK with being a little dirty … sometimes the toilets don't flush, and we don't have a shower, don't have a mirror," Ms Hackett says.
"Some of the things are uncomfortable, but part of the learning is being uncomfortable."
Year 11 student Katelyn Irvine says Ms Hackett showed her she could enjoy life outside without the need to be plugged in all the time.
"I wouldn't expect [to] have learned anything without my phone because it's got a whole bunch of information in it," she says.
"But being outside and seeing it all is just like, woah."
Growing academic pressure
Despite the benefits of outdoor education, Ms Hackett says students are finding it harder to attend camp while keeping up with the academic workload.
She says enrolment numbers are falling as students feel pressured to drop the subject in favour of more academic ones, like maths and English, the closer they get to year 12 exams.
Ms Hackett says one VCE cohort began with 20 students but dropped to seven by the end of the course.
And of the 77 outdoor education students she had last year, only 14 chose to continue with it as a VCE subject this year.
It's not yet clear how many of those 14 students will continue it next year.
She says many students fear missing class and school assessments that can only be done within strict time frames.
Another deterrent is that the subject attracts a penalty in the overall ATAR scores, which determine university entry.
Ms Hackett says outdoor education scores are scaled down, so a raw score of 35 for example, would only count as 28 towards their final ATAR.
"They look at the drop in the ATAR and they go, 'It's not worth my time'.
"But I think the life skills they get out of it and the challenges they overcome are worth more than the ATAR score they get at the end."
Between 2018 and 2022, data from the Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority showed a decline in outdoor education enrolments the closer students got to finishing year 12.
Student enrolments fell as they progressed through each semester with the largest drop between unit 2 and unit 3, which traditionally coincided with students finishing year 11 and moving into year 12.
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Raising the Criminal Age Only Sweeps Youth Crime Under the Carpet
The Victorian state government has committed to raising the minimum age of criminal responsibility from 10 years old to 12, and to 14 years old by 2027 in an effort, it says, to avoid young people entering the criminal justice system early.
Yet, the recent case of a 14-year-old, who is on bail and had more than 380 charges, struck out because of his age.
He has been described by a magistrate as “causing terror” in the community, which sums up all that is wrong with plans to raise the age of criminal responsibility.
Not holding young offenders accountable for their actions will not halt the issue of youth crime.
If anything, it will likely reinforce the sense of impunity many young offenders already feel, and will do nothing to stem the number of home invasions, thefts, assaults, and robberies that have skyrocketed post-pandemic.
The Victorian Crime Statistics Agency reveals the number of alleged offences committed by young people aged 10 to 14 has increased 37 percent over the last five years. In 2024, there were over 6,800 alleged offences committed by this age group.
However, according to data released by the Productivity Commission, only 15 young people aged 10 to 13 were incarcerated over the 2022-23 financial year.
These figures show what happens when you do not punish or seek to rehabilitate young offenders. Little wonder many youths gleefully plaster their crimes across social media, underscoring their contempt for the law.
The government’s justification for raising the criminal age limit is that children belong in schools rather than the criminal justice system, this is unlikely to alter their mindset.
Not only would this teach young offenders that they can evade the consequences of their behaviour, but it also provides a dangerous opportunity for older offenders to recruit younger people to commit crimes on their behalf, safe in the knowledge that these children will not be prosecuted.
Lack of Options for Judges
Further, the debate around the age of criminal responsibility is driven by the assumption that entanglement with the criminal justice system inevitably means jail time for children.
This reveals a key problem with existing arrangements—namely the lack of deterrents available to judges when sentencing young people.
It is widely recognised that detention can be harmful for young offenders and should be avoided where possible.
Instead, many offenders, particularly non-violent offenders, are handed light non-custodial sentences that fail to address the factors behind their behaviour.
There must be punishments available to judges that are appropriate for those offenders not serious enough to be incarcerated, but whose conduct—and the decision-making behind it—requires intervention.
There’s a Model to Copy
Sentencing reform should begin with adopting practices successfully implemented in the United States. Rancho Cielo in California has established a successful program for non-violent offenders on probation and at-risk youth, with a focus on rehabilitation and providing skills for life.
Youth offenders are sent to the ranch as students, where they receive a high school education while also being enrolled in workshops that teach practical and employable skills.
The ranch operates at just a quarter of the cost of local prisons and has reduced youth reoffending rates from 40 percent to 15 percent over two decades.
Such programs not only take the offender away from social groups encouraging offending, but also stop youth offenders heading down the wrong path.
