This document is part of an archive of postings 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
31 December, 2020
The revolutionary green technology using old car tyres to make steel that could spell the end of Australia's coal exports
This is a big laugh. The cost problem is acknowledged but there are many other difficulties.
Biggest of all is that electric arc furnaces are big users of electricity and that current has to be delivered in a stable way. So where will they get all that electricity? From coal-fired power stations, almost certainly. So they are still using coal to make steel but in a more complicated way!
Also amusing is that the newspaper's copy reader does not know the difference between an ark and an arc. Noah's arc would be amusing
The heating up of old car tyres to make steel could one day spell the end of coal - threatening one of Australia's key exports to China.
University of New South Wales engineering and science professor Veena Sahajwalla has pioneered world-first 'green steel' technology where hydrogen and solid carbon are extracted from waste rubber to make metal.
The former judge on the ABC's New Inventors show told Daily Mail Australia her innovation, also known as Polymer Injection Technology, had the potential to one day make metallurgical coal redundant.
'Oh, absolutely. Absolutely,' she said. 'We are certainly looking at a future where the dependency on coal for steel making is completely eliminated.
What is green steel technology?
Green steel technology involves extracting hydrogen and carbon from waste tyres to make metal
This method, also known as Polymer Injection Technology, relies on an electric ark furnace instead of a traditional blast furnace powered by coking coal
'So the goal very much is to say that we want to get to zero coal and coke in the process of making steel.'
China, Australia's biggest trading partner, last year bought $10billion worth of Australia's metallurgical coal exports and it still relies on old-fashioned blast furnaces that are heavily dependent on this fossil fuel.
'It's basically asking the question: "Where will the tipping point be for many countries like China and others?",' Professor Sahajwalla said.
Most of the world's existing steel production involves heating coking coal in a blast furnace at 1,000C, but green steel technology is about phasing this out and replacing it with a new method of making liquid steel.
'A traditional blast furnace will always have coke not just from a heat point of view but coke also provides a structure - it is a solid product that sits inside a furnace,' Professor Sahajwalla said.
'The traditional coke that is used as a source in a furnace, we're talking about replacing that coke with, of course, waste tyres.
'The science shows that it works.'
A smaller proportion of steel production involves electric ark furnace which uses high-current electric arcs to melt scrap steel and convert it into liquid steel.
Green steel production relies on this method to turn rubber tyres into metal.
Newcastle mining materials supplier Molycop, a former division of Arrium, uses green steel technology to make replacement metal wheels for Waratah trains servicing Sydney, Newcastle, the Central Coast, the Blue Mountains, and Wollongong.
Michael Parker, the company's president, said its manufacturing, combining coking coal and oil with crumbed tyre rubber and the use of renewable solar energy - to power an electric ark furnace - produced 80 per cent less carbon emissions than traditional steel making.
The green steel method, for now, has significantly reduced the need for coal in steel production but is has not completely eliminated it.
'This polymer injection technology allows us to substitute probably about half of that with crumbed rubber,' Mr Parker told Daily Mail Australia.
'Use the carbon and hydrogen out of waste tyres to replace virgin, raw materials.'
As part of the green steel production, tyres are put into a high-temperature electric ark furnace to extract hydrogen so iron oxide can be turned into iron as part of a chemical transformation. 'It's the rubber that contains all these other elements,' Professor Sahajwalla said.
'It's the tyres that give you these other molecules like hydrogen which then participates in the reaction and that's what allows us to convert the iron oxide into iron which is what becomes steel.'
The finished product sold to customers depends on added alloys and additives.
Though rubber tyres can replace the need for coking coal, a lot of the success of green steel will also rely on recycling existing scrap metal.
Mr Parker said waste metal was unexpectedly in short supply. 'There's not enough scrap steel in the world to replace the demand for new steel,' he said.
British billionaire Sanjeev Gupta hopes to use renewable energy and scrap metal recycling to turn the old Whyalla steelworks in South Australia into a major supplier of new green steel.
He has a long-term plan to phase out old-fashioned blast furnaces and replace them with electric ark furnaces.
His GFG Alliance bought Arrium, which previously owned Molycop, before American private equity group American Industrial Partners rescued it in 2017.
Professor Sahajwalla said green steel was slowly replacing coking coal. 'Ultimately, the goal is full replacement,' she said. 'Are we already on that journey? The short answer's yes.'
Unlike coking coal, tyres can also produce hydrogen, which can be turned into gas or a liquid.
Nonetheless, Mr Parker conceded green steel production, involving an electric ark furnace instead of a traditional blast furnace, was still a costlier method of making steel than coal or iron ore-derived methods.
'The issue is the cost of producing hydrogen through electrolysis is very high so there's got to be some breakthrough technically to get it down to a cost where you can afford to use hydrogen to make or produce iron ore to go into something like an electric ark furnace,' he said.
Making steel out of old tyres at least solves the problem of landfill. 'It's about being clever, let's use it in a way that maximises value from this waste,' Professor Sahajwalla said.
The highly anticipated Oxford University and AstraZeneca vaccine has been approved for use in Britain - and millions of doses are expected to land in Australia in just two months
The Australian Government invested more than $3billion through agreements for four separate Covid-19 vaccines to be rolled out, with Mr Hunt predicting all Australians will receive the jab by the end of October.
'The Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine is progressing well both in terms of results and in terms of its passage through the UK, US and European processes.
'First, it's not just on track, but we are hopeful that we will have both domestic production and international import ahead of schedule. And I think that's reassuring, reaffirming, and an important point of hope.'
The health minister said the data from the final assessments of the vaccine by the Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) were expected in late January or early February.
Fifty million doses of the jab will be produced onshore by biotech company, CSL.
Australia has also secured 10million doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine which is expected to be rolled out in March, going first to aged care residents and health workers.
The Novavax vaccine is also expected to hit Australian shores around May next year.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, which has been described as a 'game changer', was given the green light by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency . The UK has ordered 100 million doses of the vaccine - enough to vaccinate 50 million people.
The United Kingdom was the first country to approve the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine, which has a lower cost and is easier to store than other vaccines that have already been approved.
The vaccine – called ChAdOx1 nCoV-19 – uses a harmless, weakened version of a common virus which causes a cold in chimpanzees.
Researchers have already used this technology to produce vaccines against a number of pathogens including flu and Zika.
The virus is genetically modified so that it is impossible for it to reproduce in humans and cause infection.
Scientists have transferred the genetic instructions for coronavirus's specific 'spike protein' – which it needs to invade cells – to the vaccine.
When the vaccine enters cells inside the body, it uses this genetic code to force the body's own cells to produce the surface spike protein of the coronavirus.
This induces an immune response because it makes those cells look like the virus, which effectively works as a training aid for the immune system to learn how to fight the virus if the real thing gets into the body.
Health secretary Matt Hancock hailed the approval of the critical vaccine on Wednesday saying it means the UK will be 'out' of the coronavirus crisis by the Spring
AstraZeneca boss Pascal Soriot said deliveries would start tomorrow, adding: 'Vaccination will start next week and we will get to one million a week and beyond that very rapidly. We can go to two million.'
The Oxford vaccine is the second vaccine that has been given the green light for public roll-out after the Pfizer vaccine - which has also been approved in the US. The UK was the first country in the world to approve the vaccine for public use.
Studies have shown that the vaccine has an average efficacy rate of 70 percent, with this number rising to 90 percent when half a dose was followed by a full dose.
The Oxford/AstraZeneca jab, which has been described as a 'game changer', was given the green light by the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency.
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesman said: 'The Government has today accepted the recommendation from the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency to authorise Oxford University/AstraZeneca's Covid-19 vaccine for use.
'This follows rigorous clinical trials and a thorough analysis of the data by experts at the MHRA, which has concluded that the vaccine has met its strict standards of safety, quality and effectiveness.'
Professor Andrew Pollard, director of the Oxford Vaccine Group and chief investigator of the Oxford trial, said: 'The regulator's assessment that this is a safe and effective vaccine is a landmark moment, and an endorsement of the huge effort from a devoted international team of researchers and our dedicated trial participants.
'Though this is just the beginning, we will start to get ahead of the pandemic, protect health and economies when the vulnerable are vaccinated everywhere, as many as possible as soon possible.'
Data published in The Lancet medical journal in early December showed the vaccine was 62 percent effective in preventing Covid-19 among a group of 4,440 people given two standard doses of the vaccine when compared with 4,455 people given a placebo drug.
Of 1,367 people given a half first dose of the vaccine followed by a full second dose, there was 90 percent protection against Covid-19 when compared with a control group of 1,374 people.
The overall Lancet data, which was peer-reviewed, set out full results from clinical trials of more than 20,000 people.
Among the people given the placebo drug, 10 were admitted to hospital with coronavirus, including two with severe Covid which resulted in one death. But among those receiving the vaccine, there were no hospital admissions or severe cases.
The half dose followed by a full dose regime came about as a result of an accidental dosing error.
However, the MHRA was made aware of what happened and clinical trials for the vaccine were allowed to continue.
The overall Lancet data, which was peer-reviewed, set out full results from clinical trials of more than 20,000 people.
Among the people given the placebo drug, 10 were admitted to hospital with coronavirus, including two with severe Covid which resulted in one death. But among those receiving the vaccine, there were no hospital admissions or severe cases.
The half dose followed by a full dose regime came about as a result of an accidental dosing error.
However, the MHRA was made aware of what happened and clinical trials for the vaccine were allowed to continue.
Does it differ from Pfizer and Moderna’s vaccine?
Yes. The jabs from Pfizer and Moderna use messenger RNA (mRNA) to trigger immunity to Covid-19.
Conventional vaccines are produced using weakened forms of the virus, but mRNAs use only the virus’s genetic code.
An mRNA vaccine is injected into the body where it enters cells and tells them to create antigens.
These antigens are recognised by the immune system and prepare it to fight coronavirus.
No actual virus is needed to create an mRNA vaccine. This means the rate at which the vaccine can be produced is accelerated.
What about antibodies and T-cells?
The Pfizer, AstraZeneca and Moderna vaccines have been shown to provoke both an antibody and T-cell response.
Antibodies are proteins that bind to the body’s foreign invaders and tell the immune system it needs to take action.
T-cells are a type of white blood cell which hunt down infected cells in the body and destroy them.
Nearly all effective vaccines induce both an antibody and a T-cell response.
A study on the AstraZeneca vaccine found that levels of T-cells peaked 14 days after vaccination, while antibody levels peaked after 28 days.
Boost for Aussie business as China calls for broken relationship with Australia to be fixed as 'early as possible'
They are the ones hurting now, with widespread electricity shortages etc
Trade and political hostilities between Australia and China could be on the mend after relations between the nations escalated into a bitter year-long $20billion war.
China's foreign minister Wang Yi has indicated he wants relations repaired 'as early as possible' - but added the ball is in Australia's court.
Antagonism rapidly escalated after Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an independent inquiry into the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic from its source in the Chinese city of Wuhan back in April.
China responded by slapping tariffs on Australian wine and barley, adding sanctions on beef, wheat, timber, cotton, lamb, coal and lobster.
Mr Wang hinted at a possible truce at a recent live-streamed private event, where he was asked by former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd whether a practical way of re-stabilisation relations could be accommodated.
In a transcript obtained by the Sydney Morning Herald, Mr Wang conceded improving relations would be difficult if Australia continues to see China as a threat.
'If Australia sees China not as a threat, but a partner, then for the issues between us there are better chances that we find solutions. So I would kick the ball to Australia,' he said.
'We hope that the relationship can come back to the right track as early as possible and we would welcome efforts by all who want the relations to improve to make some efforts.'
Mr Wang also expressed concern about the 'largely negative' views about China in Australia.
His comments come days after Australia made an official complaint to the World Trade Organisation to investigate the 80 per cent barley tariff imposed by Beijing.
Australian wine also incurred 212 per cent import taxes in November, following months of trade intimidation against beef, lobster, timber, lamb and even coal exporters.
ANU's National Security Colleges head Rory Medcalf described Mr Wang's comments 'at best mild and conditional'.
'There's no admission that China bears any fault in the deterioration in ties, or even acknowledgement that it is using ongoing coercive measures – economic restrictions or hostage diplomacy – against countries like Australia and Canada,' he told the publication.
Australia wheat exports poised to deliver $6b windfall
Australian grain is flying off farms regardless of China’s trade sanctions, and wheat shipments alone are set to hit 4 million tonnes in December.
A whopper wheat crop, now predicted to be Australia’s biggest ever, could reap $6 billion in export earnings as grain flows back into traditional and rarely accessed markets.
While a flotilla of coal-carrying vessels sits in limbo off China, the action will be non-stop at Australia’s grain port terminals well into 2021.
Australian grain is being helped by doubts about supply out of Russia, where the government is trying to control domestic inflation by slapping a $US25 a tonne tax on grain exports.
GrainCorp port terminals that gathered cobwebs last year are now booked solid through to August-September.
It is a similar story for the operators of port terminals from Newcastle in NSW all the way around Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia as shipping slots are gobbled up by hungry grain traders and marketers.
The export program includes about 1 million tonnes of wheat bound for China over the coming weeks.
It is understood some grain traders, particularly multinationals operating in Australia, did not support the Morrison government’s decision to appeal against China’s 80.5 per cent barley tariffs to the World Trade Organisation.
Nearly all have refused to endorse Australia’s WTO appeal out of concern about reprisals, despite most farmers supporting the move.
Grain industry experts are tipping the harvest will wind down to produce 34-35 million tonnes of wheat and about 13 million tonnes of barley.
If so, it will be the biggest wheat crop Australia has grown and the second biggest barley crop. It also puts Australia on track to export about 22 million tonnes of wheat and 7 million tonnes of barley by September 30.
CBH marketing and trading boss Jason Craig said Australia was exporting from nearly all ports, something it had not done since 2016-17. He said it was price competitive into most overseas markets.
“We are going to places, East Africa for example, where we haven’t been since 2016-17,” he said.
“There has been strong selling and Australia is very competitive in the marketplace for wheat, barley and canola.
“People are covering their requirements as supply out of the Black Sea has been a little uncertain and that is encouraging people to come back to Australia.
“In particular you are seeing south-east Asia returning to Australian grain as their base. We would expect that for the majority of next year.”
Wheat sales into Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea are strong and the Middle East has emerged as the biggest buyer of barley in the absence of China.
There is also the prospect of stronger wheat prices for Australian farmers as Russia is set to impose its tax from February through to at least June. The benchmark wheat price at Kwinana in WA has already climbed from $300 a tonne on December 9 to $315 a tonne following the doubts about Russian exports.
Egypt bought wheat this week at a higher price than its last tender after no Russian wheat was offered for sale.
Emerald Grain chief executive David Johnson said there was strong demand for Australian wheat and barley across markets in Asia, the Middle East and the east coast of Africa. “The shipping stem [port terminal capacity bookings] in Australia is being populated very rapidly,” he said. “It is good for everyone. The cupboard was bare coming into this season after two years of well-below-average production.
https://www.hellenicshippingnews.com/australia-wheat-exports-poised-to-deliver-6b-windfall/
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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30 December, 2020
Australian culture denied by obsession with cancel culture
Tony Abbott
With public spending on an unprecedented scale and previously unimaginable restrictions on our daily lives, 2020 hasn’t been a great year for “small government conservatives”.
But with “pandemic pragmatism” tempering the instinct for lower spending and greater freedom, there’s now scope to focus on the other main element in the conservative creed: namely love of country and appreciation of our history.
And there’s more need for that too, as the Australia that emerges from the pandemic will not only have more debt and bigger government. As things stand, it’s likely to be less self-confident about what holds us together as a nation.
The pandemic has coincided with a renewed assault on our history as fundamentally racist, and requiring atonement, even though Australia had become a magnet to migrants, eventually from all over the world, even while it was still a penal colony.
It can’t have been lost on anyone concerned about political correctness and the cancel culture that police in Victoria failed to make a single arrest when 10,000 people marched for Black Lives Matter, but made 400 arrests at a much smaller protest against ongoing health restrictions.
Yet almost nothing was made of this double standard – partly because the leaders who would normally notice it were preoccupied with the pandemic and trying to make a national cabinet work.
As well as habituating people to accept restrictions on freedom and massive government spending “for our own good”, the pandemic seems to have accelerated the elevation of opinion over fact and how we feel about things over what actually happened.
We know that Aboriginal people had inhabited Australia for tens of thousands of years prior to British settlement. Post 1788, their society was disrupted and their population devastated, mostly by disease, occasionally by violence.
They weren’t always given a vote, didn’t usually get the same wage and didn’t often get the same justice.
But we also know that Captain James Cook appreciated the qualities of the Aboriginal people he found; that the British government enjoined Governor Arthur Phillip to “live in amity” with the native people; that Phillip refrained from vindictiveness or punitive measures as a matter of policy, even after he had himself been speared at Manly; and that white men were hanged for the murder of blacks as early as the 1830s after the Myall Creek massacre.
We also know that massive efforts have been made to give Aboriginal people a better life, first by missionaries and later by government.
It’s true that Aboriginal people are hugely over-represented in our gaols, even now. But that’s because they’re heavily over-represented in our courts and crime statistics; as are all people, regardless of background, who don’t finish school, don’t have jobs and live in dysfunctional households.
At least as much as some belated measure of recognition in the Constitution, Aboriginal people need to go to school and to take jobs at the same rate as other Australians, for reconciliation to be complete.
In the end, cancel culture is not about correcting a particular injustice or righting a particular historical wrong. It denies moral legitimacy to the whole Australian project, just as it also does in the United States and Britain.
You can argue that things could have been done better and that more must be done now; but it’s hard to maintain that British settlement should not have happened; or that, on balance, it wasn’t a golden moment in human history.
On balance, it was a blessing that the British settled Australia. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary Portuguese, Spanish or French governor declaring, as Phillip did, that there could be “no slavery in a free land”.
Even in those days, it was the Royal Navy that was doing its best to extirpate the West African slave trade to the Americas.
There are now calls for a pandemic-triggered “great reset” from the globalist establishment. This won’t just mean entrenching bigger government and higher spending.
Inevitably, it will also involve a new push to fundamentally rethink institutions that have stood the test of time.
In Australia, this always translates into agitation to change our flag and to remove the crown from our constitution.
Yet it’s dead wrong to see only the flag of another country (albeit our founder) within our own, rather than the crosses of St Patrick, St Andrew and St George representing our Christian heritage; or to neglect the symbolism of the Southern Cross with its significance to indigenous people.
It’s wrong to focus on a “foreign monarch” when that crown – and the ideals of duty and service that we have assimilated – has been with us every step of our journey as a nation.
Besides, it’s vandalism to demolish anything when there’s nothing better to replace it; and it’s arrogance in any one generation to think that its collective wisdom wholly surpasses that of every predecessor.
Our response to the Black Lives Matter protests was too apologetic.
Instead of looking the other way while their statues were graffitied, we should have resolved to end the neglect of people like Cook and Phillip because, without them, there would have been no Australia.
Cook was a scientist and a humanist, as well as one of the greatest explorers in all history.
Phillip didn’t so much found a penal colony as begin a nation; whose freedom, fairness and prosperity quickly became the envy of the Earth.
Instead of empathising with the would-be statue toppers, there should be a renewed emphasis on the wondrous legacy of the English-speaking version of Western Civilisation: including the world’s common language, the industrial revolution, the mother of parliaments, and the emancipation of minorities.
That perspective is at least as worthy of permeating the national curriculum as the currently-ordained indigenous, sustainability, and Asian ones.
And if there are too many statues to by-gone imperial potentates, let’s add a few more to those who should be Australian icons. To Sir John Monash, for instance, the Jewish citizen-soldier, hailed as “the most resourceful general in the British Army”, who broke the stalemate on the Western Front and helped to deliver victory in the Great War.
And to Lord Florey, the inventor of penicillin, that’s saved literally hundreds of millions of lives.
And if there’s too many “dead white males”, let’s enlarge our history, not rewrite it and be less blinkered about those who have made a difference.
People like Neville Bonner, for instance, the first Indigenous member of the Australian parliament; and Dame Enid Lyons, our first female cabinet minister. Neither of whom, as yet, seem to have statues in their honour.
The pandemic will pass. What should never pass is respect for the people and the institutions that have made modern Australia.
The economy will never be unimportant; because there can be no community without an economy to sustain it.
But post-pandemic, conservatives are likely to be patriots first and economic reformers second.
The coming campaign admonition might as well be “society, stupid”; because one thing the pandemic has helped to clarify is the new fault line in politics: not between those who want bigger and those who want smaller government, but between those who are proud of their country and those who can’t help wanting to remake it.
Of course, those with a preference for freedom and a concern for lasting prosperity still have to “fight the good fight” but also to focus even more on the one main element of conservatism that’s not in temporary eclipse.
Namely love of country, with all that involves: respect for our institutions, pride in our history and faith in our future.
Australia's Joint Strike Fighters declared ready for deployment after passing trials
The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) has declared its multi-billion-dollar fleet of Joint Strike Fighters is ready for deployment, two years after the first F-35As were delivered from the United States.
Since 2018, the controversial stealth fighters have been "rigorously tested" by the Defence Department which has now determined they have reached "initial operating capability" (IOC).
So far, Australia has accepted 30 of the Lockheed Martin designed aircraft but will eventually acquire 72 Joint Strike Fighters from the US at a cost of $17 billion.
Defence Minister Linda Reynolds has welcomed the IOC milestone, describing F-35A as critical to the Australian Defence Force.
"The fifth-generation F-35A, along with the F/A-18F Super Hornet and EA-18G Growler, is key to our air combat capability and critical to achieving the objectives set out in the 2020 Defence Strategic Update to Shape, Deter and Respond," Ms Reynolds said.
"The Australian Defence Force now has an F-35A squadron ready to conduct technologically advanced strike and air combat roles, and another squadron dedicated to providing world-class training here in Australia."
Two F-35A Joint Strike Fighters in a hangar.
The total cost of the F-35A Joint Strike Fighters is $17 billion.(ABC Newcastle: Ben Millington)
Defence claims the F-35A boasts the world's most advanced air combat technology, allowing it to gather more information and share it with other aircraft, Navy ships and Army units quicker than ever before.
The RAAF now has more than 40 qualified F-35A pilots and 220 maintainers trained on the F-35A.
Defence Industry Minister Melissa Price said 50 Australian companies had so far shared in $2.7 billion in contracts to help build the JSF for various partner nations across the globe.
"Australia will continue to work with the United States F-35 Joint Program Office and our industry partners as more aircraft are delivered through to 2023, and a mature capability is achieved," Ms Price said.
Australia first signed up to the controversial JSF program in 2002, and successive federal governments have faced criticisms for delays and cost blowouts on the multi-billion-dollar project.
La Trobe University aims to improve reading teaching in education degrees
Learning to read isn't as easy as learning to talk, because it is not an innate ability — it has to be taught. At least, that's the battle cry of phonics advocates on one side of the 'reading wars'.
If you turn the debate book over, you'll find other literacy experts who disagree and believe that reading is a natural ability.
But with student literacy levels falling across all states last year, both sides concede that it is time for a rethink on how trainee teachers are being instructed to teach Australian children to read — because they are clearly struggling.
The La Trobe University's new Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab, co-founded by professor of cognitive psychology Pamela Snow, aims to fill what it sees as a crucial curriculum gap in tertiary education degrees.
The lab aims to give teachers the knowledge needed to teach 'systematic synthetic phonics' more comprehensively in Australian primary schools.
Sometimes referred to simply as 'phonics' or 'structured literacy instruction', the method stems from The Simple View of Reading, a scientific theoretical framework from the 1980s developed by psychologists Philip Gough and William Tunmer.
"The simple view of reading tells us that in order to get meaning out of text, you've got to be able to crack the code," Professor Snow said. "So you've got to recognize that the squiggles on the page — they are print representations of speech sounds, so there is a code."
Professor Snow's first short course at the lab in September attracted more than 800 participants — mostly teachers from around the country who had heard about the method online or from fellow teachers.
"What we hear repeatedly from teachers when we talk about the simple view of reading is — 'I've never heard of this'," she said. "So that's a really good example of high-quality cognitive psychology research that I think is like the family china that belongs to teachers, but isn't being given to teachers."
The basic premise is that children are most likely to become successful readers when they are explicitly taught how to break words down into letter sounds and word parts, and use their understanding of those parts to comprehend the meaning and sound out unfamiliar words.
In the early years, the focus is on attaching individual letters to sounds. Later on, children learn about word parts and their meanings.
Professor Snow said there were many scientific and psychological studies supporting the efficacy of structured literacy instruction, especially with young children.
She said that on the other side of the so-called 'reading wars' was an approach called 'whole language'. "So, [the thinking is] we don't specifically teach children how to talk, so therefore we should not need to specifically teach them how to read, we'll just immerse them in lots of text and they'll somehow intuit the process of reading," Professor Snow said.
Professor Snow said more recently a method called 'balanced literacy' had come into favour, which aimed to strike a balanced between different methods including synthetic phonics and whole language.
Still a divisive issue
Melbourne-based Year 1 teacher Troy Wood said he was shocked by how divisive the issue was when he became an early-childhood educator several years ago. "I didn't know about this debate until a couple of years ago," Mr Wood said.
Professor Snow said she agreed systematic synthetic phonics shouldn't be the only method taught, but it should be more of a focus than it was now.
And despite its opponents, phonics is being adopted increasingly in government policy, albeit slowly and carefully.
Last year, the Federal Government launched a free voluntary phonics health check for Year 1 students, citing a report that found phonics "to be the most effective way of teaching children to read words accurately and fluently".
a woman in glasses at a press conference
The South Australian Government recently reported that it had experienced a lift in Year 1 literacy levels after introducing a phonics check in 2018.
And just last week, the NSW Minister for Education and Early Childhood Learning Sarah Mitchell wrote an opinion piece declaring that phonics had "won the reading wars", and that from next year, phonics would be compulsory for every Year 1 class in the state.
"Study after study shows that if phonics is not taught properly, student outcomes suffer across the board," Ms Mitchell wrote.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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29 December, 2020
A non-Aborigine?
The media are quick to call admirable people Aborigines even when they are to all appearances white. So how come the guy below was not identified as an Aborigine? He is in fact a fairly typical urban Aborigine. Urban Aborigines do typically have some white ancestry.
The Left-led media try their best to create a picture that it the opposite of reality. One wonders if that does any of the good that is presunmably intended. Can any good come from a blatant lie?
A man has been charged with murder after allegedly stabbing his girlfriend's father to death in front of his family on Christmas Eve.
Garth Michael Reid is accused of killing Warren Toby, 53, just before midnight on Friday in the front garden of a home in North Ipswich, south-west of Brisbane.
The 33-year-old allegedly used a 'sharp implement' to stab the man multiple times as horrified family members watched on.
Police said the group were drinking before an argument broke out and spilled onto the street.
Paramedics desperately tried to resuscitate Mr Toby but he could not be revived.
Reid, who was in a relationship with the alleged victim's 30-year-old daughter, was arrested at 5pm the following day at his home in Woodgate.
He was charged with murder, assault occasioning actual bodily harm and wilful damage.
Reid did not apply for bail and will appear in Ipswich Magistrates Court on February 3.
Shocking moment a man finds a HUGE five-foot-long python balancing on his garden fence
No big deal. I found one inside my house a month ago
The five-foot-long carpet python was spotted enjoying the sunshine in the backyard of a home in Newcastle, New South Wales this week.
The homeowner recorded the moment he stumbled upon the giant serpent and posted the footage to Reddit. 'Yep, Aussie summer is in full swing,' the caption read.
Push for radical shift in hotel quarantine system from city hotels to country areas
Professor Patrick McGorry, a leading psychiatrist in youth mental health and 2010 Australian of the Year, is among those calling for more support to be offered to travellers in hotel quarantine.
Among Professor McGorry's suggestions is to radically change the hotel quarantine system by moving it away from CBD hotels.
"It might be convenient because these hotels are empty but in the past, quarantine stations were placed remote from major population centres," he said.
"Prior to the 1950s, tuberculosis sanatoria were often placed in quite pleasant rural surroundings so you did have space, you did actually have rest and a sort of sense of calm and serenity.
"I don't know if enough thought's gone into that on this occasion."
Professor McGorry said the change would be beneficial for more than just those in quarantine.
"If there is a leakage or there are incidents or spread [of the virus] out of the quarantine location, if it's a more isolated setting or a smaller population base … the risk to the general public surely would be a lot less," he said.
Opposition spokesman Tony Krsticevic said the Liberal Party was calling for an independent inquiry into the state's preparedness to deal with the coronavirus.
He said a key consideration should be alternative forms of quarantine, including facilities in rural areas or hotels with balconies.
"We know that when people go into quarantine, into lockdown, some of them are going to struggle and we need to understand the experiences that they're going through," Mr Krsticevic said on Monday. "We should have alternatives for those who can't cope and for those who have mental health issues."
At the same time, WA's Health Incident Coordinator, Robyn Lawrence, said people in the hotels had been receiving appropriate mental health support.
"Through the health and wellbeing teams and a very dedicated mental health team for those with more serious mental health issues, we've been able to support more than 20,000 international travellers safely through hotel quarantine to return to their families and friends," she said.
Australian Medical Association (AMA) WA President Andrew Miller echoed calls for the system to be overhauled, saying it was "critical to our future success in 2021". "You can't just assume [people are] going to be OK if you stick them in a hotel room and ask them to stay there," he said.
Allowing for fresh air or trips outside were at the top of his wishlist, but Dr Miller said abandoning hotel quarantine entirely should be considered for some international arrivals.
"There may well be situations in which it's entirely appropriate for international arrivals to be … looked after at home or at another residence away from hotel quarantine."