The most dangerous offender is one with nothing to lose. Giving young offenders hope and opportunity to build a career gives them something to lose.
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4 August, 2024
Former NSW premier Dominic Perrottet says harsh vaccine mandates were wrong in valedictory speech
The former NSW premier who oversaw the state’s exit from the Covid pandemic said it was a “mistake” for the state to implement strict vaccine mandates, stating that “people’s personal choices shouldn’t have cost them their jobs”.
Dominic Perrottet, who delivered a speech following his resignation on Tuesday, succeeded Gladys Berejiklian as the premier in October 2021, just as the state was easing restrictions following the Omicron lockdowns.
“Without dwelling on every decision, I believe it’s important to point out one mistake which was made by governments here and around the world, the strict enforcement of vaccine mandates,” he said.
While decisions were made with the “right intentions,” he said the impact on transmissions was “limited at best”.
“As is mostly now accepted, the law should have left more room and respect for freedom,” he said.
“Vaccines saved lives but ultimately mandates were wrong.
“People’s personal choices shouldn’t have cost them their jobs. When I became Premier, we removed them, or the ones we actually could, but this should have happened faster.”
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Australia Post dumps commitment to carbon neutral mail deliveries despite its zero emissions target
Australia Post has announced it will dump its aim of carbon neutral deliveries despite an existing commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050.
The national postal service will scrap the certified Carbon Neutral Deliveries program on August 12.
Customers were sent a letter by Australia Post to inform them about the upcoming change, reported 2GB.
'While we're proud of what we've achieved by investing in the program, the sustainability landscape has changed,' the letter read.
Instead, Australia Post will continue to focus on its enterprise emissions reduction target, which includes achieving net zero.
Australia Post introduced Carbon Neutral Deliveries in 2019 as an environmentally sustainable way of delivering parcels.
The program works by purchasing carbon credits to offset greenhouse gas emissions.
Carbon credits are earned by carrying out activities that store, reduce or avoid greenhouse gas emissions.
Each carbon credit represents one metric tonne of greenhouse gas emissions removed from the atmosphere.
An Australia Post spokesman told Daily Mail Australia the postal service remains committed to achieving its sustainability targets.
'Australia Post will focus on its own decarbonisation initiatives as a more effective strategy to reduce carbon emissions rather than purchasing carbon offsets through the Carbon Neutral Deliveries Program,' the spokesman said.
'We are proud of our approach to sustainability, laid out in our 2025 Sustainability Roadmap, and were the first Government Business Enterprise to target Net Zero emissions by 2050.'
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University of Melbourne student claims majority of tutorials were spoken in Mandarin
A first-year university student plans on changing degrees after claiming most of his tutorials were spoken in Mandarin.
Harry is studying economics at the University of Melbourne and said he was either the only Caucasian student, or one of few, in his subjects.
While his peers would often speak in Mandarin to each other, they would also ask questions to the tutor in the same language.
Harry claimed his tutor would then respond in Mandarin and not explain what was being discussed in English.
'I was sort of left in the dark. It kind of dejected me from the conversation and interacting with the class as a whole,' he told ABC Radio Melbourne Drive. 'I was just sitting there for the attendance, essentially.'
Harry said that as tutorials are mandatory, he had to show up, but often, during group work, his peers would speak entirely in Mandarin.
He said that about one time every class a question would be asked in Mandarin, to which the teacher would respond in the same language.
'I should've asked what was being discussed so that is definitely my fault but I still think it's not acceptable for them to be speaking a language I can't understand at all in an English speaking country,' Harry said.
'The classes were either silent or predominantly spoken in Mandarin for the most part.'
Harry added there was one student who would often translate for him but said that shouldn't have to be his responsibility.
He added he believed the majority of students in the course were international students.
Harry is now hoping to defer courses to science or engineering.
The University of Melbourne it was looking into Harry's claims and have encouraged him to make a formal complaint.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13712775/melbourne-university-mandarin-subject.html
**********************************************Queensland LNP Vows ‘Adult Crime, Adult Time’ for Young Offenders
Juveniles convicted of serious crimes will be treated as harshly as adult offenders in Queensland, under a major Liberal-National Party (LNP) pre-election promise.
Opposition Leader David Crisafulli addressed the party faithful at the annual LNP state convention on Sunday and spruiked his plans for government, 111 days out from the election on Oct. 26.
He focused on tougher punishment for youths who commit crimes.
Under his plan, youths found guilty of crimes such as murder, manslaughter, grievous bodily harm and dangerous operation, and unlawful use of a motor vehicle would be sentenced as adults.
“If you make the choice to commit adult crimes, you should know we have made the choice to ensure there are consequences for that behaviour,” Mr. Crisafulli told the convention in Brisbane.
“We will restore consequences for actions for young criminals—adult crime, adult time.”
The Labor government’s management of youth justice and crime has been in the spotlight following a serious of violent incidents involving young people, fanning concerns that youth crime is rising across the state.
However, the LNP leader’s plan could prove controversial amongst legal and children’s rights groups.
Mr. Crisafulli said the state government was “cuddling young criminals” and if he became premier the LNP would fund individual 12-month post-release plans to keep young offenders on the straight and narrow.
“We can’t just release a young offender into society,” he said.
“We'll partner with the community sector to work with young people in detention, in partnership with their youth justice caseworker, to develop a relationship which can be maintained when they are released.
“That will be an intensive post release supervision to keep them on the straight and narrow.”
According to an Australia Bureau of Statistics crime report published in February, there were almost 11,000 offenders aged 10 to 17 in the state in 2022/23, up 6 percent from the year before.
The most common offences were acts intended to cause injury (23 percent of the total) and theft (17 percent).
Premier Steven Miles called the proposal as “just another slick slogan” from Mr. Crisafulli.
“The fact is that we want to intervene early and prevent crimes before they occur, and that’s why we have a comprehensive community safety program,” Mr. Miles told reporters.
In health, the LNP leader promised to provide live hospital data within 100 days, if the opposition wins government, after federal Coalition Leader Peter Dutton criticised Labor’s record on services at the convention on Saturday.
“Four years ago, the term ambulance ramping didn’t really register with the Queensland public, and yet today, ambulance ramping is at a record 45 percent,” Mr. Dutton said.
The Liberal leader endorsed Mr. Crisafulli as a thoughtful and practical leader who had a demonstrated plan to “end Queenslanders’ despair” and revitalise the state.
“The LNP’s policies are not only practical, they offer hope for Queenslanders that better times are ahead,” Mr. Dutton said.
“We can achieve government because they respect a leader who has not only demonstrated a plan to end their despair, but a leader who has a vision to revitalise Queensland.”
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4 August, 2024
Hiker Marc Hendrickx becomes first Aussie punished for defying ban on climbing Wollumbin-Mount Warning summit trail sacred to local Indigenous groups
This discrimination in favour of one racial group is grossly offensive
An activist has become the first person to be fined for defying a climbing ban on a sacred indigenous site.
Marc Hendrickx climbed the Wollumbin-Mount Warning summit trail near Murwillumbah in northern NSW on Australia Day despite the track being closed to the public since 2020.
Mr Hendrickx, a member of the Right to Climb advocacy group, and several of its members made it to the peak in time to watch the sunrise on January 26.
The group ignored several signs on the way up left by local indigenous groups which warned hikers to turn around or risk facing fines.
Mount Warning was 'temporarily' closed to the public in early 2020 but remains closed to this day and hikers fear it will become 'the next Uluru'.
The Wollumbin Consultative Group has been fighting for the mountain to stay permanently closed to all but a select group of Indigenous male members.
Despite this Mr Hendrickx proudly shared photos of his group holding signs at the summit advocating that it should be reopened.
He received a $300 fine for the stunt which was express posted to him on Friday - one day before a planned protest at the base of Mount Warning celebrating the 95th anniversary of the declaration of the site as a national park.
Mr Hendrickx copped the fine for breaching the National Parks and Wildlife Regulation 2019 for entering 'a park that is closed to the public'.
The activist said the timing of his fine was suspicious considering he climbed the mountain months ago and it came one day before his planned protest.
'For a fine to turn up now looks like it is trying to instil some fear in the community ... to make sure people don't climb the mountain,' he told the Courier Mail.
'I thought if they were going to fine me they would have fined me at the time and they didn't,' he said.
Mr Hendrickx's offence carries a maximum fine of more than $3,000 - which he managed to avoided.
A spokesperson from the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service said a second person from the Australia Day group had also been fined.
They added that anyone who ignored the climbing ban would 'be subject to appropriate law enforcement'.
'We appreciate that there has been community uncertainty about the time taken to resolve this issue,' a statement provided to the publication read.
'It is important however, that we ensure all stakeholders, including the Aboriginal custodians, are appropriately consulted about future management of Wollumbin National Park.'
Mr Hendrickx however said that he will not capitulate to this 'intimidation' and still intends to deliver his keynote speech at the protest.