Divorce courts clogged with case backlog: Pauline Hanson demands judges lose long holidays
Divorce courts are clogged with a year-long backlog of cases, as highly-paid judges enjoy up to 10 weeks’ holidays while postponing court hearings until 2022.
One Nation senator Pauline Hanson demanded that judges be stripped of their generous perks, with holidays cut back to the four or five weeks a year granted to ordinary Australian workers.
“The courts are overworked and have got a backlog of 20,000 cases,’’ she told News Corp Australia. “Cases are taking months, if not a couple of years, to be heard.
“Judges’ entitlements are excessive and I don’t think judges should be appointed for life or ‘til they’re 70. “They get burnt out, and close to retirement they go on stress leave and sick leave.’’
Senator Hanson is deputy chair of a federal parliamentary inquiry into family law, which has revealed that some children have been caught in seven-year custody battles.
Divorce disputes are heard in two courts – the Family Court, which fielded a five-year high of 21,054 applications in 2019/2020, or the Federal Circuit Court (FCC), which received 85,563 family law cases, including 45,886 divorce applications the same year.
The 33 Family Court judges, who hear the most complex disputes, are paid a base salary of $468,020 plus 15 per cent superannuation and a car allowance – with eight weeks’ holidays.
The 68 FCC judges are paid $394,980 plus superannuation and a car allowance, with six weeks’ holidays and the ability to “purchase’’ a bonus four weeks’ leave through salary sacrifice – giving them up to 10 weeks’ holiday each year.
Judicial salaries were frozen this year after the Remuneration Tribunal knocked back a pay rise due to the COVID-19 recession.
Law Council of Australia president Pauline Wright yesterday warned that some separated couples were waiting three years for a judgment.
She said the Family Court had a backlog of at least a year’s worth of cases.
Ms Wright said some hearings scheduled for 2020 had been cancelled by email and postponed due to the pandemic – with some final hearing dates set for 2022 at the earliest.
“Even before COVID-19, some families were having to wait up to three years, some longer, to have their matters resolved,’’ Ms Wright said.
“The sheer workload, coupled with too few judges to carry it out, is creating delays, leaving families and children in limbo and often at risk while waiting for their matter to be heard.’’
Internal court data provided to the parliamentary inquiry last month reveals that two out of three FCC judges are juggling more than 300 matters on their dockets.
One unnamed Brisbane judge was dealing with 659 cases, while another had more than 500. A judge in Melbourne and another in Adelaide also had more than 500 cases. A Wollongong judge had more than 600 cases and nationally 21 judges were dealing with more than 400 cases each.
In regional courts, some judges were hearing 60 cases a day.
The Family Court has a backlog of 6720 cases – including 2586 lodged more than a year ago, and 1508 cases at least two years old, the latest Productivity Commission data reveals.
The FCC has 50,791 family law cases in its queue, including 12,834 more than a year old.
Its judges have been swamped with immigration cases since COVID-19 border closures this year.
The inquiry’s chairman, Kevin Andrews, said the most pressing issues raised by evidence to the inquiry were “the cost of family law proceedings, the delays in the system, and the seeming unenforceabilty of orders.”
Federal Attorney-General Christian Porter yesterday vowed to press ahead with plans to merge the two courts next year.
“This is an area in need of urgent reform to improve the system for all those involved, most especially for families who should be able to rely on the courts to help them resolve matters at the end of a relationship as quickly, efficiently and at as low cost as possible,’’ he said.
Ms Wright said lawyers opposed the merger and wanted a stand-alone federal law court instead, with more specialised judges to fast-track cases and extra training to deal with cases of domestic violence.
Mr Porter said the Morrison government would spend $140 million on family law over the next four years, including funding for another judge, five more registrars and extra support staff for courts.
“There is little point in pushing more funding into a failed structure and additional funding needs to attach to structural reform of the courts,’’ he said.
Interest rate collapse saves home buyers thousands but hits savers
Saving for your retirement is a mug's game now
The pandemic recession will end up delivering savings worth tens of thousands of dollars to the nation's home buyers due to a collapse in mortgage interest rates, but will also cruel the savings plans of millions more.
Data compiled by Canstar reveals the extent of the drop in mortgage rates through 2020 that will deliver ongoing benefits to those buying new or refinancing their existing home loan.
At the start of the year a person with a $300,000, 25-year mortgage faced an average variable mortgage rate of 3.73 per cent. The monthly repayments on such a loan were $1539 and over the life of the mortgage the buyer would repay $461,739.
By year's end, the average interest rate on a $300,000 mortgage had fallen to 3.32 per cent. The monthly repayment is $1473 with the buyer repaying $441,920 over the life of the mortgage.
The savings have been even bigger for those able to sniff out the lowest mortgage rates on the market. At the start of the year, the best rate was 2.69 per cent which meant monthly repayments of $1375. The best rate now is 1.99 per cent with a monthly repayment of $1280.
The Reserve Bank has signalled it is not expecting to increase official interest for at least 3 years.
Canstar group executive of financial services Steve Mickenbecker said bargain hunters with good credit levels had done exceptionally well, with the lowest rate in the market 1.77 per cent for a loan-to-value ratio of up to 60 per cent. "Home loan rate cuts have been one piece of good news for borrowers in 2020," he said.
There has been strong growth in fixed rate mortgages this year as buyers seek to lock-in record low rates. The average rate on a three-year fixed mortgage has fallen from 3.15 per cent to 2.3 per cent, a difference of $130 a month or more than $39,000 over the life of the loan. The best three-year fixed rate is 1.89 per cent, down from 2.69 per cent at the start of the year.
"Much of the interest rate action has been in fixed rates, with five-year fixed rates down as low as 1.99 per cent and two-year rates starting from 1.88 per cent. Even the big banks have joined the fixed rate frenzy, with rates as low as 1.99 per cent for four years," Mr Mickenbecker said.
Low rates are expected to be the norm for coming years. The Reserve Bank has signalled it is not expecting to increase official interest for at least three years.
It's been a much tougher year, interest-wise, for people with money. As banks have cut their mortgage rates, they've also slashed their savings rates.
Canstar recorded 529 cuts to savings rates across the year, split between regular accounts and bonus savings accounts.
The average regular saving rate was 1.12 per cent at the start of the year but it is now just 0.43 per cent. For a person with $10,000 in their account, the drop in interest equates to a $740 in compound savings over a decade. The current inflation rate is 0.7 per cent, meaning a person holding cash is going backwards in real terms.
The average bonus savings rate, which are often introductory rates, have fallen from 1.47 per cent 0.75 per cent.
AMP Capital chief economist Shane Oliver said record low mortgage rates, coupled with government home-buyer incentives, income support measures and bank payment holidays, were boosting home prices at present.
How Australia navigated an economic jolt not seen for a century
But high unemployment, the collapse in immigration numbers and weak rental markets were weighing on inner city areas and units in Sydney and Melbourne.
Those with money were likely to be disappointed with their savings performances. "Cash and bank deposits are likely to provide very poor returns, given the ultra-low cash rate of just 0.1 per cent," he said.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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27 December, 2020
Six Tasmanian Aborigines killed unlawfully in 1827
The killer was a livestock handler so it seems probable that the Aborigines came to attention for cattle stealing, a grave offence in those days
It is important to note that the killing was illegal -- not part of any official policy. It would in fact have been prosecuted if it became known. So it was no evidence of the colonialist "genocide" that some Leftist historians assert. It is in fact evidence against that
A soldier's diary disintegrating in Ireland's national library has revealed disturbing evidence of an undocumented massacre of Aboriginal people in Tasmania in the colony's early years.
The diary belonged to Private Robert McNally, posted to Van Diemen's Land in the 1820s, and records in gritty detail colonial life and encounters with settlers and a notorious bushranger.
But it's his account of his part in the cover up a massacre of men and women on March 21, 1827, near Campbell Town in the Northern Midlands, that stunned University of Tasmania history professor Pam Sharpe.
Searching the National Library of Ireland catalogue for documents about settlers, Professor Sharpe found a note referring to "two volumes in bad condition" of a soldier's writings.
Unearthed, the diaries were identified as the work of McNally, an Irishman who served in Ireland, India, Sydney and Van Diemen's Land, Professor Sharpe told ABC Radio Hobart.
Professor Sharpe said she approached the find with low expectations, but that soon changed when she got her hands on the first of two notebooks. "I didn't hold out much hope that it would be interesting, but I opened it and it was absolutely fascinating," she said.
What she read prompted Professor Sharpe to divert her research funding to have the handwritten entries digitised. Efforts are underway to conserve what remains of a second McNally volume in poor condition.
"It is extremely unusual, very valuable, and completely worth diverting my research to investigate because some of these things aren't on the record about Van Diemen's Land," Professor Sharpe said.
She said the diaries recounted McNally's time with the infantry from 1815 to 1836. "He gets to Van Diemen's Land around about the time that Governor [George] Arthur comes — 1825. He's here for three years," Professor Sharpe said.
"The critical thing is that it's the only diary of an ordinary soldier that anyone has found for colonial Australia."
Professor Sharpe said she was disturbed to read McNally's account of the aftermath of a deadly confrontation between a livestock handler named Shaw and local Indigenous people on the Sutherland Estate.
"McNally doesn't actually see any Aboriginal people for the first few months, but then he is involved in some alarming episodes," she said.
"He was called to [the scene of] a massacre that my researchers and I can't find any other evidence of."
McNally wrote:
"A man of the name of Shaw came to me with information that he had killed six of the natives, two of which was woman.
"I advised him to say no more about it but keep it as a secret as he would be called to an account before a justice. He took me to the place where I saw him make a bonfire of these bodies."
A lot of violence perpetrated against Aboriginal people happened in remote areas of Van Diemen's Land and many incidents were not recorded, Professor Sharpe said.
"It is horrific, absolutely awful, but unfortunately it is probably the story of what happened to a lot of Aboriginal people in the 1820s," she said
The University of Newcastle's Professor Lyndall Ryan, who created an online map of massacres in Australia, said there were lots of massacres that never came to light.
"Most of them were carried out in secret. If you were caught, you would be hanged," Professor Ryan said.
'Colonials hid massacres'
Heather Sculthorpe, chief executive of the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre, said any new information would need to be substantiated.
"It will be exciting if there is new information, but we do need it to be historically verified," she said.
"There has been a lot of work done on the history of Tasmania, but of course there is more to be found.
"The way that colonials would have written about massacres would have been hidden."
Professor Sharpe said she had only had four hours to examine the McNally diary before returning home to Hobart. She hadn't even seen the second volume, because it was covered in mould and deemed too fragile.
But the research continues.
"After a lot of effort, and the involvement of the Irish ambassador to Australia, the National Library of Ireland is now conserving [the second volume]," Professor Sharpe said.
"It is undergoing an enormous restoration process in the Marsh's Library in Dublin, where they're experts on 18th century paper conservation."
According to his diary, McNally witnessed another famous event in Tasmania's history.
Matthew Brady was known as the "gentleman bushranger" and one of his most audacious actions was the capture of the entire township of Sorell, near Hobart, in November 1825.
His "gentlemanly" attributes included rarely robbing women and fine manners while stealing from men.
"To start with [McNally is] chasing Matthew Brady, who more or less held the whole island to ransom," Professor Sharpe said.
"I mean, Brady and his gang are running rampant.
"Robert is part of the military force trying to capture him and they have an eyeball-to-eyeball encounter at Sorell jail and Brady gets away yet again.
"That's quite a famous episode, so it's just fantastic to have a very close and detailed account of this."
Immense drinking and women trouble
Professor Sharpe said the McNally diary also documented the minutiae of colonial life.
"There is a lot of everyday detail, including what they wore, what they do all the time and all the drinking they do, which is immense," she said.
"He recounts his liaisons with women. We have a lot of quite explicit detail of his affairs, which I hadn't expected of an early 19th century journal.
"He really struggles with forming relationships with women."
Signs of authenticity
Professor Sharpe said McNally was born in the 1790s and died in 1874 in Ireland.
She said she had strong indications the diary was McNally's own work and not that of an amanuensis, or person employed to take dictation or copy other people's experiences, which was common at the time.
She said the library conservator had established the diary was very early 19th century handmade paper.
"We've been able to fact check against military records, newspaper reports and so far, Robert McNally is where he says he is," Professor Sharpe said.
"We know that writers of military memoirs sometimes put themselves into the spotlight, as Albert Facey did in A Fortunate Life when he gives a description of the beginning of Gallipoli, when we know he wasn't there.
"In the McNally diaries there is quite a famous incident in Ireland called the Churchtown Burnings and Robert says he is nearby but not actually there.
"This gives us confidence that, when he gives himself a central role in the Sorell jail hold-up by Matthew Brady a few years later, he was actually there, and he did what he describes."
Robert Hogan is working as a research assistant on the diaries, and has found Private McNally's service record in the British National Archives.
"The information he gives in the journal is consistent with military history," Mr Hogan said.
"I found that he joined the 96th Regiment in 1816 and when they disbanded in 1818 he moved immediately to join the 40th Regiment.
"His length of service in each place is consistent with what he says in his diaries."
WA doctors call for more 'humane' quarantine with access to fresh air after woman flees
Doctors in Western Australia have called for a more “humane” quarantine system with access to fresh air after a woman who described her experience as “traumatic” fled hotel quarantine and was later found by police.
Jenny Maree D’ubios hadn’t completed mandatory 14-day quarantine after arriving from overseas when she absconded on Saturday morning. WA police found her overnight at Rockingham hospital, south-west of Perth. She has been charged with failing to comply with a direction under the Emergency Management Act.
WA’s acting premier, Roger Cook, said D’ubios, who described her quarantine experience as “traumatic” on social media, had since returned a negative Covid-19 test result.
D’ubios on Facebook said she wanted a “non-toxic safe place to quarantine”, while also making several conspiracy theory claims.
The Australian Medical Association’s WA president, Dr Andrew Miller, said the hotel quarantine system needed to be more “humane”, with fresh air available to prevent people from trying to flee.
He also wants a “transparent and open” explanation of how the state’s quarantine system is working. “The quarantine seems to be a bit of a voluntary thing just now and the hospitals are overloaded,” Miller told reporters on Sunday.
“We know there are going to be uncooperative people, we know mistakes are going to be made, but in my job we have to have systems in place that make up for that, otherwise people die.
“Now unfortunately that’s also the case with hotel quarantine ... so there’s lots of work to be done because Covid is not taking the Christmas/new year period off.”
D’ubios was refused bail in Perth magistrates court on Sunday, the ABC reported, and was remanded in custody until 4 January.
Cook said the woman, who arrived in Perth from Madrid on 19 December, faced a maximum penalty of $50,000 or 12 months in prison.
While in hotel quarantine she had regular contact with an on-site medical, health and wellbeing team, he said, and was twice taken to Royal Perth hospital for medical assistance.
People quarantining in other states have shared similar experiences, describing a lack of fresh air and dirty rooms.
A woman who only wanted to be identified as Sophie and who is quarantining in a hotel in Chippendale in New South Wales told Guardian Australia that she had entered quarantine healthy but was now unwell, with allergies and back pain. She sent photos of her bed linen to Guardian Australia, which had red and brown stains on it.
Sophie said the rooms were not being cleaned, and some people had resorted to asking their loved ones to drop off vacuum cleaners and cleaning products.
“I asked the hotel to provide me with a vacuum cleaner but they said no, because I might contaminate it,” she said. “It is so unhealthy to live in a room which is not vacuumed, had no fresh air, and no ability to clean surfaces unless you call someone and ask for spray.”
She said medical staff at the hotel accused her of having obsessive compulsive disorder after her complaints about the dirty linen and dust, and encouraged her to take allergy tablets and sleeping pills.
“This system is designed to punish and humiliate, there is no other explanation,” Sophie said. “There is utter chaos and lack of coordination between government, police, ADF, the hotel, caterers and health care workers and it is infuriating.
“There is no oversight to ensure the different parties work efficiently together.”
In Victoria, a man was arrested in Melbourne after also escaping hotel quarantine, because of “anxiety”, he said. He was arrested by four police officers outside the Holiday Inn hotel on Saturday afternoon.
The man told the Melbourne radio station 3AW he didn’t believe he needed to be in the facility. He claimed he had returned from NSW in time to avoid compulsory hotel quarantine.
“I know it was wrong ... But I had told the medical staff, my anxiety is going to take over and I can’t control myself, and I’m just going to go out and try to leave until I’m forcibly stopped,” he said.
‘100 per cent’ COVID cure being produced in Australia
A vaccine said to be “100 per cent” effective in preventing severe cases of COVID-19 is coming soon, with the government increasingly confident of its ability.
A vaccine already being produced in Australia is “100 per cent effective” in preventing severe cases of COVID-19 infections, new data shows.
The federal government is “confident” it has backed the right COVID vaccine as data to be released in Australia shows the Oxford/AstraZeneca-developed jab is as effective as the already approved Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna jabs.
Australia has thrown its weight behind the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine, with 50m doses to be manufactured in Melbourne by pharmaceutical company CSL and almost 4m of those doses to be delivered to Australia in January and February.
Until now the precise efficacy of the jab was yet to be determined through clinical trials.
But AstraZeneca chief executive Pascal Soriot said new data would show the vaccine would be just as effective as the already-approved Pfizer and Moderna vaccines that protect 95 per cent of patients. And it would be “100 per cent effective” in preventing severe illness.
“We think we have figured out the winning formula and how to get efficacy that, after two doses, is up there with everybody else,” Mr Soriot said.
Senior UK government officials expect the drug watchdog will approve the vaccine before Thursday, kickstarting the rollout of the jab to 15m vulnerable people in Britain.
Unlike the US, Britain and Canada which slashed red tape to fast-track vaccines, the Australian government plans to roll out the vaccine in March.
“Before any COVID-19 vaccine is approved for use in Australia, it will be subject to the well-established and rigorous assessment and approval processes of the Therapeutic Goods Administration,” Mr Hunt’s spokesman said.
“The rollout of the vaccine in Australia will be guided by the Medical experts of the Australian Technical Advisory Group on Immunisation.”
The UK government regards the Oxford vaccine as the one that would transform the fight against COVID, as it can be stored in a fridge and costs $A3.50 a shot.
The Pfizer vaccine, of which Australia has ordered 10 million doses, has to be kept at temperatures of -70C and costs $A26 a dose.
Australia poised to fight back against Chinese trade war by AXING a lucrative university research agreement
Australia could be set to strike back at China as the two nations continue to engage in an ugly trade war, as ministers consider scrapping a widely-touted research agreement.
The ongoing deal, signed off in 2015, sees grants of up to $200,000 handed out to Victorian universities and companies to share research and data.
But the agreement could be axed by the federal government, ending the deal with China's Jiangsu province which sees intellectual property and new product development shared across the two nations.
Relations between Australia and China have dramatically soured since Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an independent inquiry into the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic from its source in the Chinese city of Wuhan back in April.
In a seemingly tit-for-tat response, a furious China has imposed a raft of trade measures on Australian products from barley to beef, recently adding timber to the list.
There are mounting fears the Victoria-Jiangsu Program for Technology and Innovation Research and Development could not be in the best interests of Australia's national affairs.
According to The Age, recent legislation introduced by the federal government in December sees the Commonwealth able to cancel agreements with foreign powers if the deals are perceived as harmful.
Dr Paul Monk, the former head of China analysis in Australia's Defence Department, said the current Jiangsu deal could see Chinese government officials blatantly take advantage of Australia.
'For this deal to be getting promoted by the Chinese government, there is likely to be something we can provide that they want – otherwise they would do it themselves,' he said.
'So we must ask: what [intellectual property] do we bring to the table that they are seeking?'
The current terms of the Jiangsu deal see a number of Australian entities frequently travel to the region for research and development in sectors such as aerospace, biotechnology and medicine.
Former Trade Minister Simon Birmingham recently lodged an official complaint with the World Trade Organisation in relation to Beijing's conduct in the ongoing trade dispute Australia and China.
'We have a series of different actions that China has taken during the course of the year and each come with slightly different criteria for how you might respond at the WTO,' he said earlier this month.
'The application of pressure on [markets] in the Chinese system where businesses within China are state-owned enterprises, being discouraged from purchasing Australian goods [is one].
In May this year, China imposed 80 per cent tariffs on barley, prompting an official complaint to the WTO from Mr Birmingham this month.
Australian wine also incurred 212 per cent import taxes in November, following months of trade intimidation against beef, lobster, timber, lamb and even coal exporters.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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27 December, 2020
How a regional Australian city became an unlikely home for hundreds of Yazidi refugees
Yazidis are Indo-Europeans, related to European populations, not Arabs or Iranians. They have their own monotheistic religion. They should settle well in Australia
It's been almost three years since about 600 Yazidi refugees from Northern Iraq and Syria began resettling in Australia, many fleeing trauma after persecution by the IS terror group.
One of the resettlement areas was Armidale, where the community has embraced its new migrants.
Aedo, who arrived two years ago, is now helping transform a plot of land just outside of the town into prime pasture, as part of a new agriculture initiative set up for the Yazidi community.
"What we're trying to achieve is help them realise their place in Armidale, through acquisition of skills and using those skills to gain employment,” says Lance McNamara from Northern Settlement Services.
Aedo hopes the opportunity will help him secure stable employment in Australia.
"The first thing I get is experience, so I know how work will be like and I can get the best work every day,” he says.
The land was donated by members of the local rotary club to give the Yazidi community, who typically worked on the land, a place of their own to farm.
Peter Lloyd from Armidale Rotary says members of his organisation have been stunned by the rapid progress the community has made in transforming the plot.
"It's absolutely amazing, 250 metres of fencing disappeared in a couple of hours,” he says.
“The speed of work, efficiency, and the degree of learning is quite impressive."
Resettlement program
Armidale, which has a population of about 25,000, was selected as a regional resettlement site by the Turnbull Government in August 2017, with the first refugees from Syria and Iraq arriving just over six months later.
Mr Lloyd says the way the families have been settled has helped them assimilate into the wider community.
"The families are being distributed, if you like, with their homes quite separated within the township and many families, their neighbours are taking everyone under their wings,” he says.
“There's a lot of exchanges, especially of recipes!”
“There's a lot of Yazidi bread that's being consumed in Armidale and a lot of other things [happening] that are really beneficial in a social sense, a language sense, and also an educational sense."
Yazidi cuisine has become a highlight at one local hotel. The Minnie Barn, which opened at the beginning of this year, has employed Yazidi chefs to cook up a unique menu.
The dishes have proved popular, even during periods impacted by COVID-19 restrictions.
“We knew about the Yazidi community, we approached them, and we found a couple of guys that were willing to come on board,” says Comfort City Inn manager Phil Mitchell.
“It was a bit of a struggle from the start with the language barriers and working out how to operate a professional kitchen with them. But a couple of months in, it's really taking off."
Salam Qaro and his wife Fryal Khalaf arrived in Australia in July 2019. Since settling in Armidale, the family has thrived.
“I was surprised because the physical aspects of Armidale are similar to my hometown, where I was living in Northern Iraq,” Salam says.
“I noticed that Armidale was so quiet, and also the people were welcoming, and I feel safe with my family here.”
The rest of his family remain in Northern Iraq, where they have faced persecution, he says. Some are still missing or were killed by IS.
"Two uncles of mine are missing by ISIS, and also my grandmother, my cousin was killed by ISIS, and no-one cared about that.”
“In my country, there is no future for anyone, especially for the Yazidi community, because the Yazidi community is all the time living very dangerous situations."
While he Fryal were able to settle in Armidale as refugees, applications to bring other family members to Australia on humanitarian grounds have not been successful.
“We received it with a declined outcome by [the Department of] Immigration. We don’t know why, and we are still asking why,” he says.
While his psychology degree is not recognised in Australia, Salam now helps settle other refugees in the area and is planning to build a house of his own with Fryal.
In June, the family also expanded when they welcomed baby Sama.
"We were lucky with Sama, she was born in Australia and she is an Australian citizen now,” he says. “She will have a good future in Australia."
Australian universities allowing almost anyone into their courses this year
Teenagers who missed out on studying their dream degree due to a low ATAR (Australian Tertiary Admission Rank) are being urged to take a short bridging course or apply directly for entry.
One university is admitting students based on teacher recommendations, rather than ATAR scores, this year.
Others are counting community service and work experience towards university entry.
Students who copped health or financial curveballs in 2020 can also apply for special entry on “equity’’ grounds.
Universities, bleeding cash due to the lockout of fee-paying international students, are bending over backwards to admit more domestic students for 2021.
Universities Australia chief executive Catriona Jackson said 2020 had been “exceptionally tough’’ for students and advised them to use different “pathways’’ to a degree.
“These include work experience, other qualifications such as bridging courses, leadership and community service, equity and special circumstances,’’ she told News Corp Australia.
“Options for university admission don’t end with the ATAR.
“Universities understand that the disruption caused by the COVID-19 crisis may have affected students differently and will be looking to provide flexibility to students.
“All universities will be ready and willing to talk with students about their individual situation.’’
Budding criminologist Megan Ting, 23, was devastated when she received a low ATAR but is now studying a Bachelor of Forensics Science at UTS, after completing a bridging Diploma of Life Science at UTS Insearch.
“Your ATAR doesn’t define you at all,’’ she said.
“Just don’t stress out – there’s always another way.
“I wish someone had told me earlier not to stress out and think it’s the end of the world.’’
The University of Tasmania has already admitted 1800 students through a side door, using its Schools’ Recommendation Program.
“We take a teachers’ recommendation along with prior academic performance, not just ATAR which is not a good predictor of future success,’’ vice-chancellor Professor Rufus Black said yesterday.
“Teachers are ideally placed to know if a student is on the right path to further studies.
“We (also) take into account people’s work and other life experience when considering their application to study.
“Not having an ATAR, or not having the ATAR you were hoping for, doesn’t have to be a barrier to your dream course.’’
Charles Sturt University (CSU) gives school leavers from regional areas a five-point ATAR bonus, and has already made 1859 early offers to school leavers.
CSU takes into account “soft skills’’ such as empathy and resilience, demonstrated through community and charity work.
Indigenous students can undertake a five-day entry program that provides guaranteed entry into a broad range of bachelor degrees.
CSU also offers “micro-credentials” in community leadership and resilience, to certify skills that show a student’s ability to do a job or continue study.
CSU acting vice-chancellor Professor John Germov said that “ATAR scores are not what they used to be’’, with 70 per cent of students entering via other pathways.
“ATAR scores do not necessarily reflect the skills and attributes that many occupations and professions require, and which students might possess when they apply for entry to university,’’ he said.
“A nurse is nothing without empathy for her patients, a veterinarian will struggle without the resilience required to deal with the death of the animals in his care.’’
The University of Southern Queensland (USQ) offers free three-month Tertiary Preparation Programs, covering English, maths and study management, with guaranteed entry to a range of USQ bachelor degrees regardless of ATAR results.
It also offers six-month certificate programs as a stepping stone to a full degree.
“You do not have to give up on your dream career,’’ vice-chancellor Professor Geraldine Mackenzie said.
“This year 12 cohort has had a lot thrown at them in the last 12 months.
“They’ve shown grit and resilience and will no doubt continue to do this throughout their university studies and into their careers.’’
In Victoria, RMIT University offers a new Pathways Guaranteed program, to help students without an ATAR get into a degree course by completing a TAFE course first.
“The benchmark of some VCE students will be disproportionately impacted this year by the disruptions of bushfires and COVID-19,’’ a spokeswoman said.
“The cost of a Pathways Package is often cheaper than completing a full Bachelor program.’’
University of Queensland acting deputy vice-chancellor Professor Doune Macdonald urged school leavers to “keep their ATAR in perspective’’.
“While it’s disappointing not to get the ATAR they were hoping for it can be a detour for school leavers – and for many students, that detour can become their passion,’’ she said.
The University of South Australia is offering diplomas or foundation studies to help students leapfrog into a degree.
“If students didn’t achieve the result they needed to get into their chosen degree, we encourage having a back-up plan by preferencing a degree in a similar field,’’ UniSA chief academic services officer Professor Marie Wilson said yesterday,
The Australian Catholic University (ACU) has introduced a new Foundation Studies Program at its Blacktown Campus in Sydney, to help students without a Year 12 qualification get into uni.
“While the year was extremely challenging for Year 12s, we are also seeing a very large number of applicants with high ATARs so not all students will be able to get in to their first choice,’’ ACU vice-chancellor Professor Greg Craven said yesterday.
He said the federal government was funding extra places for school leavers to complete a certificate first, and then transfer into a bachelor degree once they meet the entry requirements.
The University of New England (UNE) already admits 90 per cent of its students without an ATAR result, and offers free short courses to gain entry.
“If you didn’t get the ATAR that you hoped for, there is absolutely no reason why you still can’t go to university and go on to a successful career in your chosen field,’’ UNE student success director Barb Shaw said yesterday.
The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) advises school leavers to study a diploma or certificate in a similar discipline, as a pathway to a full degree.
Students can also combine a TAFE certificate with a QUT qualification, or study a different bachelor degree course before switching to their dream degree.
James Cook University (JCU) offers a Certificate of Higher Education that lets students catch up on any missing prerequisite subjects, in time to start most bachelor degrees in February 2021.
“If a student didn’t get the ATAR they need for their dream course, the Diploma of Higher Education is a six-month to one-year full-time course designed to help them meet the entry requirements for most JCU courses,’’ a spokesman said.
“They’ll study a combination of introductory and first-year degree subjects and develop the practical skills to be a successful university student and gain credit towards their chosen degree.’’
Shrinking family is fertile ground for concern
There are times when I wish I had a dollar for every insult I have endured for the size of my family. The number of children that I have managed to produce, nine, has been the source of a never-ending stream of jokes and jibes, from complete strangers.