Another activist group, Save Our Summits, will host the event which is expected to draw up to 100 protestors and will feature a speech from NSW Upper House MP John Ruddick.
Mr Ruddick tabled a petition to parliament calling for the immediate reopening of the Wollumbin Mount Warning summit trail earlier this year.
Mr Hendrickx became the face of the Mount Warning closure controversy though a string of public appearances since he was apprehended by a park ranger in January.
He said he will seek 'further clarification' regarding his fine, which Sydney radio host Ben Fordham already offered to pay in March.
The Wollumbin trail once hosted more than 100,000 climbers a year and brought in more than $10million annually.
From April to October last year, private security guards were paid $7,000 per week to make sure climbers were prevented from attempting the summit trek.
Overall, nearly $200,000 was spent securing the mountain and security is still brought in on occasions such as New Year's Eve and Australia Day.
It was initially closed in order to comply with social distancing orders during the coronavirus pandemic but the closure has since been extended multiple times.
Reasons for the extensions have included safety concerns over the condition of the trail and that the trek was against the wishes of the local Indigenous custodians.
In 2022, the NSW Department of National Parks recommended fully handing over management of the site on the Tweed Coast to the small Wollumbin Consultative Group who support a ban on visitors to the popular hiking spot.
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Alarm bells over Australian universities’ financial dependence on international students
Australian universities’ dependence on international student fees has “fuelled a culture of revenue, profit and competition” and created an unstable business model, the head of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has warned.
Critics representing various interests in the sector joined in expressing anxiety at the position universities had found themselves in as the federal government aggressively tries to wind back the number of international students.
The chief executive of Universities Australia, Luke Sheehy, said tertiary institutions had “come to rely on international student revenue to fund everything we do in the face of declining government support in recent years – from teaching and research to infrastructure projects and employing people in well-paid jobs”.
In percentage terms, Australia has more international students than any OECD country bar Luxembourg – and well in excess of the UK, Canada and the United States.
The Group of Eight (Go8) institutions are particularly reliant on international student fees, with foreign enrolments making up 47% of the total cohort at the University of Sydney and more than 35% at the University of Melbourne, the Australian National University, the University of Queensland and the University of Adelaide.
Universities earn nearly twice as much from overseas students as from domestic students. Average revenue per domestic full-time equivalent student was $22,996 in 2023, compared with $41,117 for an overseas equivalent student.
The president of the NTEU, Alison Barnes, said a growing dependence on foreign income had fuelled “corporatisation” of the sector.
“[International students] add a lot to our campuses, they’re an asset – but they’re seen as cash cows,” she said.
“There’s a systemic risk associated with relying on international student fees that was demonstrated during Covid – it’s not stable. But it’s inherently problematic beyond the associated risks.
“The aggressive pursuit of international student income has fuelled a culture of revenue, profit and competition for students.”
When the federal government released its strategy to fix Australia’s “broken” migration system late last year, international students were squarely on the agenda.
The education minister, Jason Clare, said the government was sending a “clear message” it would act to “protect Australia’s reputation as a high-quality international education provider”, announcing tougher minimum English-language requirements and targeted visa scrutiny of “high-risk” providers.
Since then, a series of levers have been pulled aiming to reduce the flow of international students into Australia, which reached record highs in February.
First, the commonwealth proposed a cap on international students, giving the education minister unprecedented powers to limit enrolments by institution and course.
Then it more than doubled the international student visa application fee from $710 to $1,600, a move described by the International Education Association of Australia as “death by a thousand cuts”.
Sheehy described the government’s approach to international students as “policy chaos” that could cost thousands of jobs. The sector needed “certainty, stability and growth”, he told Guardian Australia.
“International education is a great Australian success story and any changes to the policies that underpin this $48bn sector must be weighed carefully against its significant and far-reaching impact,” he said.
‘A victim of its own success’
Abul Rizvi, a former deputy secretary at the immigration department, has been lobbying the federal government to implement a minimum university entrance exam score in place of its proposed reforms. He said the score, similar to an Atar, would limit the incentive for institutions to put tuition fee revenue above academic excellence.
Rizvi has been a longstanding critic of successive governments’ approach to international education. He told the National Press Club in June that the “underfunded” sector had “long been chasing tuition revenue from overseas students and sacrificing learning integrity in the process”.
But he maintains that an increase in visa fees will simply mean more government revenue – not better quality students.
“We’re actually shooting ourselves in the foot,” he wrote earlier this year. “The people it will deter will tend to be good students with options.”