They range from the lamely comedic: “Don’t you have a TV?” my reply, “we found something much better to do”, to the snide: “How can you afford them?” muttered to a nine-year-old, to which she replied: “Do you have to pay for yours?” But the absolute worst was: “people have families, not litters” a statement that was actually published in the letters section of a metropolitan newspaper.
That a large family like mine is open season for attack and ridicule shows more about why there is a so-called “baby drought’” than any number of statistics and theories.
The rot at the heart of declining fertility is not as some think, just economic, nor just about women’s working patterns or men’s inability to “commit”. It is deeply cultural. It is the product of a sick society that has pushed the natural child-bearing family to the periphery.
This decline can all be traced to exactly one year, 1961, the year the pill was introduced. From the very year of its introduction the total fertility rate (TFR) literally plummeted. The graph dips in a Matterhorn-like precipitous decline.From 1961 the Australian birthrate went from 3.55, as an average number of births per woman over a lifetime, to the current 1.6.
But a worse cultural malaise took hold. The nexus between sex and fertility was lost, and gradually, the consequences of this sexual revolution, the “great dis-ruption”, as Francis Fukayama described it, have been disastrous.
One of the first things that happened was the marriage rate began to decline. This is particularly bad for fertility because most people do not want children outside the marriage bond. Even today, over 64 per cent of children are born into a registered marriage.
Over 50 years, casual sexual relationships became more common. Marriage went from the gold standard foundation of sexual relationships, something sacred, profound and exclusive to heterosexual sex because of the children that might be produced from that natural biological pairing, to a “partnership” in which the children were an optional extra.
Gradually within this milieu, serial sexual relationships have replaced marriage. Even in exclusive partnerships marriage is delayed. The consequence on a practical level is that people are getting older at marriage, and women who have delayed childbirth simply can’t have as many children as in the past – or even as many as all the social surveys show they would like.
Peter Costello is right. He knows full well that we have to increase the fertility rate in Australia or we will simply run short of young productive people to fuel the economy. We must have migration just to top up our ever-dwindling natural fertility, which must be just over 2 per woman over a lifetime for our population to simply remain static. The last time this happened was in 1997. It was the Baby Bonus blip, but it was not sustainable. Right now, our economic future is running on empty, with a pitifully shrinking fertility and alarmingly low migration statistics due to the COVID-19 crisis which has cut the projected population increase by over a million.
Some influential people have been brainwashed by the so-called “population bomb” of the zero-population growth movement, which gave its advocates an ideologically respectable reason not to have kids. But the world’s population increase is slowing and is predicted to reach stasis in about 2050. Already some countries, notably Russia, have actually lost population.
Ours is not a country that has too many people. It is a country where too many people are crammed into only six cities. It is a country that needs decentralisation, but nevertheless, we are a society that is running short of young people to fuel our economy. So, we keep importing them in ever increasing numbers just to keep things going. Migration works to expand the youthful workforce in the short term but it exponentially increases the ageing of the population since migrants arrive as adults, and have about the same numbers of children as the native born.
Since 1961 some dangerously scarring phenomena have been embedded into the social culture. The advent of the pill seemed to give women, and men, great freedom to plan their families responsibly. But on the downside it had a more subtle effect on male /female relationships. It has always been assumed it was good for women, but many women found that the pill subtly allowed men to assume women were always available – in effect infertile vessels for sex.
Now feminists and others are often puzzled as to why despite practical advances, the exploitation of women has not improved and why in the 50 years since the pill there has been a huge increase in the creep of pornography, which is fundamentally exploitive, into mainstream culture. Look back to that “revolution” which bore as one of its fruits a hyper sexualised culture, which denies the greatest gift of sex, the child.
The current confusing social/sexual milieu is another evolutionary step which seriously mitigates against healthy heterosexual sexual relations and marriage. Many young people literally don’t know if they are Arthur or Martha, having been told from a very young age, they can change. But although most people, are horrified by these developments they are too intimidated to call out this naked emperor.
Worse, in the ACT and soon in Victoria parents will be legally robbed of their authority to do so. No wonder well-meaning people are afraid of child-bearing. This attack on parental authority by the state, which only supports parents who agree with them, is an attack unprecedented in democracies. It is both an extreme symptom and cause of the collapse of the family, the real cause of the baby drought.
Adelaide man who suffered broken leg during SA Police arrest secures $854,000 compensation
The Supreme Court of South Australia has upheld an $854,000 compensation payment for a man whose leg was broken as police arrested him more than seven years ago.
SA Police officers used capsicum spray and a "figure four leg lock" as they tried to arrest Matthew Charles Crossley on Bank Street in the Adelaide CBD in March 2013.
The leg lock manoeuvre, designed to restrain someone thrashing or kicking, left Mr Crossley's femur so badly broken that a 40-centimetre rod was inserted during surgery hours after the incident.
In February, the District Court ruled that the police officers had committed three acts of battery during the arrest and, in May, awarded Mr Crossley $700,000 in compensation for the "egregious" and "violent" arrest.
At the time, District Court Judge Sydney Tilmouth found the use of the leg lock to handcuff Mr Crossley was "unnecessary and excessive" because he was already restrained.
He added that Mr Crossley was entitled to resist the arrest because the officers' failure to explain their reasoning rendered it "unlawful".
More damages were added in July to bring the total to $854,313.
In an appeal to the Supreme Court, the State Government argued the officers had lawfully arrested Mr Crossley for disorderly behaviour.
Lawyers for the government argued that using pepper spray and the leg lock was lawful and justified in the circumstances.
But the court dismissed the appeal, on all grounds, in a judgement handed down this week.
In the reasons for the unanimous decision, Justice David Peek said the officers' actions "were unjustified and unlawful, irrespective of whether or not [Mr Crossley] had been properly informed as to the reason for his arrest".
"The judge was correct in finding that [Senior Constable] Lovell attempted to carry out a 'figure four leg lock' manoeuvre by applying his full body weight across the respondent's legs while bending and twisting his left leg at the knee and that this was inherently dangerous and unjustified," Justice Peek wrote.
An SA Police spokeswoman said it was "assessing the outcomes of the appeal and have no further comment to make".
In a hearing earlier this year, Mr Crossley said he used crutches for six months and a walking stick for a further three-to-four months after the injury but was otherwise left "basically bed-bound" most of the time.
He has suffered complications with the rod, walks with a limp and will require continued rehabilitation as part of his ongoing recovery.
Additionally, his treating psychiatrist said he experiences symptoms of PTSD, anxiety and depression.
Mr Crossley told the court he had not worked since the incident because he was "not physically capable".
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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December 26, 2020
NSW Police create a deadly incident
News report below followed by some comments from a reader. My reader did the smart thing. He didn't run
The family of an apprentice tradesman killed by a senior constable in Western Sydney has called for a royal commission into policing in New South Wales.
Bradley Balzan, 20, was walking to the shops at St Marys when four plain-clothed officers pulled up next to him in an unmarked car two days ago.
His grandmother Nola Balzan said one of the undercover officers asked, "What are you doing?" but failed to disclose he was with the police force.
"He ignored them, which, if you didn't know a person, you would ignore them — then they kept following him and he said something like 'I am sick of this, f-off' and he ran because he was scared," she said.
Assistant Commissioner Mark Jones said on Wednesday he was acting "suspiciously" but would not elaborate on his behaviour.
With four officers chasing after him, Bradley Balzan sprinted only a few hundred metres home and into his backyard on Acacia Street.
Nola Balzan said she believes he grabbed a shovel to defend himself before his pet dog bit one of the officers, sending him to hospital with minor injuries.
Police claim Bradley Balzan snatched the gun from one of two senior constables and fired "at least one shot" before one of them fired the deadly shot.
"Bradley has no criminal record — I think it was police brutality because everything that happened to him was terrifying," Nola Balzan said.
Bradley Balzan was treated by paramedics but died shortly after going into cardiac arrest while his father, Adam, was told to stay inside. "Even at that stage, the officers hadn't identified themselves as police," Nola Balzan said.
"Adam said, 'Is that my son?' and they said, 'We don't know' — Bradley doesn't drive so he doesn't have a licence with photo ID." "They ended up taking a photo and showing him, and it was Bradley's face with blood all over it so that's how he knew it was his son, which is absolutely crazy … it was traumatising."
Adam Balzan hasn't been able to return home since the tragedy on his backdoor step but told the ABC "police must be held accountable for their actions".
Nola Balzan said her son was "devastated". "They have only one child and now they have none," she said. "[Bradley] was handsome, he was cheeky, he made us laugh, he loved his family, he loved his pets, his friends and mountain biking."
An internal police investigation which will be carried out by homicide detectives promises to scrutinise the actions of the two senior constables before the findings are independently reviewed.
But Nola Balzan is calling for a royal commission style of inquiry into the state's police force following the shooting.
"Think before you shoot. There's pepper spray, which was used on Bradley, there's tasers that they are allowed to use which would have been a deterrent," she said.
"Shooting someone in the stomach is not shooting to stop, that's shooting to kill," she said.
Nola Balzan said Christmas used to be the one time of the year she looked forward to and when all eight of her grandchildren would come together under one roof.
"Christmas is now dead to us — I have cancelled our lunch, it doesn't feel right with Bradley not here — I don't know how we are going to come back from this," she said. "A good deal of people are going to be missing him."
Bradley Balzan was only a year into his apprenticeship as a tradesman and had recently started taking a course to become a barman.
A reader writes:
I too was once stopped by two out of uniform police who did not identify themselves as police. It frightened me too.
I was in the bush on crown land up the back of where I lived, just sitting, contemplating things, which as you know, contemplation is a pastime of mine.
Both men were armed with rifles. I presumed them to be deer hunters. One demanded of me, "What are you doing here?" I replied, "Nothing, just sitting." He repeated his demand several times, to which I made the same reply each time.
His question was was not asked as an enquiring question, but as a demand for an answer. His eyes were piecing and his manner was very very assertive. And he gave no explanation of why he was challenging me; no introduction, no identification that he was police, nothing; he was just aggressive man with a rifle repeating a demand that I tell him what I am doing there.
The second armed man stood several steps back, as if ready to back up his mate. I was very frightened. I thought I was going to be murdered. I felt that if I fled I would be shot, and if I moved I would be shot.
Eventually they turned and left, both giving me a parting look as if they could kill me if they wanted to.
At the time I frequently swam at a local pool, and one of the local policemen swam there too. While we both took a rest at the shallow end from swimming laps, I mentioned the incident to him. He told me not to worry about it, that they were just two off duty police doing some deer shooting up the back.
That was no reassurance to me. Some men should not become police. If the story in this linked article is as described, that plain clothes police bailed up the young man without identifying themselves as police, then I can well appreciate his fear, and can understand why he ran. To then be chased, grappled and shot is tragic and criminal -- if that is the case.
24 December, 2020
Behind the scenes at your Queensland government hospital
If the doctors and nurses seem a bit distracted, here is why. And management are in denial
A Queensland-wide nurses group has taken aim at the Townsville Hospital and Health Service for what it believes is a “systematic” and “longstanding and toxic culture of bullying”.
Recent statistics revealed half of staff surveyed at THHS had witnessed bullying or sexual harassment in the workplace in the past year, the highest rate in the state.
The data was gathered from 77 THHS staff members who participated in the Working for Queensland survey.
The Nurses Professional Association of Queensland wasn’t surprised with the findings, with a spokeswoman saying it had been an issue that had reared its head for some time.
“There’s been a longstanding and toxic culture of bullying in Queensland Health colleagues and members have been reporting to me for some time,” the spokeswoman said.
“Unfortunately, Queensland Health’s bullying culture permeates the whole organisation, from top to bottom. There’s bullying that occurs both up and down the chain of management, and no one is truly protected.
“There absolutely is a statewide toxic bullying epidemic in Queensland Health that exists regardless of geography or seniority.”
The spokeswoman said some previous cases of bullying had a detrimental impact.
“We’ve had many members who have basically been institutionalised as a result of the horrendous bullying they’ve experienced,” she said.
“Members have contacted me directly with their cases, reporting having to be admitted to mental health facilities as a direct result of bullying and harassment suffered at Queensland Health. For some members, this has resulted in lifelong workplace injuries.
“Obviously, this is an extremely complex issue that is deeply embedded in Queensland Health. We note that minister Yvette D’Ath is touring Townsville as a part of her review into systemic bullying. We look forward to supporting her and working with her closely to turn this culture around.”
THHS chair Tony Mooney said there was no place for bullying in the service.
“I am looking forward to welcoming the Minister for Health to Townsville Hospital and Health Service to showcase the fantastic work our 6500 staff do in caring for our community, not to do a review into bullying,” Mr Mooney said.
“There are no active bullying or harassment cases across the Townsville HHS being managed by our industrial relations team. Bullying and harassment will not be tolerated on my watch.”
Mr Mooney said as well as causing distress to others, bullying took away from the great work and care provided by a dedicated workforce.
He said THHS had done significant work to improve workplace culture through mandatory bullying and harassment training, additional one-on-one support offered to resolve workplace issues within teams and to create a mechanism to bring on independent experts to support and review complex cases.
'Balancing act': The problem with COVID mandates
By Julie Leask
Recent developments in the pandemic such as vaccines and the outbreak of COVID-19 on Sydney's northern beaches have prompted calls for governments to mandate public health measures such as vaccination or mask wearing to control the virus.
Mandating certain behaviours to prevent the spread of infectious diseases can be an effective measure in public health. It can bring about behaviour change at-scale and remove the burden on individual decision making. But mandates come with downsides which are often overlooked.
Mandates will always carry a penalty for non-compliance: a fine for not wearing a mask or denial of childcare or family payments for the incompletely vaccinated child. These are serious consequences, particularly for people experiencing disadvantage, who themselves are already more likely to be economically or socially affected by pandemic measures. Yet it is those experiencing disadvantage who are more likely to be fined for COVID-19 rule compliance breaches. For example, in April, Sydney’s poorer Fairfield Local Government Area had just 0.98 per cent of cases but 3.7 per cent of infringements while richer Waverly had 6.7per cent of cases but just 0.79 per cent of infringements.
Mandates lead to interpersonal conflict at the point of enforcement. This is a particular problem if those with roles in implementing the requirement also provide the service because it can undermine the relationship between citizen and service. For example, the driver who turns away unmasked people boarding a bus taking them to an appointment or a doctor refusing to grant a medical exemption for an unvaccinated child will inevitably end up dealing with distressed and sometimes abusive people.
Mandates bring a tonal shift in pandemic control – from solidarity to enforcement. Rules can offer support – it’s sometime easier to just be told to do something. A few people only respond to rules. But they can also undermine intrinsic motivations towards the public co-operation more generally, making behaviour more about what I can and can’t do than what I should do for others. For long-haul behaviours like pandemic control ones, intrinsic motivation is better because it carries across a number of minute and everyday behaviours impossible to police.
Mandates should bring a meaningful additional level of compliance to controlling the spread of a disease. Right now in NSW, some commentators have called for mandatory masks for all of Sydney, at a time when the state is recording reductions in locally acquired new cases, decreasing from a high of 38 on December 19 to 8 cases on December 23. The most important control measures have been rapid identification and isolation of cases and contacts, helping bring this outbreak under control, like NSW did in July after a cluster began in south western Sydney. In Victoria, mandatory masks were hoped to be enough to bring a rising outbreak under control. But within a week it was clear that a prolonged lockdown was also needed.
Mandates require significant resourcing and attention from government departments. Legislation needs to be carefully drafted to account for the range of implications they will bring. There should be a threshold for determining what is, and is not, required and means for determining compliance. This is easier for policing the wearing of masks. For vaccination, Australia uses a national register to determine compliance. But recording error or failure to enter the data means some fully compliant families have wrongly lost family assistance payments under the No Jab No Pay. Mandates need good systems in place to be fair and feasible.
Most of these issues can be justified and managed if the benefits of mandating a behaviour are deemed to outweigh the risks. Right now in Sydney, mask wearing when one cannot distance is strongly recommended. But a mandate to do so would be disproportionate when considering the downsides along with their limited role right now in controlling COVID-19. If we are unlucky enough to see established transmission across Sydney or any other region, that might change.
For now, the measures announced on Wednesday are reasonable – limited numbers inside homes with restrictions around movement of people on the northern beaches where the cluster remains focused. We must remain focused on the most effective measures – testing and isolating if symptomatic, rapid contact tracing, quarantining of contacts, and limiting large gatherings, vigilant hand and respiratory hygiene and wearing masks when social distancing is not possible. Venues need to systematically ensure all customers accurately log their details when entering.
Mandating individual actions to prevent infectious disease spread should only be in place when the shift to mandating will be effective and carries little risk, the requirement is reasonable, feasible to enforce, and well justified. Taken together, this is about weighing the benefits of an action against its risks – something Australians have become adept at doing in 2020 when it comes to infectious diseases.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/balancing-act-the-problem-with-covid-mandates-20201222-p56pnl.html
Hotel quarantine inquiry revealed a deep and shocking truthPru Goward
The report of the Coate inquiry into the Victorian hotel quarantine system reveals one deep and shocking truth –no, it’s not that no one made a decision about private security guards, it’s that there was no system. Now it is all too late, and the proud Victorian public service, once the benchmark for all others, is having to be told how to put a crisis response plan together. Public administration 101.
The conclusion, that Mr Nobody made a decision to use private security guards in quarantine hotels, is a metaphor for a much wider cultural problem. Premier Andrews has been quick to point this out, so he already knows that real reform will take more than Justice Jennifer Coate’s carefully crafted recommendations for an improved health emergency management system. What her report fundamentally revealed was the incapacity of the public service leadership to follow orders or anything close to good process. If this malaise is widespread, then reform must be also.
Let’s deal with the private security guards problem first. This is essentially a red herring. Victoria used them, but so did NSW. Under Australian public sector pay arrangements, even the leaner ones that have operated in NSW since 2011, when the incoming O’Farrell government instituted a 2.5 per cent cap on public sector wage rises, police are expensive. Take note of the absence of police in triple-time pay periods. Understandably, the Victorian Police Commissioner wasn’t having his already stretched wages budget trashed further; private security firms seemed an obvious suggestion.
NSW had more capacity to use its police than Victoria (Mick Fuller rarely loses at Expenditure Review Committee) but also grabbed the offer of free Australian Defence Force personnel to augment its efforts. Significantly, it also used private security guards. Why ever not?
It’s the supervision question. Who was telling 20-something-year-old bodybuilder security guards (with an assumed zero knowledge of infection control) what to do and making sure they did not risk their own health? Again, both Victoria and NSW had health officials on site, but the Victorian officials told the inquiry they were there to “co-ordinate” health advice and cavilled at the suggestion that their team leaders were “in charge”. There was no such doubt in NSW; NSW Health was the boss.
Reading the report, which I have done with morbid fascination, is to read a litany of contradicting answers, Keystone Cops falling over each other. It gets down to the decision-making steps and minute-taking at senior executive meetings. As the Coate report reveals, there were none. Because when you follow the rules of meeting procedure, the reason for every decision needs to be documented. This has the added benefit of the group actually making a decision. Sadly, these tedious niceties went out the window.
Finally, there’s the question of who’s running the show. Is it the public service or the elected government? As the report archly documents, the Victorian health minister at the time, Jenny Mikakos, barely understood what was going on and didn’t think to ask. Martin Pakula, Minister for Jobs, Precincts and Regions, didn’t know much either and again, did not ask. Even when a security company that was not on the preferred tenderers’ list got the bulk of the work, the minister didn’t ask. Did the department not think it worth providing an explanation, assuming at some point, this might become a matter of interest to the Auditor-General? By the end of volume two, there was still no explanation for this brazen decision to give millions of dollars to a security firm that hadn’t made the cut.
And what about the secretary of Health and Human Services, Kym Peake, ignoring the Premier’s written instruction to focus solely on the pandemic response? Was there a letter back explaining why he was wrong? No wonder the Premier didn’t refuse her resignation.
It is true ministers are told to stay out of operational matters and there are certainly risks in making decisions that go against departmental advice. In the case of NSW, Gladys Berejiklian’s managerial strengths enable her to drive the decision-making, but all ministers, like board members, have a duty to ask questions. Their ultimate public accountability entitles them to answers and good ministers often provide exactly the informed questioning that tests a decision the public sector, with its very different mindset, may have got wrong.
Ministers also think on their feet. Sydney has the second largest consular corps in the world; the advice was not to hotel quarantine returning diplomats who, under international law, cannot be charged if they refuse to do so. Instead, a minister suggested health officials ring them at home several times a day, every day, to check they are where they said they would be for 14 days.
In my experience, ministers of any political persuasion are conscientious and hard-working, only too well aware that it is they who swing first at the end of a political rope if all goes wrong. Ask Jenny Mikakos … whose ghost should now be heard, demanding public sector reform.
NSW backs Scott Morrison's gas plant as 'critical' for state's renewable ambitions
NSW is smoothing the path for a prominent piece of the federal government's gas-led recovery by granting critical infrastructure status to plans for a Commonwealth-funded gas-fired power station in the Hunter Valley.
Planning Minister Rob Stokes declared the federal government's gas plant proposal as Critical State Significant Infrastructure on Wednesday to standardise and streamline the project assessment process.
"Gas-fired power stations will have a critical role to play in ensuring our energy security as we transition to a low-carbon emissions economy with renewable energy projects such as wind and solar," Mr Stokes said.
"As well, this project could create jobs for up to 600 construction workers and generate around $800 million worth of investment for the local economy."
NSW announced in November a strategy to become a "renewable energy superpower" and stimulate construction of a whopping 12 gigawatts in new wind, solar and pumped-hydro projects.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison and federal Energy and Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor have said they would commission Commonwealth-owned Snowy Hydro to build a 1000 megawatts gas plant to supply dispatchable power into the grid.
Mr Taylor said he did not trust private industry to replace the baseload power which will be lost due the scheduled closure in 2023 of the 1000 megawatt Liddell coal-fired power plant.
If private power generators did not commit before April next year to build a total of 1000 megawatts "government will fill the remaining capacity", but only to fill a shortfall, Mr Taylor said in September. "If industry steps up, we'll step back."
The critical declaration from Mr Stokes lists a gas plant with capacity up to 750 megawatts, which indicates industry is expected to deliver at least 250 megawatts of generation by the deadline.
Energy analysts told this masthead in October that the independent Australian Energy Market Operator had not forecast any shortfall in dispatchable power supply due to the closure of Liddell.
The operator's forecast noted a potential shortfall of just 157 megawatts by 2022, but noted the NSW government had confirmed investment in 170 megawatts of dispatchable batteries.
However, Mr Taylor said 1000 megawatts of extra capacity was required to stop power price rises and that "government has always been clear - we need to see life extension or like-for-like replacement of Liddell".
The power station would be located on the former site of a demolished aluminium smelter at Kurri Kurri in the Hunter Valley.
The NSW state government also this week approved a $500 million underground coal mine proposal in the Hunter Valley.
Malabar Resources' Maxwell mine, located at Jerrys Plains, will produce around 8 million tonnes per annum of metallurgical coal which is used for steel making. The mine is expected to operate for 26 years.
The Independent Planning Commission said in a statement the potential impacts from the Maxwell mine are manageable, and the risks of adverse impacts on the environment are low.
Lock the Gate co-ordinator Georgina Woods said approval of the Maxwell mine "further entrenches an industry with a highly uncertain future" and Hunter Valley communities would "bear the brunt of this government stupidity".
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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23 December, 2020
Australia tackling online bullies
If American media companies think that they can ignore Australian law, they should reflect on the humbling of Dow Jones a few years back.
They uttered a serious defamation of Australian miner Joe Gutnick in one of their publications and thought they were protected by America's permissive libel laws
But since the libel was of an Australian, Australian law had jurisdiction and Dow Jones eventually settled, costing them a heap
Harmful online abuse would be stripped from websites under a new government proposal to squash adult cyber bullying.
The eSafety Commissioner would be given the power to direct platforms to take down abuse, when they have failed to respond to complaints.
The online watchdog’s capacity to unmask the identities behind anonymous or fake accounts used to conduct abuse or share illegal content will also be beefed up.
Cyber Safety Minister Paul Fletcher said the new scheme was a world-leading online safety framework for seriously harmful content.
“Overwhelmingly what victims of serious cyber abuse tell us is they want the material taken down but that can be very hard to achieve,” Mr Fletcher told the ABC.
“The eSafety Commissioner has done that effectively with cyber-bullying against children and we’re now going to extend that to cyber-abuse directed against adults.”
Under the new Online Safety Bill, out for consultation on Wednesday, services will be required to remove image-based abuse and cyber bullying content within 24 hours of receiving a notice from the commissioner.
Companies that don’t comply will face maximum civil penalties of $550,000, while individuals will be subject to fines of up to $111,000.
Websites streaming online crisis events such as the Christchurch terrorist attacks and extreme violent content will also be able to be blocked for a limited time, under the commissioner’s request to internet service providers.
Protections for children will also be strengthened to enable bullying material to be removed from online services frequented by children.
Mr Fletcher said the measures recognised adults had greater resilience than children when it came to abusive content, and appropriately balanced the importance of freedom of speech.
The bill will also include legislated “basic online safety expectations” for digital platforms to establish a new benchmark for industry to keep Australians safe.
Under these, the eSafety Commissioner will be able to seek an explanation from the platforms about how they will respond to online harms under new transparency reporting requirements.
The industry will also be required to do more to keep users safe under updated codes.
“The internet has brought great social, educational and economic benefits,” Mr Fletcher said. “But just as a small proportion of human interactions go wrong offline, so too are there risks online.”
Virtue signalling and the hatred of coal
There has been more than one virus attacking the fibre of our society over the past 12 months as virtue signalling has leapt from business to business and executives have scrambled to join the race to be “woke.”
We are all now expected to conform to whatever shallow, vacuous position is currently in vogue and embrace every demand made by the chattering class lest we be condemned on social media.
Mackay small business man David Hartigan is the latest casualty of this crusade by the corporate world to beat its collective chest and show the world it has a social conscience.
His company provides engineering advice to mining companies. “Good on you, mate,” you might say, for creating jobs and doing your bit to help grow the national economy.
Not so in the world of the woke with his insurance company telling him that he cannot make more than 40 per cent of his income from thermal coal mining clients if he wants coverage.
This, of course, is so the insurance company can proclaim to the world that it cares about climate change
The large number of financial institutions now too frightened to cover mining businesses has lessened competition and allowed those still in the business to ramp up their premiums, Mr Hartigan’s increasing by 300 per cent over the past four years.
Can someone please explain to me how screwing a small businessman in regional Queensland is going to save the planet.
It is stupidity writ large and goes hand-in-hand with the insistence by the woke warriors that no one is building coal fired power plants anymore, thus ignoring the inconvenient truth that Germany commissioned one this year, Japan will build 20 over the next five years and the Chinese are building them faster than you can count.
The truth? They can’t handle the truth, preferring to project an image of heartfelt care confected by a marketing consultant while damaging the economy.
Whatever happened to that once treasured Australian trait of declaring in a loud voice that if it looks like bull…t and smells like bull…t, the chances are it’s bull…t? Have we lost the ability to mock poseurs and impostors who wear their false virtue like a robe?
Farmers launch climate change court challenge against natural gas project
The challenge, filed on Tuesday, also argued the approval for the gas extraction part of the project — which involves the drilling of 850 gas wells — should have also assessed the impacts of the transmission pipeline, which would be needed to transport the gas.
"Our client will therefore ask the court to find that the approval for the Narrabri Gas Project is invalid," said Elaine Johnson, EDO director of legal strategy.
One of the farmers involved in the challenge, Scott McCalman, said "farmers in our region are already being forced to live with worsening droughts, devastating heatwaves and extreme weather".
"The approval of damaging projects like this that will fuel global warming even further just means more hardship for rural communities," he said.
The project gained new momentum in January 2020 when an agreement was signed between NSW and the Federal Government, setting a target of injecting 70 petajoules of gas each year into the market in NSW.
That was exactly the amount the Narrabri Gas Project was likely to produce.
Then in June, NSW Planning Minister Rob Stokes backed the project, arguing it was "critical for energy security and reliability in NSW".
In September, the state's Independent Planning Commission gave the project the green light with 134 conditions to protect the environment, and in November, the Federal Government approved the project, again with conditions.
Thousands of submissions
The Independent Planning Commission received about 23,000 submissions to its environmental impact assessment process, with 98 per cent of them opposed.
About 80 per cent of those submissions were organised by conservation groups, but in addition to those, there were thousands of submissions opposing the project.
Among the main concerns expressed by those opposed to the project were potential impacts on water resources in the area.
The gas drilling will be near important aquifers relied on by farmers and towns, and some experts said it wasn't clear whether the project could avoid damaging them.
A spokesman for the NSW Independent Planning Commission said in a statement: "The Independent Planning Commission has been served papers filed in the Land and Environment Court for a judicial review of the Commission's determination of the Narrabri Gas Project.
"The matter is listed before the Court on 12 March 2021. No further comment will be made at this stage."
A conservative ministerial appointmen
Scott Morrison’s pre-Christmas ministerial shuffle has passed without much notice — unsurprising given that almost nobody in the country would be able to name any of the affected MPs
For the afficionados, however, there was one minor elevation on which a marker should be placed. Queensland LNP Senator Amanda Stoker, who was given George Brandis’ Senate seat when he retired in 2018, has risen from the backbench to the role of assistant minister to the attorney-general.
Stoker is what the media like to call a “firebrand”, and she has noisily established herself as an up-and-coming member of the religious right wing of the Coalition. She is anti-abortion, anti-euthanasia, anti-transgender and considers sexuality to be a “choice”. You get the idea.
In her new junior role, Stoker will not have any material power, but she will have a platform for pushing her ideological agenda.
Part of that agenda was revealed in a speech Stoker gave in June to the ultra-conservative Samuel Griffith Society in which she gave clear voice to a cherished desire of the far right: to overtly stack the High Court with conservative appointees.
The US religious right has been assiduous for many years in its plan to take control of America’s social fabric by filling the Supreme Court with judges who share its convictions. By the chance that Donald Trump got to appoint three judges in four years, they’ve achieved a 6-3 split between conservatives and “liberals”.
Stoker is a big admirer of Trump’s achievement, and is explicit about her wish to replicate it here. She has selected her target — a High Court decision that is anathema to the conservative mind — as the catalyst for her call to arms.
The case is that of Daniel Love and Brendan Thoms, two men of Aboriginal descent who were not Australian citizens. The High Court by a 4:3 majority earlier this year determined that Aboriginal Australians in their position cannot be “aliens” under Australian law and therefore cannot be deported.
The majority’s reasoning was based on an extension of the logic of Mabo — that Aboriginal people’s connection to Australia predates and transcends English colonisation and all that has followed, such that it is a nonsense to suggest that they could ever be alien to this land.
That made Stoker cross-eyed with anger, as it did the whole conservative right. She considers it “judicial activism”, the putting of words into the constitution that the founding fathers did not contemplate.
That identifies the battle ground for bench-stacking — the contest between “activist” and “originalist” judges, the same as in the US. The conservative argument, promoted by Stoker, is that what we want are judges who won’t rule according to their personal moral codes, politics or preferences, but who will just do as the express language of the constitution says. If the constitution gives bad law, then it can be changed by referendum. In the meantime, judges should apply it as it was written.
Accordingly, Stoker said in her speech, conservatives need to get their act together and find judges for the High Court who can be relied upon to be strictly black letter. It’d be a quicker process here than in America, because our judges must retire at 70 (and there are only seven of them).
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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22 December, 2020
Windfarm operators blamed for the big blackouts of 2016
Allegedly, the operators should have had in place cut-out switches etc that would have prevented the disaster, even though the storm was an exceptional event.
The real problem was the state's heavy reliance on wind after scrapping its coal-fired generators. It was the Greenie government that had no backup against rare events
A South Australian wind farm operator has been fined $1 million for contravening national electricity rules in the three years leading up to the 2016 statewide blackout.
The Australian Energy Regulator (AER) launched legal action against Snowtown Wind Farms last year and was accused of supplying power to the grid when the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) had not approved it to do so.
The Federal Court today ordered the company — which has 90 wind turbines in the SA's mid north — to implement a compliance program and provide a written report to the court after six months, to ensure there is not a repeat.
Justice Richard White also ordered Snowtown Wind Farms to pay the regulator's court costs of $100,000.
Elite racism in Australia: Do as I say not as I do
The media was caned for its un-wokeness this year with university academics conducting a survey which found that 75 per cent of presenters, commentators and reporters were Anglo-Celtic with only six per cent of Indigenous or non-European backgrounds.
Most Australians have an Anglo-Celtic or European background so you might expect this predominance to be reflected in any survey but accusations of racism by the networks were not long in coming along with demands for quotas to be out in place to force them to hire Indigenous and non-Europeans presenters.
None of these accusations were directed at SBS where 76.6 per cent of reporters are non-European and only 0.7 per cent Anglo-Celtic.
Put another way, if you are a blue-eyed, pale-skinned lad by the name of O’Connor, you’ve got Buckley’s chance of getting a job at SBS.
The broadcaster, to no one’s surprise, did not see this statistic as evidence of reverse racism, proclaiming instead that it demonstrated “SBS’s leading role in including and representing the diversity of Australia across our news and current affairs”. Go figure.
SBS also employs two Indigenous Elders in residence to “provide support and cultural empowerment,” has created a voluntary register of staff with what is calls a range of lived experiences to sit in on job interviews to minimise unconscious bias and now gives employees who are promoted $10,000 to spend on “professional development.” How nice for them.
If they need ten grand’s worth of professional development you might wonder how they got promoted in the first place.
When I first set foot in a newsroom all those years ago, I was shown where the toilet and the cafeteria were located and told to find a desk and a typewriter. That was full extent of my employer’s contribution to my cultural empowerment and professional development and while others might differ, I’d like to think things haven’t turned out too badly in spite of an abysmal lack of hand holding, cosseting and empowering.
I get heartily sick of people who claim they deserve special treatment because of their colour, race or sexual preference. Stop whining and get on with the job.
The great tragedy of all this virtue signalling, diversity, empowerment and inclusion is that the young people who will provide our next generation of leaders exist in a cotton wool environment in which they are fearful of expressing an opinion that is not trumpeted by the mob.
If it looks like bull…t and smells like bull…t, the chances are it’s bull…t. Merry Christmas.
Open slather on foreign students has gone too far
As 2020 draws to a close, it’s pretty clear the last COVID-related restriction that will be lifted is the international movement of people in and out of the country.
The exact timing of international borders becoming fully open is unclear. The second half of 2021 is probably the best guess at this stage, but you wouldn’t bet your house on this. The take-up and effectiveness of the vaccine will be important in determining the outcome.
For an open economy such as Australia’s, the impact of the restrictions on the international movement of people is potentially substantial, with reduced international tourism as well as fewer international students and temporary workers.
Having said that, it’s not all doom and gloom, particularly on the tourism front. The fall-off in the international student population also provides a useful opportunity for a mature discussion about the appropriate role of international students in Australia’s education systems.
Consider tourism. Last year, 9.4 million tourists visited Australia from overseas. This was an increase of 2.4 per cent from the previous year. Those from China were the most likely to visit, followed by New Zealanders.
The number of visitor arrivals to Australia has fallen off a cliff. In October this year, for instance, there were only 6000 visitor arrivals, which was a 99.2 per cent decline relative to the same month last year.
The economic impact of the loss of international tourists is being offset, at least partly, by internal tourism, particularly given the restrictions on the departure of Australians to overseas destinations. Indeed, data indicates that Australians typically spend more going overseas than international tourists spend visiting this country — a gap known as the tourism deficit.
Needless to say, the border restrictions have not helped and the size and type of spending by domestic tourists are significantly different from international tourists. But the effective ban on outbound tourism does provide the opportunity for tourism-related operators to make up some ground for the loss of business because of the absence of international tourists.
When it comes to international students, the immediate effect of the restrictions on international arrivals was not as great as expected as the majority of students were in Australia at the start of March. (There had been a scramble to get Chinese students, in particular, back into the country in February by letting them transition through third countries.)
A reasonable proportion of international students who have not been able to return to the country have continued their studies online.
However, the mid-year intakes have pointed to bigger effects, with the Reserve Bank noting: “Australia’s education exports have fallen further in the second half of the year. The number of international student enrolments has declined.”
It is also mentioned that “the size of the fall in new enrolments has varied across different types of programs”. The largest decline has been in English-language and foundation programs that serve as pathways to higher education or vocational courses. This has implications down the track.
The universities, in particular, have reacted with angst, with a number of leaders pointing to the negative consequences for higher education and the economy.
What is less often mentioned is the fact that international student numbers had been growing at an extraordinary pace prior to the onset of COVID-19. In 2019, there were 11 per cent more international students in the country than in 2018. And in the five years ending in 2019, the number of international students had nearly doubled, with China being the biggest single source country.
That there have been negatives as well as positives associated with this rapid growth is a point too rarely conceded by senior managers in the education sector. In particular, the lack of language proficiency on the part of too many overseas students needs to recognised. The potential for domestic students to lose out due to large numbers of international students — contrived group assignments and lower standards being two examples — should also be acknowledged.
There is also the dubious figure of about $40bn of “exports” associated with international students, a figure often quoted by education lobbyists. In fine mercantilist style — exports good, imports bad — they bemoan the loss of export earnings associated with fewer international students.
Now most people understand the term export to mean the sale of domestically produced goods and services to overseas buyers — think iron ore, wheat, LNG. But because international students studying in Australia will use foreign currencies, at least in part, to pay for their education, the Australian Bureau of Statistics counts all spending by international students as export income.
The reality is quite different. About $17bn of the total figure are tuition fees, with the remaining being international students’ living expenses while living in Australia. But, given that many international students work while in Australia, particularly to cover living expenses, and are paid in Australian dollars, it is a conceptual mistake to equate the $40bn as being export income.
We know the majority of students from India and Nepal — there has been strong growth in their numbers in recent years — work while in Australia. We also know international student workers are more likely to be exploited than young Australian citizens, in part because of their strong need to work as well as the restrictions on their work patterns arising from visa conditions.
The lobbyists continue to press the case for establishing facilitated paths of entry for international students in early 2021. This push has seemingly been met with some sympathy by state governments. They also point to the increasing attractiveness of other destinations for international students, such as Canada and the UK, because of the ease of entry and the option of students becoming permanent residents in these countries. This latter point is unlikely to generate much sympathy here if international students are seen to be more interested in securing permanent residence than being educated.
It’s time federal and state governments came clean about the role international students should play in our education systems. Most people accept there are benefits of having a small proportion of language-proficient students from a range of countries at our schools, colleges and universities. But the open slather of the years prior to COVID-19 should not be repeated.
The insane bureaucracy that runs the government hospitals of NSW
In one day, Stephen Crerar's 33-year career was destroyed and he's still shocked by the reason his employer NSW Health gave him. Mr Crerar, a former human resources manager in the Mid-North Coast Local Health District (MNCLHD), was told to hand his pass in and leave the building immediately on February 4, 2019.
Six months later he found out why he was suspended — for communicating with his union.
"I was beside myself in disbelief," he said. "What kind of fool would suspend a HR manager for consulting with their union, it's just laughable, it's not a sane reason to give."
Mr Crerar contacted the Health Services Union in 2018 to suggest that the MNCLHD could be in breach of the health employees industrial award as there was a lack of consultation during a staff restructure.
He suggested the union initiate action in the Industrial Relations Commission.
NSW Health alleged this was "corrupt conduct" and accused Mr Crerar of failing to act with honesty and integrity, according to an official letter from the MNCLHD.
"The whole thing was devastating and a terrible ordeal," he said. "I tried to improve communication and consultation and look how they treated me."
Mr Crerar was also put on a staff blacklist, known as a service check register, which deemed him high risk and effectively made him unemployable elsewhere in NSW Health.
Six months after he was suspended, NSW Health was forced to admit Mr Crerar had been wronged.
"The MNCLHD decision to suspend you from the workplace was not in accordance with relevant NSW Health policy," Deputy Secretary of Health, Phil Minns, wrote in a letter to Mr Crerar.
Mr Minns went on to acknowledge Mr Crerar should have never been subject to a misconduct investigation and was denied procedural fairness. "The decision to commence the investigation was flawed, particularly in that Mr Crerar was not informed of the alleged behaviour for which he was being suspended and investigated," a summary of findings said.
Although MNCLHD told Mr Crerar he had been referred to ICAC at the time of his suspension, NSW Health later admitted that never happened.
Yesterday the ABC revealed two other employees are taking legal action against the MNCLHD for psychological distress relating to their alleged treatment in the workplace.
'I stood up and said the right thing'
Mr Crerar later received an apology from the chief executive of the MNCLHD for the suspension. "I acknowledge and sincerely apologise for the distress and anxiety these events have caused. I am sorry for the wider impact this has had on you and your family," chief executive Stewart Dowrick wrote in an official letter. "You remain a valued employee of MNCLHD."
But Mr Crerar said this was too little, too late. "It's been devastating for me personally ... I had a successful career that was smeared inappropriately, as was my reputation," he said. "My mental health, physical health has deteriorated rapidly and I'm still on medication for mental health issues."
Mr Crerar also feels he was targeted for something completely unrelated to his union involvement.
In a 2018 inquiry commissioned by NSW Health Mr Crerar was highly critical of employment practices within the MNCLHD. He told the inquiry that staff were being inappropriately disciplined and victimised for the most minor of issues. "I didn't shine a very good light on them," he said.
"I'm sure that's why I was targeted. Because I stood up and said the right thing and gave honest evidence with a view to improving practices ... and look at how I've been treated."
However, NSW Health strongly refutes Mr Crerar's suspension had anything to with his involvement in the inquiry.
An external investigation into the matter was also commissioned by the Ministry and found his suspension was unrelated to the evidence he gave.
Mr Crerar subsequently lodged a claim for workers compensation for bullying which has now settled.
Health says things have changed
The Health Services Union (HSU) says what happened to Mr Crerar "beggars belief" and warrants an inquiry. "This is clearly just yet another situation of bureaucracy gone mad," HSU NSW secretary Gerard Hayes said.
Under the NSW Industrial Arbitration Act, workers are afforded freedom of association, which means an employer must not victimise an employee for their involvement in a union.
However, Mr Hayes says the HSU is witness to a lot of union member intimidation and bullying inside NSW Health. "Senior managers get targeted, cleaners get targeted," he said.
"We would like to see an inquiry into NSW Health and the bad culture that everyone recognises and acknowledges. "It seems absolutely remarkable that in a situation like this it's just 'here's an apology, let's move on'."
SafeWork NSW investigated Mr Crerar's matter, and others raised by fellow colleagues in the MNCLHD, and decided to put the MNCLHD on a 12-month monitoring schedule.
NSW Health admitted Mr Crerar "experienced distress through what has been a lengthy process", a spokesperson said.
But MNCLHD chief executive Stewart Dowrick said many changes have since been made within the district to improve workforce culture and staff wellbeing, including a dedicated Director of People and Culture. "Improvements have also been made to how staff complaints are managed, including use of the service check register," he said.
Mr Crerar says he doesn't have any confidence he will find employment again, but wants the public to know what is happening within NSW Health. "I've seen a number of employees who were disciplined for minor matters whose careers are now ruined.
"I've seen a seriously toxic culture. There needs to be change at the top."
The 2019 People Matter employee survey found only 27 per cent of staff in the MNCLHD feel senior managers listen to employees.
NSW Health Minister Brad Hazzard declined to be interviewed for this story.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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21 December, 2020
Australian Bureau of Statistics: Australian deaths, 1 January to 27 October 2020
The coronavirus has actually SAVED lives. It has wiped out some of the elderly but the rest of the population is doing fine
Deaths have been lower than average during the winter months in 2020.
Respiratory disease deaths have been lower than historical minimums since June.
Throughout this report, counts of deaths for 2020 are compared to an average number of deaths recorded over the previous 5 years (2015-2019). These average or baseline counts serve as a proxy for the expected number of deaths, so comparisons against baseline counts can provide an indication of excess mortality. The minimum and maximum counts from 2015-19 are also included to provide an indication of the range of previous counts. Minimums and maximums for any given week can be from any of the five years from 2015-19.
Deaths remained below historical averages since mid May, although the difference temporarily narrowed in late July and mid August. The number of deaths typically declines during spring with the end of the influenza season. Despite the lack of a severe 2020 influenza season, the number of deaths has followed traditional patterns, declining during the spring months.
Deaths were below the historical minimum range for most of June and July, late August and since mid September. Between 3 June and 27 October, there have been 57,939 deaths, 3,388 below the average of 61,327.
Electricity prices are set to plunge by up to $190 a year by 2023 - but only in those states where coal-fired power stations are not being closed
Natural gas and subsidies at work
Australian electricity bills are set to plunge by up to $190 within three years - but only in states where a major coal-fired power station isn't being closed.
The Australian Energy Market Commission predicted major power price plunges in Victoria and Queensland by the 2022-23 financial year.
The falls arise from reduced wholesale costs in most states and territories as gas becomes cheaper and renewable energy more plentiful
On a national level, power prices were expected to fall by 8.7 per cent or $117 within three years.
In Victoria, annual residential power bills were expected to plunge by 15.2 per cent, or $172, in a state where the Hazelwood power station in the Latrobe Valley was decommissioned in 2018.
Queensland was expected to see electricity bills dive by 14.2 per cent or $190 by 2023.
New South Wales, however, was only expected to see a 2.2 per cent or a $29 decrease in electricity bills due to the fall in coal-powered energy.
Australia's most populated state is also home to the Liddell power station in the Hunter Valley north of Sydney.
Owner AGL has begun shutting down the Muswellbrook plant, which is closing in 2023.
The AEMC report said the Liddell closure would tighten the supply of electricity and see power prices increase in 2022, after two years of price falls.
Its modelling did not take into account a federal government target for the electricity industry to deliver 1,000 megawatts of new energy to replace Liddell before it closed down in 2023.
Nonetheless, Energy Minister Angus Taylor hailed the government's decision to increase the supply of power to cope with the Hunter Valley power plant in less than three years.
'The government is on the side of consumers,' he said. 'We are taking strong action to ensure Australians are paying less to keep lights on.'
The report said cheaper gas prices and more capacity from solar and wind projects would contribute to lower wholesale prices.
South Australia, which in October became the first place in the world to be entirely solar powered for one hour, was expected to see a 10.8 per cent or a $203 fall in power bills.
The Australian Capital Territory, however, which is now 100 per cent renewable energy powered, was only expected to see a 2.3 per cent or a $45 decrease in power bills.
Tasmania which sources 90 per cent of its energy from renewable sources was tipped to see a 3.6 per cent or a $70 drop in electricity bills.
The report didn't offer forecasts for Western Australia or the Northern Territory.
The never-ending feminist push for one-eyed justice
Bettina Arndt
Good to see yet another high profile #MeToo case collapse this week when actor Craig McLachlan was found not guilty of the sexual assault and related charges which have hung over him for the last three years. Even though the magistrate Belinda Wallington reached the appropriate verdict, she was careful to give a nod to the sisterhood by praising the “brave and honest” complainants who had accused the actor of misbehaviour during a Rocky Horror show production. She also took a swipe at McLachlan, describing him as an “egotistical and self-entitled man”.
Note that this is the magistrate who first ordered George Pell to stand trial and then famously appeared in an ABC photograph with Louise Milligan, author of the notorious book, Cardinal, which very effectively poisoned public opinion before the Pell case went before a jury. The unanimous High Court decision dismissing the Pell allegations speaks volumes about the judgement of both women.
Magistrate Wallington at least made her decision in the McLachlan case based on the facts, not feminist ideology. Janice Fiamengo in Canada this week tweeted about a far more extreme example of a feminist judge who made no pretence of being impartial. A sexual assault conviction was overturned by the Court of Appeal of Alberta because the trial judge, Stephanie Clearly, was found to have “entered the fray” and acted like a victim’s advocate, interrupting and deflecting questions to the female complainant to such an extent it created an unfair trial. Imagine finding yourself as a defendant in a rape case up before a judge with that history.
Meanwhile, more Milligan shenanigans.
Despite such rare setbacks, the feminist push to influence rape trials just rolls on, led most recently in Australia by activist journalist Louise Milligan. Funnily enough Milligan was the reporter for the pathetic 4 Corners’ programme, Inside the Canberra Bubble, which alleged sexual misconduct from government ministers but served only to reinforce the organization’s reputation for biased, shoddy reporting. Here was a classic feminist witch-hunt, short on facts but long on innuendo and anti-male smears.
Now Milligan is busily promoting her latest book, Witness, which she claims highlights the elusive justice on offer to sexual abuse victims in our “broken, sexist legal system”. According to Witness, the criminal justice system is maladapted to meet the needs of sexual assault complainants. “For sex crimes, rates of complaints, prosecutions, and convictions are persistently low,” the book claims.
That’s so much hogwash. Just last weekend one of Australia’s leading criminal barristers, former prosecutor Margaret Cunneen SC, was quoted in The Weekend Australian, pointing out Australian legal system is at the forefront of advances in prosecuting sexual assault. “The environment for a complainant has never been more receptive or encouraging,” said the lawyer who achieved national fame leading the prosecution of the Skaf gang rapes that occurred in Sydney in 2000. Cunneen is now concerned that prosecutors are under such pressure to take sexual crimes seriously that far too many cases are being pushed through to trial, even when the evidence is lacking to ensure a conviction.
The numbers of such cases are certainly way up. NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics (BOSCAR) data shows a huge increase in rape convictions, which almost doubled between 1995 and 2020, up from 579 to 1006 - a 14% increase in conviction rates.
Almost 66% of people convicted of sexual assault in NSW go to jail, compared to about 10 per cent of people convicted of other crimes. Just look at the leap in the last five years – in this graph based on 2015-2019 data from BOSCAR.
In the last five year there been a 72 % increase in people sentenced to prison for sexual assault. Here’s BOSAR’s neat little summary of this very significant change.
It’s very telling that these statistics, proudly on display in this leading crime statistics organization website, never attract any media attention. Our captured media far prefers to spin feminist mistruths about our failing justice system.
Tough justice but never enough for the feminists.
Last month the NSW Law Reform Commission released recommendations for reform of the state’s sexual consent laws, after a review lasting over two years. There was an immediate outcry from feminists complaining that the state had missed their chance to require ‘yes means yes’ consent when defending sexual assault allegations.
The activists have been pushing the case for “enthusiastic” or “affirmative consent” to be enshrined in these laws, mimicking Tasmanian legislation which requires the accused to actively check out whether they have consent, not just at the start of sexual activity but throughout the process.
Despite massive lobbying from women’s groups, the Commission decided not to go this far, although they recommend that it’s not enough to assume consent simply because your partner does not verbally or physically resist – in recognition of the fact that victims can “freeze” during an assault.
There’s a bunch of other recommendations which further strengthen the rights of complainants, including the notion that consent is impossible if the person is “so affected by alcohol as to be incapable of consent” – a very problematic definition particular as intoxication of the accused is not deemed a relevant defense.
But what the most alarming aspect of media coverage of the Commission’s announcements was the reported comment by the very woke NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman who, when he tabled the report in parliament, suggested the “low conviction rates’ for sexual assault compared to other offences may contribute to the reluctant of victims to come forward.
Compared to which offences, Mr Speakman? The conviction rates for sexual assault are high compared to many other serious crimes which attract long prison sentences. The latest BOSCAR statistics show a conviction rate of 57 % for proven sexual assault, compared to 33 % for murder or 36 % for attempted murder. Sure there are lesser crimes, like stealing a car, with higher rates (73%) but these are often easier to prove than the he-said, she-said evidence that comprise most sexual assault cases, particularly in date rape situations.
Sensible juries are not going to send men away for long prison sentences when they are faced with contradictory evidence and cannot work out whom to believe. Nor should they. This is nothing to do with prejudice against rape victims, as explained in a recent article from spiked-online, quoting research surveying jurists by Professor Cheryl Thomas, director of the Judicial Institute at University College London. Thomas dismisses misconceptions about “low” conviction rapes for rape cases pointing out that the current UK rate (68.5) is the highest on record.
Speakman’s posturing doesn’t surprise me – after all this is the man who so readily parroted the lies being circulated about me when he urged my honours award be rescinded.
But it is concerning that the state’s senior legal officer chooses to fudge crime statistics, particularly when this man could influence the feeble NSW coalition government to bend to the feminist push and take things even further. Some of my long-time readers might remember when law professor Augusto Zimmermann led the WA Law Reform Commission which mounted a strong argument against proposed domestic violence laws, only to have the government ignore their advice and push ahead with policies which set up men for endless false accusations.
So, good people, I need you to write to key conservative members of the NSW Cabinet, such as Barilaro, Perrottet and Elliot, urging them to rein in Speakman, and ensure minimal changes to the already tough sexual assault laws. We only have ourselves to blame if we sit back and allow Speakman and his feminist fan club to make the running.
Feminist con job in budget hand-out
Did you notice the nice little feminist rort introduced in the NSW budget last month? With workers losing jobs across the state as a result of Covid lockdowns, this supposedly conservative government decided to offer women in this situation back-to-work grants of up to $5000.
Naturally these grants are not available to men - regardless of need. In a press release, the Premier’s justification for focussing on gender was: "It is estimated that women make up 53 per cent of directly affected industries and 65 per cent of secondary industries impacted by the pandemic."
One of my correspondents kindly sent in an analysis showing that here too the government is pulling the wool over our eyes.
Read on:
The Minister for Women Bronnie Taylor, stated that women have been "inadvertedly more affected" by unemployment during the pandemic. The clear implication is that, as a result of the pandemic, unemployment is higher for women than men. However, the Government statements are highly misleading.
Australian Bureau of Statistics data reveals that it is men, not women, who have been disproportionately affected. For every woman added to the NSW unemployed in the last 12 months, 2.7 men have become unemployed. The unemployment rate for men has risen by 2.4% but only by 0.9% for women. (Data Series A84423494R, A84423718R, A84423490F & A84423714F.)
You may like to add a note about this to your letters to the NSW Ministers, asking why they are alienating the majority of the population who believe in fair treatment for men and women.
Bettina Arndt newsletter: newsletter@bettinaarndt.com.au
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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20 December, 2020
HSC a brutal and irrelevant way to define ‘intelligence’ in a world opening its eyes to other values
A rather silly article below tries to downplay the importance of your final High School results (the ATAR).
But it does a very bad job of that. It rather boringly says the ATAR does not measure intelligence. He is right. It measures APPLIED intelligence -- what happens when you combine IQ with hard work. Business-people have long hired on the basis of that. The ATAR gives them an indication of how likely you are to make a success of a difficult task in the workplace.
The claim that your ATAR ceases to matter soon after you got it is nonsense. He actually admits that it is nonsense, saying it matters in forming relationships and will matter when you have chidren
And he seems to think he is original in saying that IQ is not the only personal quality that is important. I know no-one who would disagree. To me a kind heart trumps most other qualities
On Thursday night, the ATAR was the be-all and end-all; by Friday lunch, it was on its way to being forgotten.
One of the great joys of leaving school is the discovery that the all-important marker of so-called intelligence, which school leavers feared was going to define them, was a mirage. It wasn’t quite a con job: the HSC, as a rite of passage and an educational journey, has a lot going for it and is often unjustly criticised. But the ATAR is only a functional gateway for entry into certain university courses. Like a ticket of entry for a long-awaited show, you might have kept it under your pillow and kissed it every night for months, but once you’ve used it, you screw it up and the next day you can’t remember where you lost it.
For those who shocked themselves by how well they did, their ATAR might provide a secret treasure of self-esteem – “I am a 90 person, even if everyone took me for a 70 person” – but they will have to keep it to themselves, because from today forward, there will be not a single thing more uncool than telling someone what you got in your HSC.
For those who were disappointed, or – horrible word – who “underachieved”, the end of the HSC will come as a blessed relief. They will no longer wear that mark on their forehead.
Whether your result was good, bad or indifferent, forgetting your ATAR starts the moment you receive it. Ranking intelligence is one of the many components of our colonial inheritance that is coming under an attack that is more concerted each year. There is a broad illusion in the brutality of a number to rank a person’s intelligence. Those two years of the HSC apportion intelligence as if it were money, handed out unevenly yet treated as a symbol of virtue. For many students, knowing where they stood in this hierarchy has offered the comforts of certainty and security. Some will proceed through their lives into workplaces that replicate this hierarchy – the professions, academia, the military, some of the rank-conscious remnants of the business world. Perpetual strivers will find a sequence of substitutes for the ATAR, so they may go to their grave knowing, or thinking they know, exactly where they stand. But that way of viewing the world is shrinking with each year.
Any agreed consensus on what constitutes “intelligence” is under assault on various fronts. Science is bringing us to the humbling understanding that “intelligence” is not an objective but a social measure, conditioned by circumstance, gender, race and dis/ability, just for starters. A quantifiable scale for “braininess” is as anachronistic as an IQ test, as mustily irrelevant as Mensa membership. The drive for diversity in workplaces is not based just on the notion that anyone can be just as “smart” as the white men who invented the rules; it is based on the suspicion that “intelligence”, and the hierarchies that flow from it, was a rigged game in the first place. The diversity movement has its excesses and missteps, which are generously well reported, but at its heart is the encouragement to think about brains differently, and to figure out that the greatest contributors to our social good are those whose qualities slipped the noose of the HSC markers.
My favourite Gary Larson cartoon is the one showing the student at the “Midvale School for the Gifted”, leaning with all his weight, trying to open a door that has a big sign on it saying “PULL”. For today’s school leavers, their parents’ and grandparents’ generation saw “intelligence” as a narrowly fixed quantity, a door for the gifted. But for the class of 2020, the paths of opportunity promise to branch out in a world that is finding many different things to value: emotional intelligence, kindness, empathy, understanding, intuition, commonsense, initiative, as well as countless exercises of brainpower for which there was no measurement at school.
For all that, the HSC will still leave a heavy after-trauma. Those students might think they have been liberated from the HSC, but they can look forward to a lifetime of waking in a cold sweat from nightmares in which they still have to do their HSC exams and are even less prepared than the first time, and probably have forgotten to wear certain articles of clothing.
And then, years after putting it all behind them, they will meet their life partner and, over a bottle of wine, the old zombie will stir from its grave. “What did you get in the HSC?” And neither will want to confess to their number, because the last thing they want is for love to be polluted by memories they have succeeded for so long in burying. Their ATAR need not be tattooed onto their arm.
In time, they in turn will have children, and will love them to bits through their infancy and primary years. But then those children will enter secondary school and the nightmare of classification will become real again. As parents, today’s school leavers will make enormous sacrifices so that their children will have an opportunity to get that golden ticket. Is the ticket worth such sacrifices? You will have forgotten. Your children will ask, “What did you get in the HSC, Mum? Dad?” And back you plummet into the embarrassment of either having done better or worse than your family had you pegged for, and now you’ll get scared all over again, this time that your children will see you differently if they know your secret number.
And then those children will enter year 11, and before you know it, the HSC is the be-all and end-all again, and you’ll have forgotten the most vital lesson out of all those 13 years of schooling you did, which is that the day after your children have received their results, it will have ceased to matter. Until you become a grandparent. Onwards … and upward
China’s aggressive fishing fleet heading for Australia amid trade war
Beijing’s monster fishing fleet has long since stripped its own waters bare. Now it is aggressively prowling the Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Oceans for a catch. And it is coming to Australia.