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Australia may not be the quarry Asia requires for steel
A report released by WWF-Australia on Thursday urges the nation to be more than a quarry for its most valuable export commodity, iron ore, which is used to make steel and is a critical source of employment.
An economy driven by petroleum and raw material exports alone has significant risks that are harming our long-term economy, the natural environment and communities, chief executive Dermot O'Gorman said.
Australia's Green Iron Key recommends a $10 billion domestic support package to decarbonise the existing iron ore and steel industry and prioritise the development of export-focused green iron projects.
Governments must also combine their efforts to develop a skilled workforce and new technology, and keep onshore all domestic scrap metal to integrate into Australia's value chain.
A green iron and steel regional cooperation program to build a supply chain between Australia and East Asia could also combat Europe's headstart.
"The industry supply chain is starting to shift and Australia and Western Australia need to act quickly or lose out to faster movers," WWF-Australia's industrial decarbonisation expert Nicole Wyche said.
Australia is the world's leading exporter of iron ore for steelmaking, mostly to China where steel mills account for the majority of global steel production.
Major Asian steel producers are pursuing green iron and steel value chains involving Australia, but they are also looking elsewhere, WWF-Australia warns.
An ideal green iron plant could produce less than three per cent of the emissions of a conventional blast furnace, according to the report.
Iron will be produced where the cheapest renewable energy and the lowest-emission hydrogen can be generated, supporting steel products where manufacturers currently exist, and alongside the world's leading automakers and construction giants.
"Decarbonising iron and steel production is vital if we are to stabilise global temperature rise to 1.5C in line with the Paris Agreement," Ms Wyche said.
Global market responses such as the European Union's carbon border adjustment mechanism are forcing steel makers to reduce emissions.
Europe is positioning to be a leader in low-carbon steelmaking to combat climate change on a global scale, and extend the life of heavy industries that are at the heart of the region's economy.
There are also doubts in the industry about the suitability of Australian iron ore, with favoured low-carbon technologies requiring higher-grade ores from rivals such as Brazil.
A first-of-its-kind plant in Sweden is gearing up to produce five million tonnes of green steel a year, bankrolled by €6.5 billion from investors and lenders including a €250 million grant from the European Commission's innovation fund.
H2 Green Steel, founded in 2020 to end the dependence on coal-fired blast furnaces, will use one gigawatt of electrolysers, making it the biggest green hydrogen facility in Europe.
Established steel makers Thyssenkrupp and ArcelorMittal are also looking at renewable energy to power electric arc furnaces.
In the United States, $US1 billion will go to green steel projects as part of a $US6 billion pledge for new technologies to slash emissions from factories.
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Lawsuit Filed Against Australia’s Environment Minister for Not Considering ‘Climate Risk’
A legal challenge has been lodged against Australia’s environment minister, Tanya Plibersek, claiming she did not adequately consider climate risks when approving two new coal mining projects.
The action, filed in the Federal Court of Australia, seeks a judicial review of the minister’s decision, arguing there were legal errors because Plibersek did not consider the potential harms of climate change.
In May, Plibersek approved four new coal mines in the country, including the Mount Pleasant Mine (New South Wales or NSW), Narrabri Underground Mine (NSW), Ensham Mine (Qld), and Isaac River (Qld).
The current action, lodged by Environmental Justice Australia on behalf of the small activist group the Environment Council of Central Queensland, targets the two NSW projects of Mount Pleasant and Narrabri.
“We must act now to avoid climate catastrophes—from droughts to floods and bushfires, that will harm all of us and our iconic Living Wonders,” said Christine Carlisle, president of the Council, said in a statement.
While senior lawyer Retta Berryman of Environmental Justice Australia said that if successful, the case could result in all future coal and gas projects requiring a proper climate risk assessment.
“Until now, this hasn’t been the case, despite the legal requirements,” she said.
“Our client argues the minister should have registered the harm these projects are likely to cause. They say that the minister’s refusal to accept and apply the science from the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], other authoritative sources, and even her own department was irrational, illogical, and unlawful.”
In response, the federal environment minister’s office said it had received the documents from Environment Justice Australia.
“As this is a legal matter, we are unable to comment further,” a spokesperson for Plibersek told The Epoch Times.
Labor Government Tries to Balance Net Zero Push With Economic Growth
The environment minister is walking a tightrope between fulfilling the Labor government’s environmental (and net-zero) credentials while also ensuring the economy does not suffer (coal is a major Australian export).