It grabs as much as it can. As fast as it can. Wherever it can. Not that there is anything entirely unusual about this.
What makes China’s fishing fleet different, however, is that the Communist Party officially sanctions its behaviour. It is organised and overseen by the Communist Party. And it’s used to assert the territorial ambitions of the Communist Party.
It’s also huge. It’s now the world’s largest fleet. Its operations span the globe. One count places the number of deepwater vessels at its disposal at 12,500.
Beijing claims only 3000 boats operate in international waters.
But the full extent of its operations came to light earlier this year when Global Fishing Watch released a study based on satellite data and tracking analysis.
Australia’s rock lobster industry is just one of many targets of Beijing’s punitive economic acts. Now Australia’s fishers are worried Beijing’s fishing fleet may come for them: The site of a proposed new $204 million Chinese port is right in the middle of the Torres Strait rock lobster fishery.
Foreign Minister Marise Payne was quick to reassure that Border Force vessels would monitor the region to enforce territorial boundaries and joint-fishing treaties.
But if China claims the Papua New Guinea port gives it access to Australia’s fisheries, that could cause problems.
Former government foreign policy advisor Philip Citowicki says the proposed port is a demonstration of great-power wedge politics.
“The reality is that it continues to seat PNG at the centre of a tug of war, where the presence of China’s authoritarianism is increasingly imprinting itself on the fledgling democracies of the Pacific,” he writes.
“Rarely driven by altruism or regional responsibility, it places both the resources and security of the region at risk.”
It’s not a new threat. In 2018, the Lowy Institute foresaw Beijing’s fleet “may soon create new security headaches for Australia”. “The impact of Chinese fishing has important strategic consequences for Australia’s region in several ways,” David Brewster wrote at the time.
“There is a good chance that fishing will become a key locus of disputes and incidents involving China.”
Center for International Maritime Security (CIMSEC) Indo-Pacific analyst Blake Herzinger says international governments are starting to wake up to the damage done.
“Globally, economic losses from illegal fishing are difficult to quantify, but there is little disagreement that the overall economic loss totals tens of billions of dollars yearly, encompassing lost tax revenue, onshore fishing industry jobs, and depletion of food supplies,” he writes.
The small South American nations of Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are worried their fisheries are in the process of being looted.
In November they issued a joint statement asserting they would combine their limited resources “to prevent, discourage and jointly confront” any illegal fishing operations.
They did not name China. But the presence of so many of China’s large, modern fishing vessels off their shores is hard to miss.
And this particular fleet has been the focus of world attention since July when it was caught within the international marine reserve surrounding Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands.
Ecuador doesn’t have the strength to enforce international law. And its government is heavily indebted to Beijing and struggling to pay back infrastructure loans.
STRATEGIC FISHING FLEET
Beijing’s fishing fleet is not just a commercial operation. It is a party-political one.
It is organised as a militia. Key factory ships have Communist Party commissars watching over the captains and their operations. Selected crews are trained to work in concert with the People’s Liberation Army Navy.
In return, Beijing pays its fuel bill – the fishing fleet’s single greatest expense. It’s a massive subsidy that allows it to undercut its international competitors significantly.
Some vessels do no fishing at all. Instead, their job is to monitor the active fleet, intimidate fishers of other nations, or simply sit provocatively inside another nation’s territory.
This makes them a diplomatic weapon, part of Beijing’s determination to wage “hybrid war” – the use of every means available short of kinetic weaponry – to assert its will.
They’ve recently been highly visible off the Philippines and Indonesia.
Beijing’s fishing militia also receives unprecedented military support. Wherever the fleet goes, armed coast guard ships usually follow – no matter how far from China’s coast the fleet may be. And China’s coast guard is not a civilian police force. The People’s Liberation Army operates it. And that dramatically escalates the implications of any confrontation.
Herzinger says international fishing regulations are being enforced – but only against weaker nations such as Cambodia, Thailand, the Philippines and Vietnam.
China escapes criticism because of the power of its potential economic and at-sea backlash.
China’s 1.4 billion people love seafood – each reportedly consuming an average of 37.8 kilos a year. That’s some 38 per cent of the total annual worldwide catch.
But Beijing’s fishing fleet also sells huge quantities to markets such as the US, Europe and Australia.
Exactly how much it takes from the oceans is unknown. The militia does not report its catch to international authorities. Only the Communist Party gets that data.
Greenies do something positive
Ecological “arks” will be created in the Great Barrier Reef under a new Federal Government funded program that for the first time links island health as critical to saving the coral.
Environment Minister Sussan Ley will today announce $5.5 million for a new island restoration program, starting with Morris Island off Cape York.
She said Lady Elliot Island on the reef’s southern border was the first regeneration project ever attempted at scale and its success could be replicated elsewhere.
“There are 1050 islands along the reef ranging from the pristine to former mine sites, disused tourism destinations and those that have been damaged by introduced pest species,” she said.
“As part of the Reef Islands initiative, Dr Kathy Townsend of Sunshine Coast University is leading new ‘leaf to reef’ research that follows the nutrient trail between islands and its importance to corals and marine life, as well as researching the importance of Lady Elliot’s reefs as a biodiversity ark in the region.”
Reef manager for the marine park authority Mark Read said overseas views particularly under-appreciated the complexity of the issue.
“For context the world heritage area is 348,000 square kilometres; it’s bigger than Italy, bigger than Japan and can sit Victoria and Tasmania within its boundaries. It stretches over 2000km and at its widest point is 250km, it’s 1050 islands, 3000 reefs – so trying to categorise that whole system within a single category, ultimately it fails and doesn’t do the system justice,” he said.
Lady Elliot Island is a genesis of what the Federal Government yesterday branded an “ecological ark” carrying the essential ingredients to rehabilitate the in-crisis reef, critically affected by natural and man-made climate change.
Gash and a dedicated team of scientists, backed by a string of Federal Government funded initiatives, are in part driven by a sketch discovered in archives drawn from a sailor aboard HMS Fly in 1843 of what the island sanctuary looked like then and could again.
“So many people say ‘oh but it’s hopeless, there is nothing we can do and it’s all going to die’ and I hate hearing that, it’s never hopeless,” Island custodian Gash said as he looks out over the turquoise waters on the southern point of the reef, 80km from the Queensland mainland.
In 1973 Lady Elliot Island was a dead 42-hectare coral atoll that after almost a century of mining for guano fertiliser was left barren, with no bird or sea life.
Now it boasts more than 1200 species of marine life including turtles and manta rays, whole forests of native Pisonia trees and grasses and the second highest diversity of breeding birds of any feature in the Great Barrier Reef after Raine Island on the reef’s northernmost tip.
Environment Minister Sussan Ley visited Lady Elliot this week to see first-hand the spectacular restoration result which she now hoped will be replicated elsewhere along the reef island chain starting with Morris Island, under a new $5.5 million investment.
Great Barrier Reef Foundation managing director Anna Marsden said without a doubt there were “dark days” ahead for the climate but Lady Elliot was a shining light in what could be achieved within our life times.
“The idea is these arks, these climate refuges, will carry the reef forward,” she said. “The habitat will be able to be the ones to go, before the dark days, then when the world gets its act together and the balance restores these are the places that will reopen the doors and repopulate.”
World renowned marine biologist Dr Kathy Townsend said the correlation between land life and reef marine life was now only being understood.
“The connection between coral cays and the island has been undervalued,” she said.
“The current dogma is where these coral cays are getting their nutrients but new research is showing these coral cays are creating nutrients for the reef in a balanced way. It’s not a dump but a pumping action … it’s like growing an island. Without healthy islands you wouldn’t have the same level of growth and biodiversity you see around the reef.”
She said there had been a 125 per cent increase in turtle habitat and they again were the primary herbivore about Lady Elliot which was keeping coral killing grasses down.
The cultural truth about Australia
Darryl Kerrigan was right. There is something special about suburbia. Not just any suburbia but Australian suburbia. It is much parodied even ridiculed and especially by those who live in the “sophisticated” but congested inner city. So what does life in the ‘burbs actually look like? And does it vary from city to city?
Come with me in search of Australia’s great suburban heartland.
Australia’s largest cities invariably trail off into long tendrils, corridors, of McMansions extending 50km and more from the city centre. Here is a world of big houses, of big mortgages and of long commutes.
But this is not the suburban heartland; this is a new suburban frontier being formed and styled and built every day.
I believe the heart and soul of middle Australia sits squarely amid the expanse of a vast suburban savanna, where separate houses on separate blocks of land dominate the landscape to the horizon in every direction. Finding the middle suburban heartland is an issue of geography and demography and of trial and error.
And it’s not as simple an exercise at it sounds. At what point across each of our five largest cities is there unfettered access to the greatest number of Australians within a 10km radius?
This kind of information is vital to big-box retailers, but I think it also nurtures and celebrates Australia’s suburban culture.
The epicentre or centroid of the largest 10km-radius salami-like slice of the Australian people is necessarily positioned between 13km and 20km from the central business district. Any closer to the city centre and pure suburbia gives way to density’s apartmentia. Any farther afield results in part of the slice-of-suburbia taking in non-urban bushland or farmland. No, the epicentre of Australia’s middle suburbia sits more or less midway between the cool inner city and the Nappy Valley edge.
After some trial and error I have identified what is possibly the largest expanses of the suburban life form in each of the five biggest cities in Australia. The resultant population thus scooped up in this 20km diameter circle ranges from around one million in Sydney and Melbourne to less than 500,000 in Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.
The epicentre suburbs are Burwood for Melbourne, Parramatta for Sydney, Runcorn for Brisbane, Leeming for Perth and Green Fields for Adelaide. These places offer access to what is possibly the greatest number of suburban Australians in every direction for a radius of 10km. If there is a ground zero, a genesis point, a suburban Garden of Eden, it is these places for they lie at the demographic centre of Australia’s deeply suburban way of life.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics breaks down the metropolitan area into a series of suburbs.
There are for example 61 suburbs comprising Melbourne’s suburban expanse centred on Burwood and which converts to around 16,000 people per suburb. Melbourne’s middle suburban heartland is a bit like 61 country towns the size of Horsham all jammed together.
Sydney’s heartland is much the same: 59 suburbs the size of Grafton all jammed and connected together.
Middle Australia may be the largest single cultural group on the Australian continent but, at its core, it comprises smaller communities (of, say, county-town size) all raising families, paying off mortgages, commuting to the city, holding traditional values (see evidence later), and very much interested in beautifying and embellishing the family home with the help of Bunnings and Harvey Norman.
Parody it if you will but it is also a cultural truth about Australia and the way we live. And when I consider how people live in other developed-world cities, I think our suburbia is a pretty good way of life. There are questions of sustainability, but with some effort and especially with more workers working from home this way of life can be made more efficient (that is, less carbon emissions).
What strikes me about the suburban slices is the consistency in how we live. At the last census there was roughly one local job per two local residents in each slice. About one-third of the sampled middle suburbia population was born overseas. About a third hold a mortgage.
More than half believe in a god; they hold traditional values. Interestingly, the Parramatta slice is the most devout and contains the highest proportion of the population born overseas (49 per cent). These figures are skewed by the Indian community that dominates Harris Park near Parramatta.
Melbourne’s biggest migrant enclaves are located outside the Burwood slice.
Australia is an extraordinarily multicultural community even at the everyday suburban level. At the last census 17,000 overseas visitors spent the night in Burwood’s middle suburbia. These aren’t high-end tourists staying in five-star city hotels; these are, in all probability, friends and family visiting new migrants and probably marvelling at the suburban abundance of the Australian way of life.
Again in the Burwood slice — containing 4 per cent of the Australian population — 23,000 visitors from within Australia spent census night in this most suburban part of Melbourne. Then there are 37,000 foreign students, perhaps attached to any of the three local universities namely Deakin, Swinburne and Monash.
I am not getting the feeling that this example of middle suburbia is some disconnected cultural backwater. Indeed, the metrics suggest otherwise. middle Australia may hold traditional values, it’s people may commute, raise families and take an inordinate sense of pride in their home — indeed, their castle — but this community is also deeply connected into their extended families.
Local residents are immersed in the cultural influences of visitors flooding in from intrastate, from interstate and from overseas. The multicultural youth presence (students) — no doubt somewhat subdued by the pandemic — delivers a pulsating energy to otherwise quite quiet places within striking distance of university campuses.
Of course the Parramatta slice sits at the centre of the Greater Sydney Commission’s grand vision for Sydney whereby Parramatta emerges as the Harbour City’s second CBD. And that plan very much makes sense, although in due course this may push Sydney’s pure suburban culture even further to the west. (A bit like the way the Celts were pushed to the edges of the British Isles.) We will know that this cultural transformation is under way when black-clad Surry Hills hipsters begin to surface in Parramatta’s cool laneways.
Brisbane offers two versions of unbroken suburban expanse: northside and southside. The southside’s Runcorn choice offers more population within a 10km radius and it includes the demographic influences of Griffith University positioned at Mount Gravatt. Like some grand demographic recipe, the addition of the vital university ingredient delivers zest and the vibrancy of youth to Brisbane’s middle suburbia.
I must admit to never having heard of Perth’s Leeming until undertaking this exercise. But its 10km slice takes in the youth influences of Murdoch and Curtin Universities, both based on the city’s southside. Perth’s urban form tends to elongate rather than bunching up, thus creating the kind of incubator necessary to bake a big suburban pie.
Adelaide’s Green Fields scoops up much of the city’s northern suburbs. But the 10km radius includes the thinly populated port as well as nearby industrial and air base precincts. This explains why Adelaide’s slice contains the fewest people of the five slices examined.
All things considered, the single slice that offers what I think is the best example of middle suburban culture — in a single salami-like slice — is Melbourne’s Burwood. Indeed I would argue that Australia’s cultural history agrees with my assessment. And that is because within this circle of suburbia centred on Burwood there is evidence of a suburban lifestyle that is much loved, greatly celebrated and vigorously projected to the rest of the nation.
Barry Humphries conceptualised his parody of middle suburbia Edna Everage (and whom he would place in distant Moonee Ponds) from his Camberwell home, 5km from Burwood.
The middle suburban cul-de-sac in which the soap opera Neighbours is filmed is located in Vermont, 8km from Burwood. The 1974 pop song Balwyn Calling by Australia’s Skyhooks chose to recognise the genteel suburb of Balwyn, 7km from Burwood. I don’t think that song would have worked citing Narre Warren or Parramatta or Caboolture.
The conclusion that comes from all of this is that the way of life in middle suburbia, or at least in the slices sampled, is pretty much the same. Harvey Norman and Bunnings and others have got the model right. Suburban Australians appear to have much the same values and behaviours. Most want a backyard gazebo and a flatscreen television. There are differences but only substantially in densities.
The similarities, I think, are far greater, such as the cosmopolitan population base, the coming and going of friends and family from within and beyond Australia, the radiating influence of universities and their youthful energetic zesty cohorts.
I don’t see a staid and provincial middle suburbia in these suburban slices. I see an energetic, connected, aspirational people wanting to build a better life for themselves and for their families.
And when you think about it, that’s not such a bad aspiration.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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19 December, 2020
The triumph of the selective schools
Selective schools are ones that admit smart kids only. Leftists oppose selective schools as a violation of their idiotic "all men are equal" doctrine but their success speaks for itself. That success is the main thing that shields them from envious attacks.
A small complication is that the kids doing best in exams are not only from selective schools but of Asian background. James Ruse Agricultural High School is almost entirely populated by students of East Asian and South Asian ancestry. Asians are on average smarter. But even discounting the Asian element, selective schools still score best
James Ruse Agricultural High School has claimed the title of NSW’s top school for the 25th year in a row, an unparalleled achievement in the history of the Higher School Certificate.
Baulkham Hills High School was second, with North Sydney Boys’ and Girls’ high schools third and fourth. Sydney Grammar, at fifth, was the only independent school in the state’s top 10.
The top non-selective school was Ascham, at 11th. Mackellar Girls High, part of the Northern Beaches Secondary College (NBSC) network, was the highest-placed public comprehensive school at 43rd. Parramatta Marist High was the top Catholic systemic school at 46th.
Tangara School for Girls, which was forced to close for two weeks in August due to a COVID-19 cluster affecting senior students, climbed 78 places to 25th, its best performance in several years.
James Ruse principal Rachel Powell stepped into the role two years ago. “We got it! That’s such a relief,” she told the Herald. “It’s vindication of of all the hard work this year.”
The principal of Mackellar Girls’, Christine del Gallo, said she was “absolutely delighted that we were able to support our girls through the COVID-19 dilemma to enable them to achieve such amazingly wonderful results for them.”
Concerns private school students would have an advantage over high-performing public students due to better remote learning resources and a shorter shutdown due to COVID-19 appear to have been unfounded, with more public schools in the top 10 than any year since 2014 and more comprehensive state schools in the top 100 than last year.
It also did not appear to affect overall results among top students, with 17,507 distinguished achievers this year compared with 17,122 in 2019.
Of the top 50 schools, 18 were government selective schools, one was a comprehensive state school, two were Catholic systemic schools, and the rest were independent.
Of 14 independent schools in the top 25, nine were single-sex girls’ schools. Single-sex public comprehensive schools also fared well, with Willoughby Girls’ at 59, NBSC Balgowlah Boys’ campus at 60, and Epping Boys’ High at 76. Chatswood High, a co-ed comprehensive school, was 69th.
The highest-placed Catholic systemic schools were Parramatta Marist High, Brigidine College Randwick at 49th, and St Ursula’s College at 79th.
James Ruse has finished first in the HSC rankings since 1996, when it took the crown off Sydney Grammar. It was originally established as a farming school, and agriculture is still a compulsory subject.
It has become the most sought after of the state’s 50-odd selective schools, and has the highest year 7 entry scores. Alumni include Atlassian founder Scott Farquhar and concert pianist David Fung.
Qld exports in demand despite COVID, China threat
There has been a surge in export demand for Queensland products, including avocados, beans, and even rowing boats, despite the pandemic.
Trade data shows a soaring demand for Queensland produce and other products since February, with some goods reporting as much as 130 per cent growth.
It comes as Queensland’s economy faces potentially devastating shock from China’s increasingly hostile trade war which threatens 8 per cent of the state’s annual production.
Crippling tariffs placed on some of Australia’s biggest industries including barley, coal, and timber have resulted in Australia referring the communist giant to the World Trade Organisation.
The value of Queensland exports to China plunged nearly 25 per cent between February and October.
But despite this, the state has seen a 137 per cent growth to $79m in bean exports, while avocadoes, guavas, mangoes, saw an 8 per cent increase to $14.16m.
Rowing boats, canoes, and vessels saw a 13 per cent growth, with strong demand from New Zealand and the US, while baby carriages, games, toys and sporting goods increased to $59m.
Lead also saw a 32 per cent increase to $390m.
Acting Premier Steven Miles said since the pandemic had begun, the state had still recorded growing demand for beans, nuts, and vegetables along with a range of other resources and products.
Social distancing requirements along with consumers having more time for leisure and sport also led to a strong spike in sales for specialised rowing sculls and canoes.
Mr Miles said strengthening partnerships with markets like the US, India, Pakistan and Singapore would boost exports.
“In particular, we’re seeing growing demand for high-protein plant-based produce like beans in a range of markets including Vietnam, India and Indonesia,” he said.
“This is great news for Queensland farmers in regions like the Southern Downs, Goondiwindi and Toowoomba. Coronavirus has had a huge impact on our economy. But this data shows that our strategy to support local companies to sell more Queensland products in new markets is taking off.”
Mr Miles said global trade would not return to normal for many years.
“But by ensuring that Queensland continues to build on its strong presence in growth markets, we can position ourselves to capitalise as market conditions improve,” he said.
Exporters have been urged to diversify and negotiate new trade agreements to avoid further economic damage.
Owning a car to be cheaper as local mechanics boosted
Car ownership will get cheaper when manufacturers are forced to share tools and data with third-party mechanics under proposed changes set to go before parliament next year.
Previously off-limits to independent workshops, the mandatory availability of special tools and software currently withheld from independent workshops will give motorists a chance to shop around when maintaining their car.
Supporters say the move will benefit drivers, but some car makers object to sharing data with third parties on the grounds of safety and security.
Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar said the planned reforms “establish a level playing field for all participants in the automotive service and repair sector, increasing competition and consumer choice.”
“The new scheme is designed to ensure appropriate commercial dealings and improved competition in the service and repair market for the benefit of both businesses and consumers.”
“The scheme will mandate that all service and repair information car manufacturers share with their dealership networks in Australia must also be made available for independent repairers and registered trading organisations to purchase at a fair market price.”
The Morrison Government will consult stakeholders and accept submissions on the issue until January 31 before introducing legislation in the first half of 2021. The plan is to put it into effect on July 1, 2022.
Tony Weber, chief executive of the Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries, said manufacturers broadly support information being made available “for the benefit of consumers, on fair and reasonable commercial terms”.
“The important thing is that consumers are protected through the process,” he said.
Mr Weber said small businesses were unlikely to be able to match dealerships’ investment in training, parts and tools, particularly if they want to work on a diverse range of cars.
“The days of the backyard mechanic fixing every car in the neighbourhood are well and truly gone, but some still cling to that hope,” he said.
“The capacity of the independent repair sector to cover a wide range of makes and models is very limited.”
Volkswagen Australia managing director Michael Bartsch said VW already cooperates with workshops to offering basic servicing, but that data held back by the brand “should be proprietary”.
Mr Bartsch said safety and security systems – such as the programming of digital keys, should remain exclusive to manufacturers. “I would say right now that key coding is something that we would do everything we can to retain the integrity of that information within Volkswagen,” he said.
The changes will allow independent workshops to plug computers into cars, helping them diagnose potential problems and clear error codes within a vehicle’s systems.
Richard Dudley, chief executive of the Motor Trades Association of Australia, welcomed the long-awaited development. “This is a good day for consumers, and a good day for business,” he said.
“This heralds a new era for consumers in terms of surety around consistency of those working on their cars, and ultimately being able to choose where they have their cars repaired and serviced.”
Mr Dudley said it means workshops can offer the same standard of service as official dealerships. “We will be one of the first countries in the world to have mandated this across a whole country,” he said. “I don’t think this should be underestimated.”
The news comes as manufacturers are pushing to lock customers into extensive prepaid multi-year servicing contracts and exclusive arrangements attached to extended warranties.
Many manufacturers offer multi-year service plans discouraging customers from visiting third-party providers. Mitsubishi has courted controversy by doubling its standard warranty from five to 10 years if customers have all maintenance carried out in its official dealerships.
Labor’s Shadow Minister for Employment and Industry, Brendan O’Connor, welcomed the changes while pointing out delays in implanting a scheme originally promised for 2019.
“We know independent mechanics are doing it tough,” he said.
“If the Morrison Government would just get on with the job, rather than announce and forget, these reforms could help this struggling sector.”
The un-dead Campbell Newman
The writer below says Newman came undone by firing a lot of bureaucrats. That is a matter of opinion. I think Newman failed by not communicating his thinking well
Newman is a living, breathing manifestation of what the conservative side of politics would like to think it represents – a self-reliant self-starter, resourceful, distrustful of big government and bureaucracy, untainted by corruption, tough minded and hugely successful in both his financial and personal life.
This is the former soldier boy who became Mayor of Brisbane in 2004, then went tunnelling under it with all the fervour of a Viet Cong guerrilla before parlaying his extraordinary municipal success into an historic, 2012 landslide Queensland state election win, taking the LNP back into power 14 years after Rob Borbidge lost to Peter Beattie.
Yes, we all now know Newman made some poor political decisions. In hindsight he appears to have been engineering his own demise from the early days of office when he commissioned an audit from former Liberal federal treasurer Peter Costello on Queensland’s financial situation. That report, found, among other things, that: “Given the state’s weakened financial position, the current cost of service provision is unaffordable. Queensland cannot continue to be a high cost provider.’’
“Can do’’ rolled up his sleeves and, like the Army engineer he once was, set about solving the problem in a logical, methodical and highly transparent manner.
He sacked 14,000 public servants.
Given the six degrees of separation laws, Newman simultaneously ensured that almost everyone in Queensland knew someone who had lost their job, or knew someone who knew someone who had lost their job.
With his political capital burned down to the wick in just three years, Newman was turfed out of office in 2015 and ever since has been portrayed as a political pariah.
Perception will always hit reality for a six when it comes to politics, but Newman’s reputation as a political loser of epic proportions is deeply unfair, given we insist on looking at the devastating 2015 loss only through the prism of his epic 2012 win.
When you look at the numbers (which he’ll happily refer you to) the LNP suffered a not-so-crushing defeat in 2015, with 41.3 per cent of the primary vote.
Newman’s replacement, Tim Nicholls, received just under 34 per cent in the subsequent 2017 election and the affable Nicholls, in rude health and living happily in his seat of Clayfield, is hardly a He-Who-Cannot-Be-Named.
Former LNP leader Lawrence Springborg who lost in 2009 with 41.6 per cent of the primary is an LNP legend.
Yet the Newman name lingers in the air, not so much as a bad smell as like that radioactive fallout that stays in the atmosphere after a nuclear bomb detonates. Its presence six years after he left office is so potent that it would have been almost certainly one of the first issues that newly minted leader David Crisafulli and his advisers workshopped when Crisafulli was made LNP leader earlier this month.
Crisafulli, who arrived in state politics with Newman in 2012 and briefly exited it with him in 2015 when he lost the Townsville seat of Mundingburra, is the third LNP leader in six years who may not wish to see the Newman name up in lights. But the Queensland Labor Government and media will go on putting it up there over the next four years, and it won’t be of the little string of fairy lights variety – more in pulsating neon.
Newman had 41 mentions in state parliament by the end of Friday Question Time in the first week of sittings after the November election, while former Labor Premier Anna Bligh scored a more modest 25.
Newman’s legacy was also one of the first questions put to Crisafulli in his first press conference after being anointed leader earlier this month. Crisafulli batted it away, insisting he would not be referring to Bligh who led her party to defeat in 2012 after saying Labor would not sell off state assets, then did.
Bligh, in her 2012 defeat, presided over the over the largest swing in Australian political history (15 per cent against the ALP) received less than 30 per cent of the primary vote, then relocated to Sydney in a piece of political theatre you might think the LNP would be happy to remind the Queensland electorate of, possibly daily.
But all Crisafulli could muster was a refusal to look backward: “If they (Labor) want to look in the rear vision mirror, good luck to them.”
Newman, ever generous with advice via his regular spot on Sky News, has thoughtfully mapped out a plan for the LNP that doesn’t involve burying Voldemort deeper, but resurrecting him from his still relatively shallow grave.
Newman insists the attacks upon him and his legacy don’t really bother him. He appears to regard them much as an actor might view a rival actor’s performance, with a critical yet occasionally approving eye.
He can trace the hatchet job performed on his political persona well beyond 2015, all the way back to former deputy premier Jackie Trad and public relations whiz Dee Madigan who moulded the evil incarnate image in 2011 in the lead-up to the 2012 state election.
Then he was supposed to be the sinister mayor from city hall who was involved in property deals with his in-laws.
That didn’t stick. He won the election and during his three-year term he was easily cast as the villain because of public service redundancies.
Then, when Labor won back power in 2015, the Voldemort legend gained tremendous traction as he morphed into an historic figure of fear and loathing whose power to conjure up nightmares in ordinary Queensland voters seemed to escalate as each year passed.
“But it’s the Labor Party doing it!” declares Newman with an enthusiasm bordering on admiration.
“They are my political rivals; I expect them to do that. “Politics is often reduced to simple narratives – the government is secretive, the government is arrogant, the government is out of touch sort of thing, so I expect Labor to do that.
“The thing that annoys me is the LNP’s position on the matter.”
Newman believed the LNP never had the courage to own its own story, and is happy to remind many serving LNP members they were very much part of it.
If fully told, he insists, it’s a magnificent tale, ranging from the initiatives to establish the Queens Wharf precinct in the City to commissioning former Governor-general Quentin Bryce’s comprehensive review of domestic and family violence in Queensland which sparked the reforms the Palaszczuk Government continues implementing.
There was the overhaul of the public health system which resulted in the best emergency performance and surgery waiting times in the nation, the cuts to government expenditure that allowed (for the first time since World War 11) a government to spend less in one financial year than it did in the previous, a crackdown on outlaw motorcycle gangs that led to a 15 to 20 per cent reduction in crime, and workers’ compensation law reforms that saw an average 15 per cent reduction to business workcover premiums.
Dr Paul Williams, a long-time observer of Queensland politics and political lecturer at Griffith University, outlined in a 2018 paper examining the 2015 election published in the Australian Journal of Politics and History, a long list of negatives to accompany those positives.
They include (beyond the public service redundancies) a harsh fiscal austerity, perceptions of ministerial incompetence and “conflicts with insider groups” – a polite reference to the appointment of Tim Carmody as Chief Justice, which sparked a rebellion against the government by some of the state’s most influential legal figures. But Williams says Newman’s loss in 2015 was nowhere near as epic as the mythology around it now suggests.
He’s convinced that, had Newman held fire on the public service redundancies, the LNP Government would have survived comfortably into a second term in 2015.
“Queenslanders do like a politician who gets things done,” he says.
Williams counters that observation with another. Queenslanders have a deeply entrenched, intergenerational belief in the idea governments provide secure, reasonably well paid jobs – a belief which has at least some of its deep roots in the Great Depression of the 1930s.
Yet Newman remains an unapologetic and deeply committed believer in the supremacy of free markets operating within a framework of small governments which maintain a light regulatory touch.
It’s a political philosophy outlined over the centuries, never so elegantly as by 18th century philosopher Thomas Paine, never so nimbly as by 20th century US President Ronald Reagan: “Government is not the solution to our problem – government is the problem!”
In Newman’s view, the LNP has to start promoting that political outlook that hundreds of thousands of Queenslanders are more than ready to get behind.