In early May, after cancelling two coal mines in Queensland because they did not supply adequate information on their environmental impact, Plibersek wrote on Twitter, “If companies aren’t willing to show how they will protect nature, I’m willing to cancel their projects—and that’s exactly what I’ve done.”
It is a move that has compelled some pro-net-zero organisations to accuse the government of hypocrisy.
“Last week’s ’rejection' of the long-stalled China Stone and Range coal mines was laying the groundwork for the approval of new coal mines with more momentum and more powerful proponents,” said the Australia Institute on May 12 on its website.
“Thursday 11 May, Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek quietly gave the nod to not one, not two, not three, but FOUR new coal mines.”
Climate Lawsuits Underway
The radical environmentalism legal movement is well underway, with several pending lawsuits in Democrat-led states in the U.S.
Big oil and gas companies are being targeted to pay the costs of disasters that are being attributed to climate change.
While there is some agreement on the impacts of climate change, there are those who disagree, saying the science is open to interpretation.
U.S. eco-modernist, Michael Shellenberger, has argued against the narrative that the planet’s environmental situation is in dire straits.
“The death rate from natural disasters has crashed; we have four times as many people as we did in the world 100 years ago. The death toll has declined about 90 percent in the United States,” he told the Conservative Political Action Conference in Australia in October 2022.
“Somewhere between 305,100 people die every year from natural disasters. More people die walking from their bed to the toilet than they do from natural disasters.”
He also said there was more coral in the Great Barrier Reef than there had ever been in 36 years.
At the same time, forest fires have claimed 25 percent less land compared to 2003—an area the size of Texas.
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1 August, 2024
Jim Chalmers' excuses for Australia's inflation crisis spectacularly unravel - with two key stats easily blowing apart the garbage Treasurer is peddling
Treasurer Jim Chalmers wants you to believe that rising inflation isn't his fault. The only problem with such spin is that it's utterly false.
While inflation and interest rates around the world are falling, Australia has just recorded the first rise in quarterly inflation since early 2022, at 3.8 per cent.
While the Reserve Bank probably won't have the courage to put rates up next week to counter the bad news, not doing so risks the next quarterly inflation numbers only getting worse.
Meanwhile, the government continues to spend when and where it shouldn't, further stoking inflation. State governments are making the same mistake.
You can bet that the spend-a-thon will only get more extreme as we count down to a Federal election. It always does.
Then you need to consider the impact that the July 1 tax cuts will have on inflation and rates.
They are only just starting to take effect, meaning that their impact will be seen in the coming quarterly updates - also putting upward pressure on inflation such that we may see it rise again.
The Treasurer wants you to believe this is a global problem - claiming on Wednesday that 'some global pressures' are helping fuel 'sticky' inflation - but it's just not.
He wants you to focus on the fact inflation is lower now than when Labor came to power.
But that was nearly two-and-a-half years ago now, and it was in the immediate wake of the pandemic, when inflation was sky high everywhere.
The simple fact is that inflation has come down more substantially elsewhere than here, and now it's rising in Australia when it isn't rising elsewhere.
This is nothing sort of a disaster for Australians already doing it tough during a cost of living crisis.
And the blame rests firmly at the feet of a government about to seek re-election. Specifically at the feet of a Treasurer failing in his duty.
The biggest giveaway that Chalmers' attempts to absolve himself of responsibility and claim international factors are contributing to high inflation is utter rubbish can be seen when the inflation figure of 3.8 per cent is broken down into what the Australian Bureau of Statistics terms 'tradeables' and 'non-tradeables'.
Those figures essentially measure the price of goods from overseas compared to what's happening domestically.
This is the important data that exposes Chalmers' excuses as garbage.
The inflation figure for what we get from overseas is just 1.5 per cent, below even the RBA's inflation target range of 2-3 per cent.
In sharp contrast the domestic 'non-tradeables' inflation number is a whopping 5 per cent.
In other words Australia's rising inflation - a quarterly adjusted figure of 3.8 per cent - is a homegrown problem.
Don't take my word for it, this is the way Richard Holden, a Harvard PhD in economics and UNSW Professor of Finance, put it when approached by Daily Mail Australia:
'The June quarter CPI figures are concerning but unsurprising. They confirm that we have an entrenched, homegrown inflation problem that is even worse than official figures show, given the government's 'energy rebate' fudge.'
For an academic that level of condemnation is akin to calling the Treasurer an economic idiot, personally responsible for the problem he's trying to hide from.
And Professor Holden is right to call out the energy rebate Chalmers popped into his budget.