He believes there are three things needed to get the state moving again, and the first is to cut energy prices: “I mean cut the price of energy, don’t shave it, cut it,” he says.
Asked if that means coal fired power stations, he throws out a withering glance and powers on, undaunted.
“That means whatever it takes – strip away the rules and regulations and subsidies, stop the bullshit and give people certainty you won’t reverse the rules, that they will get cheaper electricity and it will stay cheap.
“The second is to reform industrial relations and bring in labour market flexibility and that means making it easier to both employ people, and to un-employ them.
“The third is get rid of red tape and improve the approvals process for business.”
Newman says energy is being sapped out of the private sector every day by an overly officious government and bureaucracy not merely in Queensland but across the nation, even with a conservative coalition in charge in Canberra.
“It is really hard to start a business in this country,” he says.
“Queensland should be the lead state economically, we should be the powerhouse state, we should be the place where people want to go to get a job and start a business, we should be the state the rest of Australia looks on at in envy.”
To Newman, the ruling Coalition in Canberra committed a major betrayal of the Conservative cause when it rejected a 2014 Newman government ruling which allowed a Cape York landholder to clear 2100ha of woodland to plant grain crops. In late November, the federal Environment Minister Sussan Ley backed conservationists who opposed the plan, saying the land clearing posed a risk to threatened species.
That infuriated Newman, who exploded in frustration: “After being in office for seven and a half years this Coalition government has not done a thing for northern agriculture or built a dam,” he told News Ltd journalist Peter Gleeson.
“They never will. They are a government of spin. No substance and they do nothing. They are a disgrace,” Newman said.
“You can quote me on that,” he added generously, before delivering a final uppercut to Prime Minister Scott Morrison. “He really is Scotty from marketing.”
Newman is full of admiration for the private sector and its power to shape a successful society, and unabashed about his hatred of big government and its associated bureaucracy.
“I hate bureaucracy with a passion!” he declares with real venom in his voice.
“When I left office and I wondered what I was going to do with the rest of my life the thought of working for a large organisation just left me cold.
“I just couldn’t have done it.
“The only role that I could have considered would have been CEO or chairman of the board but even then, I just couldn’t have dealt with the politics, the slowness of it all.”
It’s a view held, perhaps from a slightly different perspective, by hundreds of thousands of Queensland voters.
They might not all be in a position to contemplate a position as CEO of an ASX top 100 company, but they include everyone from small primary producers to the T-shirted 20-somethings creating a new app to the wage slave suburbanites who save enough capital to buy a van and kick off a mum and dad mobile plumbing business, all the way to the Wagner family of Toowoomba who built an international airport in a cow paddock.
Newman identifies strongly with them, and has an almost evangelical faith in the resourcefulness, energy and enterprise of the ordinary Queenslander.
“When you just get out of their way and let people get on with it, things sort themselves out.”
As for himself, he’s not merely talking the private enterprise talk, but walking the walk.
Since leaving office in 2015, he has immersed himself in private enterprise including the fledgling world of robotics, centred on a farm operation near the Central Highlands town of Emerald, which is at the cutting edge of autonomous agricultural robots.
He left that outfit three years ago but still maintains a keen interest in its progress while also devoting his time to another project, Art Market Space, which sells art online and boomed during the COVID shutdowns.
His chief preoccupation (apart from more than 20 directorships of various companies) is his position as chair of commercial property syndicator and funds manager Arcana Capital, which has around $125m worth of properties under its whip ranging from petrol stations, shopping complexes, and industrial sites from Tasmania to the Queensland southeast and dotting the state’s coast line through Mackay and up to Townsville.
Newman, who completed his MBA in his middle age with a focus on property, says Arcana will provide you with a return of more than eight per cent per annum, but don’t bother applying to put your money in unless you are a high-end investor.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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18 December, 2020
The carefree larrikin is a myth. Australians are obedient to authority
Waleed Aly does have a point below. I found something related in my survey research some years ago. I found that Australians disapprove greatly of lawbreaking but were also much less respectful of authority of than are the English. Evidently, being anti-authority does NOT extend to tolerating crime. So that surely leads to cautions about what we infer from the available data
I think Aly somewhat misreads Australians' motivations. What he attributes to submissiveness to government I would attribute to the famously relaxed attitudes of Australians. They just do not get worked up about much, including demands on them from the government. Rather than protest government intrusions they just go to the beach
And the demands that Australian governments make can usually be seen as commonsense so the beach is doubly attractive because of that. Not much is lost by letting the government have its way.
Regardless of its explanation, however, the result is the same. Australians do live in a remarkably peaceful and orderly society with good modern amenities and a high standard of living. That's pretty good. It's particularly good when we read of the great and ongoing fractures in American society
Thinking about Australia’s stunning success in handling COVID-19:
If there are cultural dimensions to America’s poor performance and current paralysis, a similar explanation probably exists for our triumph.
I don’t say this in a spirit of triumphalism, or with a sense of cultural superiority. I’m suggesting instead that the characteristics of different societies make them well suited to different kinds of crises. We’re poorly suited to climate change, for instance. But COVID-19 is a crisis that very much suits us. Our national psychology is tailor-made for it. Crudely, I’d put it like this: we love a closed border, we’re a surprisingly anxious people in the face of immediate threats, we’re very obedient to authority and we have a deep belief in the role of government to solve our problems.
Some of that is at odds with our self-image, which tends to emphasise the mythology of the carefree larrikin, thoroughly informal in manners and sceptical of power. This is the Australia of Ned Kelly and Waltzing Matilda, which captures much of how we talk about ourselves, but very little of how we actually behave.
Perhaps the best demonstration of this point came from the late Australian historian John Hirst. His argument is worth reading in full if you find the time, but to put it briefly, our whole history is one of reliance on the state, heightened regulation and mass compliance.
So, we were the first nation to make seatbelts compulsory in cars. We’re one of extremely few to make bicycle helmets compulsory. We were early adopters of mandatory breath tests for motorists. We have extensive prohibitions on smoking in public places, including vast outdoor ones.
As Hirst put it: “At games of Australian rules football the spectators yell foul abuse at the umpire and then at half time they file quietly outside to have a smoke”. We’re the only English-speaking country to make voting compulsory. Before that we had compulsory enrolment. We even had laws that made it mandatory to tell the Electoral Office if you moved house. The police were involved in administering all of these policies, aided by spies from the Electoral Office. Yes. Our Electoral Office had spies, most often postmen. That describes a libertarian’s hell. Hell, it’s vastly more interventionist than even social democratic Europe.
And while we have our share of people who decry the idea of a creeping "nanny state", I'd venture that every one of these measures, from compulsory voting to bicycle helmets, is wildly popular here. In general, we'd argue they're common sense and regard critics of them as unreasonably ideological. In any event, we comply silently with all of them.
We might despise politicians, but we ultimately like government for the very simple reason that the modern nation-state of Australia could never have existed without it. In fact, it never did.
The British arrived with Governors, ready to assume the role of governing. White government arrived with white settlers everywhere except Melbourne, which was the only place settlers formed their own government. Then, these governments set about building infrastructure in a way they never did in Britain. They were not managing a society that existed. They simply crushed the Indigenous ones that did, then proceeded as though no society was here in the first place. That set in motion a peculiarly Australian logic that government created society, not the other way around.
Beyond that, our love of border control scarcely needs explanation. One of the first laws we passed after federation was the Immigration Restriction Act, and it has been the most enduring theme of this COVID year. The federal government defied World Health Organisation advice by shutting down our international border. Then, most of our state governments defied the federal government and shut their borders, too. Spats repeatedly broke out between the federal, Queensland and New South Wales governments.
But for all the political fireworks, there isn’t a single leader in this country who didn’t benefit from a hard border policy during this pandemic. Indeed, there probably hasn’t been one in our history. You could never have done this in Europe, where permeable borders are so central to people’s understanding of life. You’d be hard pressed to close state borders in America. But we embraced it with astonishing ease.
All these traits are invaluable weapons against COVID. They’re also what makes it possible for us to legislate gun control after an isolated massacre, pass expansive counter-terrorism legislation without anything like the scrutiny of a serious public debate, and maintain a brutal policy on asylum seekers. Chances are you support some of these things and oppose others.
But that’s the nature of a national psyche. It leads us to do both daft and inspirational things without breaking stride. Perhaps America cannot control its guns for the same reason it can have a spectacular civil rights movement. And if that’s true, perhaps we stopped COVID for the same reason we stopped the boats.
Beijing's trade war with Australia spectacularly backfires as China is plagued by electricity woes plunging millions into darkness – after it refused delivery of $1billion of Aussie coal
Millions of Chinese residents have been left without heating in the middle of winter as cities ration electricity amid a blockade on Australian coal.
Australia provided 57 per cent of China's thermal coal imports in 2019, which is used to generate electricity in power stations.
But last month, Beijing blocked Australian coal imports, which has resulted in 80 ships carrying more than $1.1billion in blacklisted cargo being stranded off the Chinese coast.
Chinese coal prices were 500 yuan ($100) last month but increased 760 yuan ($153) per tonne on Wednesday, which has now resulted in restrictions on power use for millions of residents, according to South China Morning Post.
Some 57 million people live in Zhejiang province, south of Shanghai, on China's east coast, and have been besieged by power shortages resulting in electricity being shut off.
The Zhejiang provincial government has now ordered offices to only use heating when the temperature drops below 3C and restaurant to only use air conditioning for diners, rather than staff, in the city of Wenzhou from December 11 to 20.
Small to medium sized factories have reportedly been ordered to halt production for one to two days after operating for two days between December 13 and 30.
Meanwhile in Hunan province, which is home to 67 million people, some residents have reportedly been forced to climb 20 flights of stairs after apartment power cut off and shut down the lifts, according to The Australian.
A Chinese energy industry source told the newspaper: 'You cannot pretend that bad relations between China and Australia haven’t contributed to this situation.'
Even in global financial hub Shanghai, which has a population of 24 million, the municipal government has ordered shopping malls and office towers to turn off air condition and non-essential outdoor lighting.
The city's iconic light and laser show along the Huangpu River will reportedly be shut down indefinitely in the coming days.
China's economic planning agency, the National Reform Development Commission, said there is enough coal to last through winter and spring despite increasing prices, according to the Post.
The Ordos Coal Trading Centre blamed skyrocketing coal prices on the ban on Australian imports.
'Right now, there are more than 80 Australian cargo ships, carrying 8.8 million tonnes of coal,' the coal trading and service provider said in a research note obtained by the Post.
'But under the current circumstances, in the short term, they will not be allowing in Australian coal, but rather will depend on [supply] from the domestic market.'
It comes after a Chinese government spokesperson denied knowing Australian coal exports worth $14billion have effectively been banned in the communist nation.
A meeting on Saturday between China's major power companies and the nation's top economic planning agency agreed to lift restrictions on coal imports from all countries except Australia, Chinese media reported.
Australia's total export markets in 2019
1. China: $135 billion (33% of total Australian exports)
2. Japan: $36 billion (9%)
3. South Korea: $21 billion (5%)
4. United Kingdom: $16 billion (3.8%)
5. United States: $15 billion (3.7%)
Source: Worldstopexports.com
In the first official comments from the Asian nation about the meeting, foreign ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said he was 'not aware' of the ban and accused Australia of casting itself as a 'victim'.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has said the ban would be a lose-lose for both countries and a clear breach of World Trade Organisation rules, as well as the China-Australia free trade agreement.
He also emphasised it would force China to buy dirtier coal from other countries, putting its climate change ambitions at risk.
While there has been no formal notification of the ban, the spokesman for the Chinese foreign ministry did not deny it was in place.
Mr Wang said everything China did was legal and in the interests of its consumers and companies and Australia was 'pointing an accusing finger at China.'
'This move is meant to confound the public and we will never accept it,' Mr Wang told a press conference in Beijing on Tuesday evening.
Australia's resources minister Keith Pitt said Australia expected all its trading partners to play by the rules.
'We are doing our part,' Mr Pitt said on Wednesday.
'Australia has not moved in terms of the free trade agreements and we continue to meet what we said we would do. But we expect all of our exporters to have a level playing field, be treated fairly and that is what we are looking for.'
Coal is Australia's second biggest export industry, with the nation exporting $14billion worth a year to China.
Relations between China and Australia have rapidly deteriorated since Prime Minister Scott Morrison called for an inquiry into the origins of coronavirus which was identified last year in the Chinese city of Wuhan before spreading around the world.
More industries are concerned if they will be next on the chopping block as the Chinese Communist Party continues to punish Canberra for speaking out on its human rights record.
Beijing's decision to slap tariffs on Aussie wine and barley and block several other exports including wood, coal and seafood has badly affected some producers.
Indigenous leader appointed to Murray-Darling Basin board
A man with a red beard is an Aborigine? Pull the other one! The stream of articles like this are amazingly racist. They constantly show that you have to be effectively white to be regarded as a high-achieving Aborigine
The legislated position for permanent Indigenous representation on the board of the Murray Darling Basin Authority has finally been filled after more than a year’s delay.
Rene Woods has been appointed to the position by Water Minister Keith Pitt. Mr Woods was chairman of Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (MLDRIN), which is a confederation of Indigenous Nations or traditional owners in the southern part of the Basin. He stepped down from the role to serve on the MDBA board.
Mr Woods said Indigenous representation was a “step in the right direction” to improving the influence of First Nations on water management.
“It’s my hope that there will be more First Nations representation in coming years that will continue to take our voices to the Authority, improving their understanding of First Nations water issues,” Mr Woods said.
“My father, Ian, was the first Indigenous man on the Murray Darling Basin Commission – he started to advocate for more involvement in decision making – I’m proud to continue that work.”
'Disgrace': Calls for Indigenous voice in water management
The decision to deliver a permanent Indigenous representative on the authority’s board was announced in September last year by then-water minister David Littleproud, but the position remained vacant until Mr Woods’ appointment on Friday.
Indigenous representatives railed against the appointment delay. The Northern Basin Aboriginal Nations labelled it “appalling” and MLDRIN vice chairman Grant Rigney said it was “unjustifiable”.
MLDRIN’s acting chairman Grant Rigney said Mr Woods was the “the ideal candidate”.
“Now more than ever, as controversial new dam projects and flood plain harvesting rules pose heightened threats to our sacred waterways, First Nations need a strong voice at the highest decision-making table of the MDBA,” Rigney said.
Mr Pitt said Mr Woods had been a prominent force in his representation for MLDRIN and he was well qualified for the MDBA board.
“He grew up with the Murrumbidgee River running through his veins and has a wealth of valuable experience in a broad range of local and national water management issues.”
The MDBA oversees water resource management and delivers the $13 billion Basin Plan to recover water for the environment.
A study from Griffith University this year found in NSW Aboriginal people collectively have rights to 0.2 per cent of the available surface water (12 gigalitres). Aboriginal people comprise 9.3 per cent of the population in NSW’s Murray Darling Basin, but only hold rights to 0.1 per cent of the value of the water market there ($16.5 million).
Two other overdue MDBA board appointments remain unfilled.\
The hotel quarantine change that could stop COVID-19 spread
Experts say we should have seen an outbreak causing chaos across Sydney coming and we could have stopped it with a very simple solution
Holiday plans are up in the air, state borders are on the verge of being slammed shut and more than 250,000 Sydneysiders have been essentially sent back into lockdown because of yet another coronavirus scare.
At the start of the week, Australians would be forgiven for thinking the dark days of 2020 were behind us after a consistent stream of days without locally acquired cases across the nation.
That all changed on Wednesday when the first warning shot was fired in the form of a Sydney Airport shuttle driver becoming infected.
And, yesterday 17 new cases were discovered in the city’s northern beaches — prompting a three-day ‘stay at home’ order for tens of thousands of residents.
There is still a lot of questions that need answering about how these cases cropped up, but a big one has been answered this morning
NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian revealed genomic sequencing had been done on the coronavirus samples, revealing the virus spreading through Sydney was from an overseas source.
“Somehow that’s obviously gotten out into the community,” Ms Berejiklian said.
“We are concerned that there could have been what we call seeding events, people from the northern beaches may not have known they had the virus, gone to other parts of Sydney and unintentionally affected people.”
Basically, the virus has managed to escape the state’s hotel quarantine system and jump from an overseas arrival into the community.
It’s highly damaging news for the NSW government after several widely-publicised near misses in recent weeks.
Of course NSW isn’t the only state to be hit by a quarantine stuff-up. Victoria’s entire second wave was traced back to one quarantine hotel and more recently South Australia’s system was breached, leading to a local cluster in Adelaide.
Two of Australia’s leading epidemiologists have told news.com.au they saw these problems coming a months ago and they could have been stopped with a simple solution.
Instead of bringing tens of thousands of potentially infected overseas travellers into our most populous cities where even the slightest breach can lead to a superspreading event, they say we should be sending our arrivals to remote locations.
They say that these facilities could be set up by the federal government with full-time staff living on-premises, meaning they were far less likely to seed infection into the community.
To them it’s a no-brainer.
Professor of Epidemiology at UNSW Mary-Louise McLaws told news.com.au the system we have now makes “little sense” and should have only been a temporary solution.
“Placing quarantining of high numbers of cases in highly populated cities places too great a risk for seeding the community with infection through the staff,” she said.
“It would be like placing a COVID ward in the CBD in an office building without the required infection prevention design of that building and this ‘ward’ being staffed by non health workers. It makes little sense outside the original rapid response solution.”
Professor Adrian Esterman from the University of South Australia said there would be some difficulties in setting up a new remote system such as transport, logistics and cost — but that it would be worth it all to avoid the pain of another lockdown.
“I believe that the ADF could take care of most of this – they have experience in logistics, security, and disaster response, and could even supply catering and health staff,” he told news.com.au.
“Since some of the returnees might have health issues (other than COVID-19), there would have to be a health centre available, and if necessary, the ability to medevac people to a major hospital.
“Setting up these centres would not be cheap, but it would still be nowhere near as expensive as the cost of yet another lockdown.”
He believes the federal government should take charge of the system and that there are several facilities they could use to set it up at Howard Springs, Woomera, RAAF Learmonth and the immigration detention facilities.
Prof McLaws said this system would also be safer because the facilities could preferably be low rise buildings with the high level of airconditioning airflow expected for a COVID ward or good natural ventilation.
“Low rise also allows for exercise court yards with minimal contact with staff and other travellers that would also improve mental and physical health,” she said.
“However, to keep the staff and the immediate regional community safe from being seeded via an infected staff, there must be daily rapid antigen testing of staff before they return to their home. Rapid testing takes 15 minutes and can be performed by a trained person at the facility. “Testing needs to be daily testing because staff can be infectious before they develop symptoms; this is possible from day-three of being infected that is up to three days before they develop symptoms.”
However, after breaches in South Australia last month federal Trade Minister Simon Birmingham told Sky News that moving to regional facilities would cut the capacity of the system.
“You have to realise that there are capacity limits both in terms of what can be done in the cities, but if you want to look outside of the cities there are potentially even greater capacity limits in terms of the numbers of people who could be processed and bringing them back,” he said.
Professor Maximilian de Courten, health policy lead at Victoria University’s Mitchell Institute, told the Sydney Morning Herald hotel quarantine posed only small risks, and it would be far too expensive to relocate it to the regions.
“Do you really need to have it 99.99 secure? With COVID, you do not. COVID is infectious, it kills people, but not at the rate that ebola does. It is not something we need to have watertight to the nth degree,” he said.
“We have quarantined 130,000 people. Try to run a program absolutely watertight at that sheer size. It’s impossible. We will have leaks. The question is how serious are they, and can we control them.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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17 December, 2020
Quiet amusement as Chinese steel mills ask for help from Rio and BHP
There would be an element of schadenfreude within BHP as China’s steel mills send signals of distress in response to the soaring price of iron ore.
BHP is the world’s biggest seaborne metallurgical coal producer but China’s so-far-unofficial ban on Australian coal has left Australian coal carriers stranded in China’s ports, unable to unload and the price of Australian coal has plummeted.
No doubt, when BHP iron ore marketing executives were summoned to a video call with the China Iron and Steel Association last week, they made the right sympathetic noises about the near-70 per cent increase in iron ore prices this year but, given the backdrop of the widespread Chinese trade sanctions on Australian products and on their own coal exports, one suspects it wouldn’t have been heartfelt.
It isn’t clear what CISA expects the Australian producers to do about prices that have soared from less than $US90 a tonne at the start of this year to more than $US150 a tonne, which has more than offset the impact of the bans on coal, barley, wine, lobsters and lamb on Australia’s exports to China.
There was a ripple of concern, and some bemusement, in mining circles when CISA, according to Reuters, said on Wednesday that Rio Tinto, similarly summoned to talks, had committed to working with the mills to review the pricing mechanism for iron ore, which CISA vice-chairman Luo Tiejun described as “unreasonable” and “not conducive to the long term healthy development of upstream and downstream” sectors of the industry.
Rio responded to the report by issuing its own very diplomatic, but rather meaningless, statement.
“Rio Tinto is continuously working with customers, suppliers and industry stakeholders to improve our products and services to meet evolving customer needs as well as to ensure major markets, including iron ore, are open, liquid and transparent, which benefits all market participants,” it said.
It is understandable that the mills aren’t happy with the spike in prices even as their other big input cost – coal – has soared as a result of their own government’s actions in cutting off their supplies of Australian coal.
They are having to substitute domestic coal and coal sourced from other countries that is nearly twice as expensive and of lower quality than the Australian product. With the elevated iron ore prices they are experiencing an intense margin squeeze. Trade wars, as the US discovered, are mutually destructive.
While the iron ore producers might make polite motherhood statements of their commitment to their customers and to liquid and transparent markets – and the iron or market, where the price is based on indices that reflect actual customer transactions, is transparent and illiquid – there is no way, given their historical experiences, that the Australian miners would contemplate any material change to the way their commodity is priced.
The producers aren’t going to walk away from the current pricing mechanism or gift the mills material discounts to alleviate the pressure on the mills’ margins created by the effects of the stimulus program and China’s self-harming ban on Australian coal.
Until a decade ago seaborne iron ore had been priced through annual negotiations between the big producers – Rio, BHP and Brazil’s Vale – and the Chinese mills, echoing the way the price had been set with Japan’s mills for more than 40 years.
It was former BHP chief executive, Marius Kloppers, who transformed the way iron ore was priced.
From about 2005, Kloppers had advocated a shift to market-clearing prices for bulk commodities like coal and iron ore to replace the annual, protracted, negotiations with the Japanese and Chinese mills, where the producers were inevitably played off against each other.
He said BHP would produce at capacity and accept whatever the market price – at the time indices of iron ore prices were just emerging - might be. In 2010 BHP shifted most of its Chinese customers over to market pricing.
Rio and Vale were initially reluctant to follow suit but the Chinese mills forced their hand. Where the Japanese had always honoured their contracts the Chinese mills, when the spot price fell below their contract price, reneged on the contracts to get access to the lower prices.
Confronted with the “heads we win, tails you lose” stance of the mills, Vale and subsequently Rio joined BHP in adopting market-related pricing and the contract system disappeared.
Unless Rio’s corporate memory has completely failed, which it hasn’t, there will be no turning back and any changes to the current pricing mechanism will be tinkering rather than structural.
The problem confronting the mills is that the prices do reflect the fundamentals of supply and demand.
On the supply side – and the three Australia producers, Rio, BHP and Fortescue supply more than 60 per cent of the mill’s demand – there have been some constraints.
Vale is still recovering from its tailing dam failures and has also experienced weather events that have seen its production fall short of its own forecasts.
The Pilbara miners are implementing pre-cyclone season maintenance, which has a modest impact on their production volumes, but are otherwise producing as much ore as they can and, subject to the weather, will continue to do so.
The mills can blame their own government for the demand-side issues. China’s response to the pandemic centred on stimulating infrastructure investment, which is steel-intensive. The mills are producing at near-record rates - which means that their demand for iron ore is at near-record levels.
Given the stimulus-inflated demand, which has seen iron ore imports running at double–digit rates above those in 2019, along with Vale’s production shortfalls and thin inventories at the ports, it isn’t surprising that the price has spiked.
That’s the way markets work. The mills didn’t complain – and nor did the miners -- when, in 2016, the price fell below $US40 a tonne as supply overwhelmed demand.
While there is speculative activity in iron ore, via trading in iron ore futures on the Dalian and Singapore exchanges, the prices the miners are receiving are not unprecedented.
During the last, and far bigger, bout of infrastructure-based stimulus in response to the financial crisis the price neared $US200 a tonne.
Contrary to the mills assertion, the pricing mechanism hasn’t failed but reflects actual market conditions and CISA’s calls for China’s regulators to investigate the price and “severely crack down on possible violations of laws and regulations” are therefore misconceived and could backfire.
The producers aren’t going to walk away from the current pricing mechanism or gift the mills material discounts to alleviate the pressure on the mills’ margins created by the effects of the stimulus program and China’s self-harming ban on Australian coal.
Any attempt to “crack down” on them could adversely impact supply, send the price roaring even higher and ravage the mills’ profitability even further.
So now we can’t even talk transgender issues?
The Melbourne Age ran an opinion piece on its website Sunday in which a mum expressed reservations about her daughter’s desire for a sex change.
But less than an hour after trans activist and La Trobe University lecturer Yves Rees complained that the paper was “peddling transphobic nonsense” — by which she meant a parent’s sincere concerns for her child –- the paper issued a public apology and promised to delete the piece.
Age editor Gay Alcorn wrote: “I apologise Yves … given the sensitivity in Melbourne due to the recent death of a young trans woman, I am having it removed from our site.”
And just like that, The Age newspaper, aping Pravda, disappeared the viewpoint of a caring parent for ideological reasons.
One wonders if The Age will now submit all its content to the LGBTQ crowd for approval before publication.
What is the point of a free press if it makes itself subservient to the heckler’s veto?
The “transphobic nonsense” that Yves Rees found so offensive was a mum expressing concern that health professionals seemed too ready to affirm her teenager’s claim to be transgendered.
The mum, who had consented to testosterone treatment for her daughter, wrote that she worried about “a relentless motion towards permanent medical changes” when it was unclear to her whether the child might change her mind about changing her sex.
A posse of hysterical rainbow bullies took to Twitter to deride the mum as being nasty, vindictive, hateful and harmful. Her article was “crappy writing by a crappy parent,” they said, outraged that she had referred to her daughter as “she”.
“Anyone who misgenders their own child should have them removed from their care,” thundered one activist.
Well if a parent can’t express doubt about their child embarking on a series of body-altering treatments that are in many cases irreversible, when in all other areas that same child is not granted the capability to consent, then children may as well be wards of the state.
ABC radio presenter Patricia Karvelas called the article a “truly bewildering piece”.
“My god … I imagine this is what parents were writing about gay kids once,” she said, forgetting that if your “gay kid” later decides he is not gay, no harm done. But if your trans kid later decides he is not trans, well good luck unscrambling that egg.
Alcorn’s decision to vanish a woman’s honest account of her experience trying to find appropriate treatment for her daughter’s dysphoria did not save her from the mad ravings of the sex-change-happy Twitter mob.
They insisted that such articles might lead trans people to commit suicide. They were outraged that it had been published so soon after the body of a missing trans woman was found in bushland in East Kew. Police have said they were not treating her death as suspicious.
“Cancelling my subscription to The Age. Absolutely vile to publish this hateful crap at any time, let alone today,” tweeted one unhappy reader.
“It’s repugnant opinion like this that drives trans people to kill themselves,” warned another.
“The recent passing of this human being can, in part, be attributed to irresponsible ‘journalism’ like this. Never ever post transphobic shit again, blood is on your hands.”
All of which begged the question, if the risk of trans people committing suicide is increased by the publication of a mum’s concern that her teenager might have misdiagnosed herself as trans, isn’t that evidence of deeper issues being experienced by those at risk?
Or is it a manipulative cry-bully tactic aimed at silencing any dissent from the ‘gender is fluid’, ‘trans women are women’ and ‘gender is a social construct’ narrative?
Surely a recent High Court ruling in the UK which found that puberty blocker drugs given to stop the natural development of transgender identifying children were “experimental” and weak on evidence proves confused teenagers and their parents need discussion, not censorship from journalists who are terrified by ideas and determined to play to the sensibilities of micro-groups.
Hysterical outrage from activists claiming that an op-ed is “dangerous and harmful” ignores the fact that medical interventions involving children can likewise be “dangerous and harmful.”
The article published in and then quickly removed from The Age was fair comment on an important issue of national interest. It’s a conversation that should be had. All sides deserve to be heard. Children’s lives are at stake.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2020/12/so-now-we-cant-even-talk-transgender-issues/
Dunce teachers to be weeded out with tough testIt is certainly a good idea to filter out the dummies BEFORE they do teacher training rather than after. It avoids big waste of resources.
But no current proposals are going to help the kids in State schools much when all new teachers will be entering what is basically a destroyed educational sysyem. Smart kids will always do well in any system so it is the plodders and the dummies who need to be looked after. They are currently being largely failed by the chaos that is common in State school classrooms.
And that chaos both harms the pupil and deters good teachers. Teaching is not a job for dummies so young people who would make good tachers usually will have many options for their future. And they just have to look at a typical State school classroom to decide that there are jobs better than teaching
So there is something of a Catch 22 involved: To improve the education of the kids you need good teachers. But those who would make good teachers don't go into teaching. Which leaves mainly the desperates willing to go into teaching.
In short, teaching is a low-prestige job and that is the major dictate governing whom you will get to go into teaching. You can test yourself blue in the face but if the candidates for teacher training are mostly pretty dim, it it is only dim teachers that you will get. And the current crops of new teachers can be very dim indeed. You are getting the blind to lead the blind
But teaching has not always been a low status job and is not a low status job everywhere. Perticuarly in Asian countries teaching is high status and well-paid.