It was brazenly designed to artificially put downward pressure on official inflation figures even though RBA Governor Michelle Bullock notes that the fudge didn't fool her.
The good professor is also right to call out the inaccuracy of the Treasury's official inflation figures that have been surpassed today.
The Treasurer crowed about delivering lower inflation forecasts in his budget, yet here we are.
Chalmers also attacked economists who at the time suggested his budget would be inflationary.
The Treasurer now has mud on his face, that's for sure. In fact, he's covered in it from head to toe.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13691485/inflation-jim-chalmers-Peter-Van-Onselen.htmls
************************************************Australia slowly retreats from vaccine mandates
The retreat from Covid hysteria in Australia has been painfully slow and uneven.
In one dispatch from the virus overreaction front, the news is good, if long overdue. The South Australian Health Department (SA Health) has, after more than three years of alarmism and public health messaging, abandoned its last foxhole and announced that its Covid vaccination mandate for 'medical staff with patient-facing roles' is no more.
The 245 medical practitioners, ambos, dentists, allied health practitioners, disability workers, and social workers who were sacked for exercising their basic human right to control what goes into their bodies will now be able to get their old jobs back. Sort of. Returning employees will have the charge of 'misconduct' recorded against their personnel record. SA Health bosses couldn't resist a swift kick to the shins.
In its partial retreat, SA Health admits no error or misjudgement concerning the old policy of mandatory employee vaccination, citing increased Covid immunity in the population as a reason to change their position. The department is still 'recommending' that all staff be vaccinated but, at long last, health officials have recognised that pretty near everyone has had (or will get) Covid. Thus, naturally-acquired immunity exists within the community.
What we will not see is an admission that vaccines had little to do with 'increased Covid immunity in the population' because that would mean publicly acknowledging their monumental failure. SA Health's belated and begrudging retreat from its last Covid stronghold is an example of bureaucratic foot-dragging and bottom-covering at its worst.
Meanwhile, in Paris, Covid hysteria has returned. Australia appears to be one of the only countries bothering with Covid testing, isolation, and mask wearing.
In all the hoopla about the unveiling of the Australian Olympic uniform, no one thought to mention that face masks would be part of the green-and-gold outfit, but the 41-member Australian swimming team arrived in Paris fully kitted out. The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade would approve. It 'strongly encourages' Australians travelling abroad to mask up. Meanwhile, French health authorities recommend masks be worn 'in enclosed and small spaces, and at large gatherings' (which pretty much covers all bases where humans gather).
The current sports carnival promised to be a 'return to normal' after the soulless outing in Japan in 2021 which played to empty stadiums and diminished TV viewership (down 27 per cent compared to Rio in 2016) but Australia, apparently, is not quite ready to return to normal just yet.
In spite of the lingering Covid charade being acted out by the Australian Olympic contingent, five of the thirteen-member women's water polo team tested positive to Covid (none of them are 'particularly unwell', according to Australia's chef de Mission,) whilst two members of the athletics squad were also 'isolating but have tested negative'. The infectious athletes are permitted to train but with, you guessed it, 'protocols in place'. The public health Covid theatre Downunder is running longer than Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap.
There are some who say that Australia escaped the worst of the 'pandemic' because of our 'tough' policy response, but the Covid encore in Paris is a reminder that, in many ways, Australia experienced the worst of Covid mania.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/07/australia-slowly-retreats-from-vaccine-mandates/
***********************************************Migrants blamed for public schools and hospitals pressure
Migrants are being blamed for piling pressure on public schools and hospitals, as NSW Premier Chris Minns demanded more federal funding for state-run services.
As state governments refused to sign a national 10-year school funding and reform agreement on Wednesday, Mr Minns called for extra commonwealth spending. "At the end of the day, we take 37 per cent of inbound migrants to NSW,'' he said.
"We're happy to do it - we recognise that Sydney is an inter national city - but we need the bigger, deeper pockets of the commonwealth government to provide basic services.
"We need their help when it comes to funding on education, on health, on disability funding, on reform to the NDIS (National Disability Insurance Scheme).''
Federal Education Minister Jason Clare has given states and territories an eight-week deadline to sign off on teaching reforms and student learning targets, in return for $16bn in bonus school spending over a decade. Mr Clare said the states would have "no option'' but to sign the Better and Fairer Schools Agreement to get extra commonwealth cash.
"It's not about dollars, it's about what you spend it on,'' he said. "We've got to make sure we direct that money to the sort of things that are going to help kids who fall behind when they're little to catch up, and to make sure that more kids finish school.''