How come? Asian schoolrooms are famous for their high levels of discipline. Teachers are free to teach and do so. A good teacher likes to teach and in Asia they do
And that is the key difference between their government schools and ours. In our government systems teachers are too busy trying to get the pupils to sit down and shut up to have much time for teaching. And they are even told that it is not their job to get the kids to sit down and shut up. Teachers are not supposed to teach any more. They are merely learning facilitators.
That all asks too much of most potential teachers so State schools will always remain pits of poor education.
And parents know that. It is why 40% of Australian teenagers are sent to private schools. One way or another, such schools provide the sort of good learning environments that few State schools can equal. I taught High school in two quite different private schools and had no discipline problems at all. I was free to concentrate on my basic task of opening up young minds to the world of knowledge. So there are some dedicated and talented teachers in existence but they will almost all end up in one of our many private schools
So what can parents do who cannot afford private schools? Their only hope is to get their kid into a selective school or a school in a "good" area. But what is a good area? It is wherever well-off people live. Their kids get disciplined in various ways at home so give little trouble in classrooms. Teachers in such schools can teach. But again there is a Catch 22. "Good" areas are expensive so they are just not an option for the less well off. The less well-off are stuck with government schools
So why are government schools often so bad? It is purely the Leftist influence. Leftists have a horror of disciplining kids and they impose low discipline through regulations and other ways. Once again it is the Left who are NOT the friends of the poor
Shadow Education Minister Tanya Plibersek has told Sky News there must be a higher university cut off to enter teaching courses and potential teachers need to be tested before degrees rather than afterwards.
Dunce teachers will be weeded out before they start university with a tough new English and maths test.
The nation’s education ministers have approved a skills test for school leavers before they enrol in a university degree to study teaching.
One in 10 trainee teachers flunked a similar test after finishing a four-year education degree at university last year.
Federal Education Minister Dan Tehan said the upfront test would save students time and money.
“We don’t want to see students getting to the end of their degree and not being able to graduate or work as a teacher because they haven’t passed the … test,’’ he said.
“The sooner a student takes the test, the earlier they can get support or make alternative arrangements.
“Giving students the option to sit the test before their start their degree will save time and money.’’
Mr Tehan said students who fail the upfront test will still be able to enrol in a teaching degree at uni.
“But it does make them aware that they need to work on their literacy and numeracy skills,’’ he said.
Student teachers cannot graduate until they pass a test placing them in the top 30 per cent of the population for literacy and numeracy.
In 2019, almost one in every 10 graduates failed the online test – 8.3 per cent bombed the literacy test and 9.3 per cent flunked the maths exam.
Each test has 65 questions, administered by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER).
The ministerial decree to let students sit the test before signing up to a teaching degree overrides the universities, which had refused to let students take the exam upfront.
However, the upfront exam will not start until 2023.
The federal government will make teaching degrees cheaper next year, to lure smart school leavers into the teaching profession and head off a national shortage of classroom teachers.
The Education Council of federal, state and territory ministers has also agreed to “improve’’ the writing assessment for students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 who undertake the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN).
Mr Tehan said NAPLAN was due to go online in 2022.
“NAPLAN is the best tool we have to understand the impact of COVID-19, the long-term trends in student learning and what actions we need to take to improve,’’ he said.
The controversial national test was cancelled this year due to COVID-19 lockdowns.
Banks going Green threatens coal industry
On Wednesday the treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, signed up to a plan put forward by the Liberal National MP George Christensen to launch an inquiry through the trade and investment growth committee to query how climate change is impacting banks’ lending decisions.
The move comes as 29% of ANZ shareholders approved a resolution for the bank to “to reduce exposure to fossil fuels in line with the Paris Agreement’s climate change goals”.
All four major banks have signalled they will align their portfolios to a target of net zero emissions by 2050, with most aiming to cease lending to thermal coal companies by 2030.
The moves have prompted a furious backlash from Nationals MPs who want a new coal-fired power station in north Queensland, with some even calling to boycott banks including ANZ.
Christensen, who has denied the link between climate change and the severity of natural disasters, wants the committee he chairs to set up an inquiry to grill financial regulators – the Australian Securities and Investments Commission and the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority – and banks over plans to pull back on lending or insuring mining projects because of climate change.
Frydenberg reportedly told the Sydney Morning Herald: “It is only appropriate that the parliament be able to examine trends in banking, insurance and superannuation investment practices and how they may affect our resources sector and the regions in which they are based.”
Wilson, who chairs the house economics committee, told Guardian Australia that his committee “explores the legitimate issues of climate and sovereign risk … frequently during our hearings with the banks and regulators”.
“It might be wise to review the house economics transcripts first before starting a new inquiry, but that is a matter for the trade and investment committee,” he said.
As the Coalition continues to balance its inner-city liberal constituency with regional voters who are more supportive of fossil fuel industries, Labor has also faced internal struggles about whether it should back a gas-led recovery.
The shadow treasurer, Jim Chalmers, told reporters in Logan that central banks, regulators and financial institutions had done “important work” on “how we manage the financial and investor risk associated with climate change”.
Chalmers said Nationals, including the resources minister, Keith Pitt, and Christensen, lived in an “alternate universe” and disputed the importance of tackling climate change.
“I think it speaks volumes about this treasurer that he places a higher premium on placating the George Christensens of this world rather than engaging properly and rationally in the important work that’s going on to make sure that we can manage financial and investor risk associated with climate change.
“We want to see this inquiry based on facts, not based on conspiracy theories.”
At the ANZ annual general meeting on Wednesday, 29% of investors representing nearly $19bn of investment backed a resolution demanding less exposure to fossil fuels. The number is almost double the 15% achieved for a similar resolution last year.
Despite the Nationals’ anger at banks, environmental activists at Market Forces have accused the big four of taking too long to wind up coal loans and inconsistent efforts subjecting oil and gas to similar scrutiny.
NAB and Westpac are reviewing their approach to funding oil and gas, a move Market Forces wants replicated at ANZ and the Commonwealth Bank.
The Reserve Bank of Australia has said climate change poses a rise to financial stability and has joined central banks in warning that global GDP could fall 25% below the expected level by 2100 if the world does not act to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions. [How stupid to think you can predict what will happen in 80 year's time!]
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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16 December, 2020
Court Challenge to Australia's International Border Closures
LibertyWorks has lodged in the Federal Court of Australia seeking to invalidate Orders made by the Health Minister, Hon Greg Hunt MP, that prevents prevents Australian citizens from leaving Australia.
Minister Hunt cited Section 96 of the Biosecurity Act to make such Orders however it is the contention of LibertyWorks that no such powers exists under the Act.
LibertyWorks president, Andrew Cooper, says: ”Minister Hunt has overstepped his legislative powers in preventing Australians from travelling overseas”
"It’s an illiberal and a draconian restriction on the free movement of Australian citizens many of whom want to see family and loved ones or to attend to urgent business in other countries”
”Preventing people from travelling overseas does nothing to make Australia safer. But it does create unnecessary pain for families who want to be together for Christmas or during this difficult and worrying period of global pandemic.”
Please note - invalidating the ban on overseas travel does not diminish Australia’s ability to impose quarantine restrictions on returning travellers to Australia.
Why we must push back against absurd ideas
If you think the lunatic fringe of the identity politics movement exists only on the crazier recesses of Twitter then you haven’t been paying attention.
Isn’t it comforting to learn some of the state’s well-paid public servants, whose salaries remained intact throughout Victoria’s economy-destroying lockdown, were busying themselves coming up with imaginative ways to be offended on behalf of the LGBTTQQIAAP+ community?
How helpful for the state government to revise its LGBTIQ+ Inclusive Language Guide for public servants to ensure harmful terms such as “Mr and Mrs”, “he and she’’ and — brace yourself — “husband and wife’’, are replaced with non-gendered, often grammatically incoherent but always politically correct terms such as “they/them”.
The guide advises public servants to never assume a person’s gender or pronouns, to “practise’’ their PC language and to apologise immediately if they inadvertently misgender a member of the “QTIPOC (Queer, Trans, Intersex, Persons of Colour)” communities.
There are no fewer than 17 references to “intersex” and “intersexism’’ in the 11-page document that claims this newspeak is needed to acknowledge the “diversity of bodies, genders and relationships”.
Victorian public servants are advised every job applicant should be asked what pronoun they use when invited for an interview.
But the guide also warns to “avoid asking people what terms they ‘prefer’. Having a ‘preference’ can sound as if it’s a choice and most people do not feel as if they have a choice in these matters”.
So, asking what pronouns a person uses is inclusive, asking what terms they prefer is hurtful and marginalising.
On one hand it’s tempting to dismiss this nonsense as a steaming pile of bollocks but there is an ideology behind this movement that is organised, influential and has gained a powerful foothold not only in public institutions but increasingly in the private sector.
Deakin University has a lengthy but, they stress, not exhaustive list of pronouns including ze/hir, they/them, co/cos, xe/xem/xyr, hy/hym/hys and no pronoun where you must use the individual’s name.
So, instead of saying John enjoyed his time at Deakin you would say John enjoyed John’s time at Deakin. So inclusive.
If you think the lunatic fringe of the identity politics movement exists only on university campuses and on the crazier recesses of Twitter then you haven’t been paying attention.
Ideas that start as absurd, because they plainly are absurd, are adopted in academia, normalised by popular culture and before long are in high schools and work places and those who don’t submit are rebuked as transphobes, racists, misogynists and a range of other slurs used to silence dissenting voices, even if those voices are mainstream and represent the majority view.
After singer Sam Smith announced his pronouns were no longer he/him but they/them, newspapers across the globe dutifully mangled the English language to not offend the pop star and the powerful trans lobby.
It didn’t take long for Merriam-Webster dictionary to amend the definition of “they” to include a non-binary pronoun.
Ceding linguistic territory to the radical left is not only foolish but divisive and destructive. The trans activist agenda has had enormous success in silencing critics by attacking anyone who questions or corrects falsehoods as dangerous bigots.
Prominent individuals from feminist Germaine Greer, to comedian Barry Humphries to author JK Rowling have been maligned as transphobic and unworthy of the honours and acclaim they previously enjoyed, all for commentary the overwhelming majority of the population would deem perfectly acceptable.
Every day there are absurd new terms for absurd new offences that do not exist in the minds of the sane majority.
In the name of “inclusion’’ we are asked to submit to a toxic, unforgiving woke ideology.
Even the term women has been deemed as non-inclusive thus giving birth, excuse the pun, to a slew of new terms including womxn, vulva owners, menstruators and other terms that reduce womanhood to a bodily part or function.
The trans-inclusive language used to describe women can sound decidedly misogynistic. It’s little wonder the trans lobby has caused a fracture in the feminist movement.
If you don’t push back against this madness then don’t complain when it becomes the norm and we are all expected to list our pronouns on our CVs, Twitter and workplace profiles or be deemed trans-exclusionary bigots.
And, it doesn’t stop at just pronouns and gender identity. We are seeing athletes called racist for refusing to take a knee for BLM, a group founded by Marxist feminists that is explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-nuclear family and advocates for the defunding of the police and the payment of reparations for slavery.
If you’re not on-board with all that and stand during the anthem then you’re in the firing line of the activist media class.
That’s what happens when you let the radical left set the agenda.
IN SHORT
At the weekend The Age deleted and apologised for a column by a parent whose child was transitioning because of a backlash from trans activists. The parent had “consented to testosterone treatment” but wrote about the pressure to give consent. So a thoughtful piece written by a parent with lived experience disappeared because of the mob.
Greenie exhibitionists let off lightly
These egotists imposed huge costs and frustrations on other people. Time is money, among other things, and people who were forced to sit in their cars for extended periods were out of the productive workforce during that time. They lost various sorts of productivity for no good reason and making up for that lost productivity would often not be possible.
And that is not to take account of the stresses which were no doubt imposed on many busy people. Many drivers would have been working to tight time deadlines and being blocked from meeting those deadlines would have been very stressful.
It is surely the job of the police to remove such deliberate obstructions expeditiously and it is surely the job of the magistracy to impose on the offenders a penalty that reflects to some degree the frustrations they deliberately imposed on many innocent people. As it was, both the police and the magistracy failed to do what was their bounden duty
Two Extinction Rebellion protesters who held up inner-city Brisbane traffic for more than two hours earlier this month have been fined hundreds of dollars each.
However, serial protester Eric Serge Herbert, 21, and Wenzel Auch, 28, will not have to pay $917 restitution to the State fire service and their convictions have not been recorded.
The pair blocked traffic at the intersection of Edward and Queen Sts on December 7, from 7.15am to 9.25am, while protesting on top of a truck, Brisbane Magistrates Court heard.
Police, including the Special Emergency Response Team, Queensland Fire and Rescue Service and Queensland Ambulance Service, were called to the scene.
Herbert has just spent seven days in Arthur Gorrie Correctional Centre, after he refused to sign a bail condition agreeing not to participate in any illegal protests while on bail.
Wenzel Auch, 28, who also refused to sign the bail condition, spent four days in custody, before being released on Friday.
The court heard the protesters appeared to have their arms locked in a metal pipe “sleeping dragon’’ device, while they stood on the truck during the protest.
However, after fire officers brought them to the ground and sawed through the pipe, it was revealed the pair were only held together with bulldog clips.
Herbert pleaded guilty to obstructing the path of a driver, contravening a police direction to move off the road, obstructing a police officer and refusing to state his full and correct name.
Police prosecutors asked for each man to be ordered to pay $917 restitution to QFRS.
Herbert objected, saying it should only be ordered if there was damage to property or injury to people.
“My conscience dictates that it is my duty to follow our ancestors and do peaceful civil disobedience when our lives are threatened by the government or its laws,’’ he said.
Magistrate Mark Nolan said he took into account Herbert’s early pleas of guilty and that he had voluntarily spent several days in custody.
Mr Nolan said everyone had the right to protest and make statements about their beliefs, but the law required everyone to abide by it.
He fined Herbert $600, and did not record a conviction. Mr Nolan refused to order restitution to QFRS, saying the paperwork was insufficient.
Auch pleaded guilty to causing an obstruction to drivers, contravening a police direction and obstructing police and was fined $500, with no conviction recorded.
When Auch told Magistrate Terry Quinn that he had not enjoyed making people angry by disrupting traffic, Mr Quinn said: “I disagree.’’ Mr Quinn said he had seen Auch looking around the court, looking very happy with himself. “I have formed the opinion you are enjoying the limelight,’’ the magistrate told him.
Auch, who recently graduated with an environmental science degree, said he felt such a protest was a small impact on people’s lives compared to a catastrophic climate emergency.
Mr Quinn told Auch his protest could have prevented people, including pregnant women or doctors, from going to hospital.
While Herbert and Auch were in custody Extinction Rebellion staged a city protest on Thursday, which resulted in several arrests.
Auch said outside court he was released from prison at 1am the following day.
Chinese trade war on our coal shapes as an own goal
There are other large customers for our coal
As China continues its cat-and-mouse bullying over black-listing Australian coal, the Chinese government has not even had the courtesy to notify Australia about the apparent change of policy. As Scott Morrison said on Tuesday: “We take official information from the Chinese government … so that’s where we’re seeking clarification.”
In the face of Chinese provocation, the Prime Minister and his government are responding responsibly and calmly. Any black-listing, as Mr Morrison said, would be a breach of World Trade Organisation rules and Australia’s free-trade agreement with China.
The WTO has mechanisms, and in extreme cases penalties, for dealing with rule breaking and for settling disputes. Such procedures can be long and cumbersome. Australia’s formal action against China’s barley tariffs is “imminent”, Trade Minister Simon Birmingham said on Tuesday: “We’re close to making a final decision in that regard,” he said. Senator Birmingham is hoping to avoid having to take legal action about coal. He and Mr Morrison stressed Australia was willing to engage in dialogue to resolve the issues at stake.
Unfortunately, so far China has been recalcitrant in ignoring all overtures to hold mature, bilateral discussions after moving against Australian beef, lobster, wood and wine as well as barley and now coal. According to reports in the South China Morning Post, wool is being considered as the next target. And Australia’s largest mining companies — BHP and Rio Tinto — have been asked to explain to Chinese steel manufacturers why their iron ore prices are so high as the surging trade undermines Beijing’s eight-month trade campaign against Australia.
The campaign is presumably a retaliation for the Morrison government’s entirely reasonable call in April for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus in Wuhan. But it is out of all proportion and reflects its true mindset, that of an authoritarian dictatorship.
It also comes amid rising concerns about Chinese Communist Party members embedding themselves in overseas consulates, including that of Australia in Shanghai, and in companies holding sensitive contracts with the Australian and US governments.
China has not confirmed officially it has black-listed Australian coal. But after meetings in China on Saturday of the National Development and Reform Commission, China’s main economic planning agency, the CCP’s bellicose mouthpiece, the Global Times, reported approval had been given to power plants to import coal without clearance restrictions, except from Australia. Coal producers in Mongolia, Indonesia and Russia would benefit from the change in policy, it said.
That news will make for an anxious Christmas for coal workers, investors and those in the regional areas where the miners live and work in Australia. It is also bad news for the 1000 sailors stranded aboard 80 bulk carriers off China’s coast, which are not being allowed to unload.
Not surprisingly, the ship owners holding the black-listed coal are threatening legal action against Chinese buyers, as Perry Williams reports. With China buying $13.5bn in coal a year, the crisis has put Australia’s industry under pressure.
But China is not our biggest market for thermal coal, as Mr Morrison pointed out on Tuesday. Japan buys $9.6bn of thermal coal a year, followed by China ($4bn), South Korea ($3.3bn) and Taiwan ($2.8bn).
The biggest markets for Australia’s metallurgical coal are India at $10.2bn, followed by China ($9.7bn), Japan ($7.4bn), South Korea ($3.8bn) and Taiwan ($2.5bn). The Australian resources sector believes China will have no option in the foreseeable future but to continue sourcing Australian metallurgical coal for steelmaking. But, as we have argued for months, diversification of markets is critical.
In jettisoning Australia’s second-largest export, China is also setting itself up for a lose-lose situation in terms of President Xi Jinping’s target of net-zero emissions by 2060. One tonne of Australian thermal coal produces as much energy as 1.5 tonnes of local Chinese product and other imported sources. As a result, emissions would be driven high if China opted for inferior-quality coal sourced domestically or in nations other than Australia. That issue will test the depth of China’s commitment to reducing its ballooning contribution to climate change.
The Minerals Council of Australia is correct when it says the use of a rules-based system is vital to restoring stability to a trading relationship that has been beneficial for both nations, supporting years of economic growth and job creation, including in Australia’s regions. Mr Morrison and his ministers are seeking out their Chinese counterparts for bilateral talks, but to no avail so far.
The government is right in rejecting the call by former trade minister Matt Canavan on Monday for a 1 per cent levy on Australian iron ore exports to China to offset the impacts of trade bans on other industries. In a fiendishly difficult situation, Australia’s greatest strength is the quality of our exports and the fact we play fairly, by the rules.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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15 December, 2020
Language cuts risk Australia's regional relationships -- or do they?
It is a common view among educated people that we all should learn a foreign language. Although I personally gained a lot from my studies of German, Latin and Italian, I do not agree. I get a lot out of classical music and what I gained was an enhanced understanding of those three languages as part of classical music. With the honourable exception of Russian, those three languages are the source language of almost the whole of the classical music repertoire. If you want to undertand the words in a Bach cantata, it helps a lot to know German. And you need Latin for the Stabat Mater etc.
But how many people really enjoy classical music? Best estimate is 2% of the population so why should the rest of the population study languages?
In answering that I hearken back to the fact that only a tiny percentage of English-speakers who study (say) French ever become fluent in that language. I have a small gift for languages but even I am fluent only in English. So the time spent studying a language is a waste for most people in the English-speaking world. And that goes A fortiori for students of Asian languages. Asian languages are so alien to us that even many years of exposure to them in adulthood will not suffice to bring native fluency
But is partial fluency useful? Perhaps for tourists but for business a very accurate understanding of the other person is usually important, which leads us to the real important factor in foreign language utilization: The fact that we have among us a large number of foreign-born people who have learnt both English and their ancestral tongue during childhood.
So they constitute an easily available pool of near perfect translators. We do not ourselves need to learn a foreign language when we have large numbers of good translators at hand. The are a valuable resource that we should use. They can aid international communication where our own abilities at that would be pathetic.
The author below recounts a pleasing life journey that resulted from his decision to study Indonesian. Indonesia is a country and a culture well below the intellectual horizons of most Australians. But is it nonetheless imporant to Australians? It is one of the world's largest bodies of Muslims and is rather close to our Northern borders, so its strategic importance must be allowed for but as a source of cultural products or economic relationships it is of negligible importance to us. There are many more things we could study which would be more gainful than the Indonesian language
La Trobe, Swinburne, Murdoch and Western Sydney University. These are some of the Australian universities considering axing various Indo-Pacific language programs from Indonesian to Hindi. It’s feared other universities may follow suit.
Abolishing language programs is a dumb move. Australian universities are a key ingredient in the government’s commitment to engagement with the Indo-Pacific.
Universities are essential training grounds for a future generation of Indo-Pacific literate Australians.
The decline in programs corresponds with a decline in enrolments. This is evident with the Indonesian language.
In the 1990s, enrolment in Indonesian language was at its height, with 22 programs at Australian universities. In the decades since then, there has been a major decline.
According to David Hill, emeritus professor of south-east Asian studies at Murdoch University in Perth, in 2019 there were only about 14 Indonesian language programs left at Australian universities. As a result of COVID-19, that number may fall further.
Australian universities must retain language programs, which are vital to equip the next generation for smart engagement with the Indo-Pacific.
Institutional commitments to language programs by universities are crucial because studying a language requires a significant investment of time, commitment and money.
As part of my Arts degree I undertook an Indonesian language program, building on my four years of Indonesian language studies in high school.
Yet this was in mid-2000s, when I was one of about 400 students studying Indonesian in Australia. By 2014, those numbers dipped below 200 equivalent full-time students. It is feared that in the future the number of students could be much less.
At university, I was privileged to be taught by the likes of Arief Budiman, a well-known activist and scholar, and Professor Ariel Heryanto, a cultural studies expert.
As part of my degree, I also took Indonesian studies programs like politics, media, religion, law and society. This helped me to appreciate the great diversity and richness of the country’s history, people and culture.
My university also facilitated several internships in Indonesia. It was through contacts at university that I heard about the Australia-Indonesia Youth Exchange Program. This collective experience with a group of 15 Australians and 15 Indonesians set me on a course of lifetime engagement with Indonesia.
Many of the Australians on that youth exchange program have found exciting and fulfilling careers in diplomacy, business, academic, education and the civil service. Their skills in the language and their knowledge of Indonesian enabled them to achieve the vocations they now pursue.
Through my university, I also received support from my faculty to undertake an internship with the Office of the Ombudsman in Yogyakarta.
These short-term trips would not have been as rich and meaningful if I did not have basic competence in the language. In short, my years of studying the language in high school and at university equipped me for deep engagement with Indonesia.
Our universities are now at risk of curtailing access to Indonesian language programs for a future generation of students.
If the decision by some Australian universities to close language programs is dumb, then the Australian government is dumber.
Over the past two decades, the government has been told time and time again that student enrolments in languages of the Indo-Pacific are falling, particularly for Indonesian. This is a well-established fact.
Yet the federal government has done nothing about it. Short-term study abroad is no quick fix for an Indo-Pacific literacy crisis. It's great to have the Governor-General of Australia studying Indonesia, but what about the future generation?
The government frequently refers to its commitment to the region and its Indo-Pacific strategy, as set out in its 2016 Defence Paper and 2017 White Paper.
Yet it has failed to live up to this aspiration with real policies that create incentives for Australian students to study languages of the Indo-Pacific and the necessary funding for institutions to make this happen.
What we are left with is a future where there are fewer graduates of Australian universities than ever with basic competence in one language of the Indo-Pacific.
These graduates are going into business, diplomacy, academia, education and science with less knowledge than ever before about our neighbours.
Collaboration and partnership in the Indo-Pacific region require mutual understanding.
Australia’s bilateral relationships are strengthened when Australians take the time to learn a language.
To take one example, the landmark Indonesia Australia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement should see more Australians incentivised to study the language, rather than less.
The more students studying Indonesian language, the greater chance we have of building strong relationships with our most important neighbour. Our economic, diplomatic and cultural ties remain hollow without a basic appreciation for the language.
The dual lack of commitment by Australian universities and the government to invest in language capabilities affects our engagement in the region.
Even the embassies based in Australia agree. That’s why the recent consultations to axe language programs at some universities have received a strong and swift response from both the Indian embassy and the Indonesian embassy.
That’s right, our neighbours know it’s important for us to learn their language more than our own government and universities do.
And there lies the challenge for 2021: both the government and Australian universities must work together to ensure Asian language programs not just survive, but thrive, post COVID-19.
Live and let live – and let us die how we choose
The NSW Independent MP Alex Greenwich is, as we speak, drawing up plans for voluntary euthanasia legislation, which – if passed – will see NSW arrive in the 21st century, joining other states around the country in legalising assisted dying for terminally ill patients.
It will be supported by such admirable groups as Dying With Dignity NSW, politicians across the various parties and – to judge by polls on the subject – about 85 per cent of the public. It would mean terminally ill patients, who are medically judged to have less than six months to live, could choose to die at a time of their choosing, rather than at the agonising end of nature’s ravages.
I say again, all of us who have nursed a dying loved one to the very end know that meaningful life often ceases long before the final heart beat, and all too often we are left with no more than a shell of agony left in the bed before us, usually a being totally bereft of all dignity. If they have made it clear that they don’t want to go through this, whose damn business is it but theirs to say they must?
And yet, if previous experience and that of other states is any guide, we can expect fierce opposition to this legislation to come from mostly religious groups, lead by some Catholics who genuinely think that months of agony is all part of God’s plan, and cannot be opposed.
My friends, if that is your view, fine. Go ahead with it when it comes to you and yours. But can you leave the rest of us alone? I repeat: if I am facing a terminal illness, when and how I choose to die is none of your damn business! Not only do I not want you to tell me how to live, I certainly don’t want you to tell me how to die. Just leave us alone. Live and let live, and let us die how we damn well choose. Thank you.
Qld won’t introduce voluntary assisted dying laws by February
Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk will break an election promise and won’t introduce voluntary assisted dying legislation by February.
Acting Premier Steven Miles today confirmed the Queensland Law Reform Commission had asked for extra time to draft proposed legislation – pushing back the date for when it can be introduced.
He partly blamed the recent caretaker arrangements for the delay, saying the QLRC was unable to consult on the issue during the October election campaign.
“By providing the law reform commission with the time and resources that they’ve indicated that they need, we can be assured that the Bill that will be considered by the parliament will be the best possible Bill,” he said.
“It means that MPs and the community can be assured that the Bill that will be introduced to the parliament has been very, very carefully considered.
“We will take into account this additional time in the drafting of the Bill when we consider an implementation time frame.”
The QLRC now won’t come back with a final report until May 10 – at least two months after when Ms Palaszczuk had initially promised to introduce legislation to parliament.
Attorney-General Shannon Fentiman said there was a “significant degree of complexity” involved in the review.
“It also comes obviously as community members express a desire for an extension of time to make submissions,” she said.
“We want everyone to be able to have their say. As the Acting Premier said, this will be introduced in the first half of next year.”
Ms Fentiman said the legislation would be introduced to the parliament by the end of May.
She said the extra time meant the government could get work underway now to ensure there is a “shorter implementation time frame” if it passes the parliament.
Ms Palaszczuk announced the surprise timeframe for the legislation at Labor’s election launch in October, saying it was “very important that people have dignity in death”.
“If we are re-elected, we’ll introduce legislation in February, this is a very personal decision, between an individual and the medical practitioners, it’s a very very important issue that people discuss for their end of life care,” she said at the time.
“And yes, I would vote for it.”
Asked why she was speeding up the draft legislation from the original March timeframe, Ms Palaszczuk said she would give the commission extra resources.
“I think it’s a very important issue for Queenslanders, it’s been raised with me countless times, and there’s no reason any extra assistance the Law Reform Commission is needed, we can bring that forward, so the parliament can have a vote,” she said in October.
Queensland Law Reform Commission chair Justice Peter Applegarth said the body “hopes” to meet its new May reporting date.
“The Commission agrees with the government that ‘reform in this area requires careful consideration’ which is ‘informed by views of stakeholders and other experts in the field’,” a statement by Justice Applegarth said.
“It will continue with its existing resources, and with the increased resources which the government has announced, to complete this complex review as soon as it reasonably can.
“... The Commission is committed to doing the best it can, in the time that it has been given, to recommend “the best possible legal framework for people who are suffering and dying to choose the manner and timing of their death in Queensland”.
“It hopes that it will be able to report and provide well-drafted legislation by its reporting date of 10 May 2021.”
The importance of productivity
Something we’ve had to relearn in this annus horribilis is that the state governments still play a big part in the daily working of the economy. Another thing we’ve realised is that the Productivity Commission is so important that some of the states are setting up their own versions.
When you put the word “productivity” into the name of a government agency, you guarantee it will spend a lot of its time explaining what productivity is – a lot of people think it’s a high-sounding word for production; others that it means we need to work harder – and why it’s the closest economics comes to magic.
Earlier this year the NSW Productivity Commission issued a green paper that began with the best sales job for the concept I’ve seen. Its title said it all: Productivity drives prosperity.
Its simple definition of productivity is that it “measures how well we do with what we have. Productivity is the most important tool we have for improving our economic [I’d prefer to say our material] wellbeing,” it says.
“Our productivity grows as we learn how to produce more and better goods and services using less effort and resources. It is the main driver of improvements in welfare and overall [material] living standards.