Mr Clare has promised to repeal legislation capping the commonwealth contribution to 20 per cent of running costs for public schools. He wants to lift it to 22.5 per cent - at an extra cost of $16bn over the decade.
Western Australia has accepted the offer but NSW, Victorian, Queensland and South Australian are refusing to endorse reforms until the commonwealth doubles its offer to cover 25 per cent of schooling costs.
The Northern Territory signed a special deal on Wednesday after the federal government increased its funding by $738m over 10 years.
The commonwealth share of spending on NT schools will be lifted to 25 per cent next year, rising to 40 per cent by 2029, to tackle disadvantage in remote Aboriginal communities.
The NT government has also granted teachers a 13 per cent pay rise over three years. The funding deal requires the NT to meet higher targets for literacy, numeracy, school attendance and Year 12 completion rates. The NT will also be required to build state-run boarding schools, or else subsidise the cost of boarding school fees for remote students.
NT Education Minister Mark Monaghan said the commonwealth cash would make a "huge and immediate difference in our schools . It means our students will have more experienced teachers in front of them, (with) additional one-on-one sessions for children falling behind so they catch up and keep up".
"It means students, especially our remotes, will be able to access more wellbeing professionals like psychologists, speech pathologists and social workers so they are supported throughout their learning,'' he said.
Centre for Independent Studies education policy program director Glenn Fahey hailed the federal government's "better targets, testing and teaching''.
"Australia's education system needs strong targets to turn around two decades of di s appointing results,'' he said.
"Rolling out phonics and early numeracy screening across the country will mean a stronger educational safety net. This bold direction is a key step in addressing Australia's student catch-up crisis, where four out of every five children who fall behind never catch up.''
Federal opposition education spokeswoman Sarah Henderson said Mr Clare had "delivered a funding war and no national reforms . while the government has adopted the Coalition's call for explicit instruction and other evidence-based teaching methods, Jason Clare has failed to detail how teachers will be properly supported in the classroom''.
"The draft agreement contains plenty of motherhood statements but says nothing about improving the national curriculum or delivering the critical reforms needed to combat classroom disruption.''
Greens schools spokeswoman Penny Allman-Payne, a former teacher, gave Labor's funding agreement "an F for fake''.
"This is a plan to lock in underfunding for another decade, ensuring another entire generation of children misses out on the education they deserve,'' she said.
"Teachers are fleeing the system, student disengagement and school refusal is rising and cashed-up private schools draw more and more kids out of the public system.''
Save our Schools called on education ministers to "come to their senses and end the stand-off'' over funding.
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Steven Miles must get tough on rogue CFMEU
Premier Steven Miles must toughen up his stance on the militant rogue union the CFMEU - and soon; as on the evidence so far it appears he is too spineless to take them on.
The latest example of this came yesterday, after the Cross River Rail Delivery Authority announced late on Tuesday it had cancelled plans to temporarily reopen the Ekka train station for this year's show because CFMEU-backed industrial action had delayed necessary safety tests.
It is not the end of the world that showgoers will now have to take a bus and then walk 500m or so to the nearest entry gate rather than being delivered into the heart of the Ekka by train. And yes, public safety must always be the priority.
But it is still outrageous that this scenario - which the RNA itself did not have confirmed until Tuesday - has arisen directly because of CFMEU industrial action, which has cost the project the best part of two weeks of work in July alone.
What is just as outrageous is that Premier Miles for some reason yesterday could not bring himself to acknowledge this fact, or the reality that some of these disruptions by the CFMEU have involved thuggish physical confrontation.
The most strength the Premier could muster was to describe the cancellation of the Ekka train as "a disappointment" before trying, lamely, to argue that the CFMEU isn't really to blame - because it's "not that simple".
Well, yes, it is: CFMEU workers stopped work on Cross River Rail to such an extent that scheduled work on the Ekka train station could not be completed in time for the show. There might be some extenuating circumstances, but that's basically it.
Now, you can understand why the Premier is timid in the face of the CFMEU's bullying ways. These are some serious dudes who play it tough, and consider the laws of the land to be optional at best.
But letting them repeatedly get away with the industrial equivalent of daylight robbery not only just emboldens them, but is also surely starting to wear thin with voters.
It is one thing for the CFMEU to go to war against the government, construction companies and "rich developers" in its aggressive efforts to win better terms and conditions for its members. But now it is also inconveniencing private citizens - who might have expected just a touch more sympathy, and blame, from the Premier on this issue.
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All my main blogs below:
http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)
https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)
http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)
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