“From decade to decade, productivity growth arguably matters more than any other number in an economy . . . Growth in productivity is the very essence of economic progress. It has given us the rich-world living standards we so enjoy.”
Productivity improvement itself is driven by increases in our stock of knowledge and expertise (or “human capital stock”) and by investment in physical capital (“physical capital stock”).
But by far the biggest long-term driver of productivity is the stock of advances known as “technological innovation” – a term that covers everything from new medicines to industrial machinery to global positioning systems.
Technology’s contribution to overall productivity growth has been estimated at 80 per cent, the paper says.
“Our future prosperity depends upon how well we do at growing more productive – how smart we are in organising ourselves, investing in people and technology, getting more out of both our physical and human potential.”
The (real) Productivity Commission has pointed out that on average it takes five days for an Australian worker to produce what a US worker can produce in four. (That’s not necessarily because the Yanks work harder than we do, but because they have fancier equipment to work with, and better organised offices and factories – not to mention greater economies of scale.)
The paper notes that productivity improvement hinges on people’s ability to change. “Unwelcome as it has been, the COVID-19 episode has shown that when we need to, we can change more rapidly than we thought. There is no reason we can’t do the same to achieve greater productivity and raise our future incomes.”
Technological innovation is the process of creating something valuable through a new idea. You may think that new technology destroys jobs – as the move to renewable energy is threatening the prospects of jobs in coal mining – but, if you take a wider view, you see that it actually moves jobs from one part of the economy to another and, because this makes our production more valuable, increases our real income and spending and so ends up increasing total employment.
“All through history,” the report adds, “[technological innovation] has been a huge source of new jobs, from medical technology to web design to solar panel installation. And as these new roles are created and filled, they in turn create new spending power that boosts demand for everything from buildings to home-delivered food.
But the thing I liked best about the NSW Productivity Commission’s sales pitch was the examples it quoted of how technology-driven productivity has improved our living standards.
As each month passes, this not-my-department categorisation of “the economy” is becoming increasingly incongruous, misleading and “what planet are you guys living on?”.
Take, medicine. “The French king Louis XV was perhaps the world’s richest human being in 1774 – yet the healthcare of the day could not save him from smallpox. Today’s healthcare saves us from far worse conditions every day at affordable cost.”
Or farming. “In 1789, former burglar James Ruse produced [Australia’s] first successful grain harvest on a 12-hectare farm at Rose Hill. Today, the average NSW broadacre property is 2700 hectares and produced far more on every hectare, often with no more people.”
Or (pre-pandemic) travel. About “67 years after the invention of powered flight, in 1970, a Sydney-to-London return flight cost $4600, equivalent to more than $50,000 in today’s terms. Today, we can purchase that flight for less than $1400 – less than one-30th of its 1970 price.”
Or communications. “Australia’s first hand-held mobile call was made at the Sydney Opera House in February 1987 on a brick-like device costing $4000 ($10,000 in today’s terms). Today we can buy a new smartphone for just $150, and it has capabilities barely dreamt of a third of a century ago.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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14 December, 2020
Australian Anglican Church on a path to schism over blessings of same-sex unions by national body
As ever, Sydney diocese stands firm on Bible teachings. Since they have a third of Australia's Anglican parishoners, they will always have the last laugh.
But their place in the Anglican communion is an odd one. Most of the Anglican churches in the Western world are so wishy-washy about doctrine that their claim to being Christian is dubious. The Sydney diocese is about the only place where the old Anglican faith lives on.
But they are not a bit abashed by that. Their seminary (Moore College) has hundreds of students and their churches too are pretty full. So their collections make them very robust financially as well.
And there is plenty of passion at their Synod, as they take doctrine seriously
You would think that other Anglicans would learn from them and return to the faith once delivered. In reality, however, it is the Devil's gospel that you hear from most Anglican pulpits
Bible references on homosexuality: Romans 1:27; Jude 1:7; 1 Timothy 1:8-11; Mark 10:6-9; Matthew 19: 4-16; 1 Corinthians 6: 9-11; 1 Corinthians 7:2; Leviticus 18:22; Leviticus 20:13; Genesis 19:4-8
The conservative Anglican Diocese of Sydney has told its top personnel the church is "on a trajectory towards disintegration" over a decision to allow the blessing of same-sex unions.
The church's *national* appellate tribunal – a legal advisory body comprising three bishops and four lawyers – ruled last month that Anglican priests could give a blessing to same-sex couples who had already been married elsewhere.
The tribunal found it would not breach the church's fundamental declarations and principles, and it was up to each diocese whether they allowed such blessings. Many LGBTQ people of faith still want such a blessing from their bishop or priest even if they are not able to marry in their church.
Sydney Archbishop Glenn Davies, who will retire in March, recently wrote to hundreds of bishops, wardens and school chaplains promising a showdown in coming months over the tribunal's decision.
He said the Bible and therefore the Anglican Church clearly taught that "the sexual union of two persons of the same sex was sin", and "to bless such a union would amount to the blessing of sin".
Dr Davies wrote: "While the world may deride our commitment to the standard of morality that God has established for his people, we have been called to holy and righteous living."
Bishop Michael Stead – a leading candidate to succeed Dr Davies as archbishop next year – warned "the majority opinion [of the tribunal] has put the Anglican Church of Australia on a trajectory towards disintegration".
Mr Stead said it was not feasible that clergy in the Newcastle diocese could be permitted to bless same-sex marriages while clergy in the Sydney diocese would be disciplined for such an action. He compared it to the invention of rugby in 19th century England which eventually led to the establishment of association football.
"Just as there are different codes in Australia which are all called 'football', there will be different versions of the Anglican Church of Australia, which have nothing in common except the name," he wrote in a letter seen by The Sun-Herald which was attached to Dr Davies' communique.
"While some might applaud the judicial innovation of the appellate tribunal for finding a way to enable an already fractured church to remain together, they have in fact entrenched separation and division. This decision has destroyed the rationale for a national church."
Late last month following the tribunal's decision, a retired bishop in Victoria's Wangaratta diocese, John Parkes, blessed the marriage of retired clergymen John Davis and Rob Whalley using a liturgy the diocese approved in 2019.
In response to reports of the blessing, Dr Davies issued a further statement last week saying it was untenable to have some members of the church "purporting to declare God's blessing" on same-sex marriages.
"It would be naive to think that mutually contradictory views on same-sex marriage can co-exist within our national church," he said. "To pursue this course will not bring healing but will only lead to a collapse in the fellowship that binds us together."
The issue will be debated at the Anglican church's national General Synod in 2021.
Australia and Taiwan in sensitive trade talks
Australian officials have been talking with Taiwan about boosting trade between the two economies as the Morrison government looks for alternative markets for billions of dollars worth of exports hit by China’s trade strikes.
Officials from the Department of Foreign and Affairs and Trade have held meetings with counterparts in the Taiwan government in recent weeks to discuss more trade opportunities.
While the Australian government has at this stage ruled out striking a free trade agreement with Taiwan, the two countries are discussing options to boost exports into the self-governed democracy of 23 million people.
Any move to enter a formal economic agreement with Taiwan could further inflame tensions with China, which has claimed sovereignty over the island state since the end of the Chinese civil war in 1949.
Former resources minister Matt Canavan said Australia should be planning a free trade deal with Taiwan.
"I think it would make absolute sense to finalise a trade agreement with Taiwan. It is a close friend of our country and a very important trading partner," Senator Canavan said.
"We have a strong presence in the commodity markets with Taiwan including coal and iron and ore. But we could no doubt increase trade of branded products and services including beef, beer and tourism."
Asked whether there was any risk of further angering Beijing by striking a free trade agreement with Taiwan, Senator Canavan said Australia "should not allow another country to dictate who we should finalise agreements with".
Senator Canavan's call for a Taiwan trade deal is the second within Coalition in three months after Liberal MP Ted O'Brien said in September that Australia should negotiate an agreement.
“If we’re serious about diversifying our economy, how can we not pursue deeper economic relations with Taiwan?" Mr O'Brien told The Australian Financial Review.
Other Coalition MPs are privately sympathetic to negotiations with Taiwan but concerned it may further inflame tensions at a time of high sensitivity with Beijing. The relationship between Beijing and Canberra is in turmoil after diplomatic disputes over the coronavirus, national security and human rights triggered trade strikes on half-a-dozen Australian industries this year.
China dominates Australian trade accounting for more than 30 per cent or $153 billion in exports annually. But Taiwan is Australia's sixth largest export market and surged by 20 per cent in 2018-19 to $10 billion, largely on the back of coal, iron ore, natural gas and copper exports.
While resources growth has been strong, consumables have historically been undermined by tariffs that make them less competitive against countries that have economic co-operation deals with Taiwan, including New Zealand and Singapore.
New Zealand, a competitor to Australia in the beef and wine sectors saw its exports to Taiwan rise by 22 per cent in the year after the deal was signed.
Australia walked away from plans for a free trade agreement with Taiwan in 2018 after China warned any deal would hurt relations between Beijing and Canberra.
Taiwan was on a list of economies the Coalition government was considering for bilateral trade deals but in a series of meetings over 2017 and 2018, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi conveyed directly to then-foreign minister Julie Bishop that China was opposed to Australia boosting formal ties with the government of President Tsai Ing-wen.
Sources from both governments, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions, confirmed that talks have been taking place, but insisted they were standard meetings as part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum.
Because APEC is branded as a "meeting of economies", it provides the opportunity for Australia and Taiwan to talk about trading opportunities without recognising Taiwan as a country.
China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs warned Australia in November against taking a stand on Taiwan, accusing it of interfering China’s internal affairs, despite the Morrison government remaining publicly restrained on the issue.
Labor senator Kimberley Kitching said Australia had for a long time been "too reliant on one country as a destination for our exports".
"Labor has been calling on the government to diversify our trade portfolio and identify new markets and opportunities for Australian exporters," she said. "As part of this, of course we should be looking to Taiwan, and ways we can increase the two-way trade between our countries."
Liberal plan to change federal voting laws may have crossbench support
Crossbenchers could support a controversial proposal from government MPs on the influential electoral matters committee which would change the way Australians vote in federal elections.
Australians have had to number every box on federal election ballots since 1918, when the rise of the Country party (later the Nationals) split the conservative vote. Prime minister Billy Hughes introduced the change, after Labor emerged the winner from split Nationalist-Country party contests.
The recommendation to shift to optional preferential voting was made in the joint standing committee into electoral matters (JSCEM) report into the most recent election. It does not have the support of Labor or the Greens but is supported by James McGrath, a Queensland Coalition senator, who wants the government to make numbering every box optional in a move to “maximise voter choice”.
And he may have some support to make it law – if the government chooses to adopt the reform.
Both Centre Alliance senator Stirling Griff, and Pauline Hanson, who controls two votes in the Senate, have told Guardian Australia they support the shift from compulsory to optional preferential voting, saying it will put the power back in voters’ hands.
“Most of us wish for a single choice and this makes such a choice possible,” Griff said.
“I do get that minor parties and candidates will see this as potentially disadvantaging them, but the reality is, that an OPV vote best represents what the voter wants.”
Hanson, who missed out on the lower house seat of Blair in the 1996 election, despite a strong first preference vote, also supports optional preferential voting.
“One Nation would strongly support abolishing full preferential voting which would kill off the Labor/Greens preference deal and restore the voters’ right to simply put a ‘1’ in the box,” she said.
Hanson said she would also ban how to vote cards, and instead supported reforms where interested voters could download a party’s recommendations for preference flows, from party websites.
Under the current Senate numbers, the government needs three more votes to pass legislation.
Labor and the Greens issued dissenting reports objecting to the recommendation, with Labor MP and committee member Milton Dick telling the Guardian Labor would fight any attempt to change federal preferential voting “tooth and nail”.
“The way we have elected people to the federal parliament has worked well for the past 100 years,” he said.
“There has been no evidence to suggest we should change how we elect MPs in our country.
“Compulsory preferential voting maximises the voters’ decisions in who they want to represent them and Labor will fight this tooth and nail to make sure there is consistency in our voting system.”
The Greens objected to the recommended change and defended compulsory preferential voting as increasing the diversity of MPs in the parliament.
JSCEM usually operates with bipartisan support for its recommendations, as it oversees how Australians vote as well as the electoral process itself, and whether any changes to the system need to be made.
McGrath, the committee chair, has been a longtime supporter of liberalising Australia’s systems, including how we vote. He did not respond to requests for further comment.
The official committee report justified the move after detailing the levels of informal voting at the last election. New South Wales, the last state to run elections with optional preferential voting, recorded the highest rate of informal votes, with some suggestion that confusion between “just vote 1” state election orders and “number every box” for the federal election was to blame.
Queensland made the shift to compulsory preferential voting before the 2015 election, citing confusion between the state and federal systems, although the move was seen as helping the then-minority Labor government win more seats despite a weaker primary vote.
Australia is among the only democracies in the world to force preferential voting, which rather than the first past the post vote of most systems, can see a vote transferred in order of the voter’s preference, to another candidate, in close contests.
The 2019 federal election saw both major parties return their lowest primary votes in decades, with Labor recording its worst first-preference result since 1931 and the Liberal party seeing its worst result since 1946.
The Coalition won the election on a slight swing to it on two-party preferred terms (once preferences were allocated) of 1.7% – enough to win government, with a one seat net gain.
Pandemic exposes global differences - and how Australia rose above most others
Nine months ago, officials in Canberra were poring over geospatial maps of Australia. They were identifying every major cold storage facility and ice-skating rink. All indications were that the hospitals and morgues would soon be overflowing. The Home Affairs officials were looking to secure places to stack the corpses.
About the same time, police chiefs convened to plan for the possibilities of a breakdown in social order and outbreaks of civil unrest, a fact that Peter Dutton hinted at publicly this week.
Instead of the official projection of a worst-case scenario of 150,000 dead, Australia has suffered 908 deaths in the pandemic to date. Every country, every state faced the same fateful moment of awesome responsibility and awful choice. The pandemic struck the countries of the world like an avenging angel, wreaking havoc on the unready and the uncaring, the slothful and the prideful, and re-ordered the world.
After an uncertain start, Australia ultimately made the right choices. Its leaders, yes, but also its people. The pandemic was a severe test of leadership, and of nation-state capability, but also of social cohesion and public culture. The whole of the people had to accept some personal inconvenience for the common good. In successful countries they did; in failed ones they did not.
And the countries that met the public health test had a much better chance of meeting the economic test.
Australia's responses have elevated it into a small elite of competent countries. "Our system has performed impressively and that puts a spring in your step and makes other countries interested in you," says the director of the Lowy Institute, Michael Fullilove. "And that's a positive. The prestige of smaller, well governed countries has risen, mainly in our part of the world – Taiwan, Singapore, New Zealand, South Korea, Australia."
The most dramatic effects have been in the biggest powers. "Nations cohere and flourish on the belief that their institutions can foresee calamity, arrest its impact and restore stability," Henry Kissinger said in April. "When the COVID-19 pandemic is over, many countries’ institutions will be perceived as having failed."
One of the foremost, shockingly, is the United States itself. The virus exposed its divided political system as not just an entertaining foible but as a deep national liability. Political division paralysed policy. In many countries politics is regarded as a sport, a game. In a crisis, we now learn, politics literally is a matter of life and death for the people and of national destiny for the country.
Even today, nine months on, the US cannot agree to stop the needless mass death nor agree on fiscal policy. With the daily death toll outstripping the 9/11 count, the US Congress remains deadlocked in negotiations for a second economic stimulus. It negotiates, sometimes month to month, sometimes week to week, the funding to "keep the government open". The asinine has become the norm.
The pandemic has broadly affirmed the effectiveness of the nation-state and social cohesion in the East Asian countries, the Confucian cousins of Japan, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan. All have controlled the virus effectively, and all have demonstrated relatively strong economic resilience. Once China got over its initial bungling of the virus, it, too, has joined the other Confucian countries.
Europe, on the other hand, has been unimpressive overall. The European picture broadly is one of ineffective governance and social complacency. Even the better European performers, such as Germany, have had a death rate per capita eight times worse than Australia's. And the worst, such as Italy, have suffered a death rate four times worse again. A shambles, in other words.
Neither democracy nor autocracy can claim an ideological victory. There have been good and bad performances in each camp.
Democratic Taiwan is a showcase, the lowest death rate per capita of any credible reporting country. Yet Communist Vietnam also has performed just as well in controlling the plague and weathering the downturn. There have been questions about Vietnam's official casualty numbers, yet independent signs such as a Reuters check of funeral parlours suggests they're truthful.
The clear-cut winners are effective governance, centrist politics, scientific expertise and social trust. The more a country had, the better it did. Everything else was distraction or destruction. It seems pretty obvious now. It's a shame of historic proportion that it has so far cost 1.5 million people their lives to prove again what human civilisation had already learned. And largely forgotten.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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13 December, 2020
Seven teens arrested after spate of armed robberies in Sydney
No ethnicity given. Had they been whites that would almost certainly have been said. As it is, the group retreated to Redfern Station, a notorious Aboriginal hangout. There is a high rate of criminality among young Aborigines
Eight people, including two 13-year-olds and five other teens, have been charged after a spate of armed robberies in Sydney's CBD on Saturday morning.
"We're alleging they followed three people after they left Maccas on George Street and chased one of them down to Town Hall Station and robbed them there," a NSW Police spokeswoman said.
The first of the three robberies occurred at about 4am when a man was approached by a group, one of whom was allegedly armed with a knife. A man from the group demanded his phone before hitting him over the head with a bottle.
The injured man was treated by paramedics at the scene before being transferred to St Vincent's Hospital in a serious condition. The police spokeswoman said the man received stitches and was kept in hospital overnight for observation and was expected to be released on Sunday.
Shortly afterwards, a second man was allegedly threatened by the same group while travelling on a train from Town Hall to Central before his phone was stolen.
Then, a third man had his headphones stolen by the group at Central Station.
The robberies occurred over about 45 minutes.
Police from a high-visibility operation targeting street crime in the CBD found and arrested the group at Redfern Station about 6am. The group consisted of a 13-year-old boy and girl, two 14-year-old boys, a 16-year-old boy and girl, a 17-year-old boy and an 18-year-old woman.
Members of the group were charged with a range of crimes, including armed robbery, assault and theft. They were refused bail and will appear in Parramatta Bail Court on Sunday.
Five Eyes partners mull joint sanctions as allies hit back at China trade coercion
The Five Eyes allies are quietly discussing a plan to fight back against China’s aggressive new trade tariffs by introducing joint retaliatory sanctions on Chinese goods and produce.
News Corp understands officials from some of the Five Eyes nations have been discussing how best to respond to China’s attempts to pressure Australia by harming some of our export markets, notably beef, wine and coal.
One option is that all five nations – Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and New Zealand – respond with their own sanctions on Chinese goods and services.
A second option would be for Australia to respond with retaliatory tariffs on inbound products from China, and the four allied nations support the move by refusing to buy extra product from China if Beijing looked to make up its losses elsewhere.
Talks are at a preliminary stage, but the idea is gaining traction in Canberra, and is being seriously considered in Washington.
News Corp has been told the problem had been discussed at high levels within the Morrison Government, but that talks so far remained at the level of officials.
The discussions come as the Five Eyes alliance, formed decades ago as an intelligence-sharing agreement, continues to expand into diplomatic and economic policymaking, largely in response to concerns about Chinese aggression.
“Five Eyes co-operation is off the charts at the moment,’’ a source said, pointing out even the Social Services Minister Anne Ruston had a recent Five Eyes link-up with her fellow ministers.
Under options being discussed to respond to China’s trade hostilities, the Five Eyes security agencies would jointly conduct an intelligence assessment of each new sanction announced by Beijing on Australian exports.
If the agencies deemed the sanctions to be a coercive economic move designed to pressure Australia for political purposes, a retaliatory sanction would be imposed, to the same or a higher value than the one imposed on Australia.
The other Five Eyes nations would then ensure China could not turn to them to make up any shortfall in sales.
Alternatively, each Five Eyes nation could respond with sanctions of their own.
“The Chinese Communist Party is trying to cause political pain in Australia to attempt to get the Australian government to change some of their decisions,’’ he told News Corp.
He said retaliatory sanctions would “look to do the same thing in China to make sure the CCP realise it’s a two-way street.’’
The aim was to “push the CCP into normal ways of doing business’’ and resolve trade disputes through recognised channels such as the World Trade Organisation or formal negotiations.
Outrage as Melbourne CBD’s Australia Day parade cancelled for 2021
Days after Whittlesea Council axed Australia Day, the Saturday Herald Sun can reveal our national day will no longer have it’s Melbourne centrepiece event that saw thousands flock to the CBD in January. It is understood a flag-raising ceremony could also be moved from Melbourne Town Hall to Government House.
The moves have sparked outrage and claims of political correctness gone mad.
The Andrews Government has claimed it is cancelling the event because of COVID-19, but the march will be held a full month after 30,000 are set to attend the Boxing Day Test.
Black Lives Matter protests were also allowed to go ahead earlier this year in the midst of Victoria’s coronavirus pandemic.
Sources have said the state government is looking to gauge the reaction to the cancellation and yesterday refused to say if the parade would be back in 2022.
“The Australia Day parade will not be part of the program of events for Australia Day 2021 given the current public health restrictions,” a government spokesman said. “The Victorian Government is planning activities to appropriately mark the day and connect our communities during our COVIDSafe Summer.”
Wurundjeri elder and Indigenous educator Ian Hunter said the move smacked of “political correctness gone mad”. “We’re all Australians. I classify myself as an Australian citizen with Indigenous heritage,” he said.
“There are some people that jump up and down about Australia Day, but traditional people don’t. “Traditional people in regional communities don’t care,” he said.
Polling has found more than 70 per cent of Australians support Australia Day being celebrated on January 26.
But moves to change the date of Australia Day have intensified in recent years with debate raging over the appropriateness of celebrating the date the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove.
Both Scott Morrison and Daniel Andrews have dismissed suggestions the date should be moved.
But the Premier has faced internal pressure over the issue.
Several Victorian councils including Moreland, Yarra and Darebin have stopped referring to January 26 as Australia Day prompting federal government intervention to strip councils of their ability to host citizenship ceremonies.
Last year thousands of people lined Melbourne streets for the annual Australia Day parade.
Bella d’Abrera from the Institute of Public Affairs said the move was a “sneaky way of cancelling Australia Day under the cover of COVID”.
A City of Melbourne spokesperson said it would host a citizenship ceremony on the morning of Australia Day.
We cannot ignore the hard facts when it comes to renewable energy
Why are people in authority allowed to get away with obvious untruths about climate change, despite all the factual evidence to the contrary, asks Peta Credlin.
Not only do all the renewable energy advocates claim that wind and solar will produce cheaper power than coal and gas, but they then invariably assert that “all the research” proves it.
Yet everywhere that transitions from fossil fuels to widespread use of wind turbines and solar panels experiences big price hikes and the risk of blackouts.
It’s no coincidence that South Australia, with the highest use of intermittent power sources, has had the highest electricity prices in Australia; and that power prices generally have roughly doubled over the past decade as renewables went from almost none to nearly 30 per cent of total generation.
How it could ever be cheaper to replace 24/7 power with power that’s only on when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing is hard to fathom.
I’m a reluctant conspiracy-detector, but it’s hard not to see one in all the “researchers” eager to “prove” what’s utterly implausible just because that’s what the green-establishment wants people to think.
Now, the lie about renewables being cheaper has yet again been exposed.
Back in 2017, the Northern Territory’s power generator reported to the government that reaching a 50 per cent renewable energy target would push up system costs by up to 30 per cent and that “capital costs will replace fuel costs as the key driver of electricity prices”. When challenged on this leaked report, the NT government said this week that it was “outdated” and didn’t reflect new developments.
Yet when this report was given to the government, the Chief Minister had claimed: “We very much see this as about substitution rather than additional costs … The advice we’re getting … is that an investment in renewables will actually put downward pressure on household prices.”
Despite the Chief Minister’s assurances, the NT’s renewable energy target hasn’t stopped further price rises.
Why are people in authority allowed to get away with obvious untruths on everything to do with climate change? It’s a classic case of wanting the lie to be true so insisting that it is despite all the factual evidence to the contrary.
Expect to hear even louder and more frequent assertions that renewables are cheaper in the run-up to next year’s Glasgow climate conference — but this debate has to include all the facts and science, not just the version that the zealots want to push.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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12 December, 2020
UN warns that 2021 could be catastrophic due to COVID-19 fallout and famine
Everybody -- at least in the "West" -- has continued to be fed DURING the virus period, so why should they suffer famine when the problem recedes? It is a nonsense
And it is mainly the lockdowns, not the virus itself, that have done the economic damage. So as lockdowns slowly fall out of favour, we can expect an economic revival, not some kind of "emergency"
The article below is just a beatup. The "emergency" is just a fiction designed to raise money for the authors of the fiction
The world has always had disaster areas and that will continue. Neither COVID nor global warming are needed to produce more of them
Misery loves company. In the case of COVID-19, that company includes unemployment, economic turmoil – and famine. And they’re about to come knocking.
“2021 is literally going to be catastrophic based on what we’re seeing at this stage of the game,” said World Food Programme (WFP) chief David Beasley at the United Nations General Assembly on Friday.
And if you think Australia won’t be affected by all this, think again. The warning signs are already there.
Notice how scarce out-of-season foods have become on supermarket shelves? Many vegetables and fruits must come from overseas. International trade has been disrupted and Australia’s ability to exploit cheap international labour has also been choked. This leaves many of our crops at risk of rotting in the fields.
The situation, however, is much more dire in Africa and South America. And that could trigger a global shortages and economic shockwaves.
Beasley says 2021 would likely be “the worst humanitarian crisis year since the beginning of the United Nations ... As I say, the icebergs in front of the Titanic.”
Beasley was supporting an appeal for $US35 billion in aid funding to meet a 40 per cent spike in the number of people needing humanitarian assistance. “We’re not going to be able to fund everything ... so we have to prioritise,” he said.
The impending “carnage” was “almost entirely from COVID-19,” UN emergency relief chief Mark Lowcock added.
It was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back for people already reeling from conflict, social upheaval and climate change shocks. As a result, he said, “multiple” famines are looming.
“The picture we are presenting is the bleakest and darkest perspective on humanitarian needs in the period ahead that we have ever set out. That is a reflection of the fact that the COVID pandemic has wreaked carnage across the whole of the most fragile and vulnerable countries on the planet,” Lowcock said.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs predicts a record 235 million people will need humanitarian assistance and protection next year. This year, that figure was 170 million.
Lowcock warns that the “obscene” chance of global famine in 2021 would inevitably lead to war and civil unrest.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged the world to “stand with people in their darkest hour of need”.
COVID had produced “new spikes of conflict in places that were previously more peaceful. We’ve seen that obviously recently in Nagorno-Karabakh, we’ve seen it in northern Mozambique, we’ve seen it in the Western Sahara and at the moment obviously, tragically, we’re seeing in northern Ethiopia,” he said. “We’re overwhelmed with problems.”
Roll out the literacy test that stops children failing at the first hurdle
Little is more fundamental to the success of an individual than literacy. If our children do not develop the abilities to read, write, speak and listen properly, almost everything else in life is denied them.
Which makes it a great shame that too many young Australians have fallen through the cracks with their English skills poorly developed. The proportion of Year 4 students who are poor readers compares badly with almost all other English-speaking nations and so they go on to fail at senior school.
However, there are grounds for optimism. Last week NSW became the second state after South Australia to introduce compulsory phonics screening for Year 1 students. The Tasmanian government conducted a trial this year. The Year 1 Phonics Check was developed by the British government and has been mandatory in all English schools since 2012.
Phonics, for those untutored in the intricacies of early school-policy debates, is the time-honoured approach of teaching the sounds of the alphabet, spelling them and blending these sounds into words; for example, c-a-t cat.
Until recently, this was considered old-fashioned, and that, left to their own devices, children would somehow absorb the art of reading. This is what is known as the “whole word” or “whole language” method.
The logic went like this: if we jettisoned those boring phonic drills, children could work out words in context or by guessing them from pictures. The more they encountered frequently used words, the more likely they would recognise them automatically. Who cared, for instance, if they read the word “dog” instead of “dragon”, as long it made sense in the sentence? Reading and writing would become easier and fun, thus students would learn more quickly.
However, this approach had shown especially poor results for children experiencing reading difficulties. Students, especially from poor backgrounds, misused grammar and could not punctuate. They just found reading difficult and unrewarding and stopped trying.
Not surprisingly, there has been overwhelming evidence not just about the urgency of the problem but also about the measures needed to turn the intellectual tide. No longer is the use of phonics regarded as educationally and ideologically unsound.
Now, at last, there is a general agreement, including among a clear majority of NSW teachers who participated in a training blitz, that systematic, synthetic phonics is an essential part of the teaching of reading. A strong foundation of phonics helps with comprehension and writing.
There are several policy heroes in this story.
Credit must go to the federal Coalition government for being an early champion of the Phonics Check. Under education ministers Simon Birmingham and Dan Tehan, and the veteran policy wonk Scott Prasser, Canberra has been determined to push ahead with ensuring that phonics was at the heart of teaching children to read. They have made an online version of the Phonics Check available to all schools.
In South Australia, Labor took on the establishment and ran a trial of the phonics screening check with the support of the opposition. The success of the trial led to a statewide roll out in 2018 and the results speak for themselves.
Whereas in 2018, just 43 per cent of Year 1 students met the expected achievement level in the Festival State, this year 63 per cent of SA state school students demonstrated phonics skills at the benchmark level or higher.
The results are a vindication of the SA Education Minister John Gardner’s boldness in pursuing sound, evidence-based policy. They are also a tribute to the hard work of SA’s primary school teachers, who have improved the way children are taught to read in South Australia.
In NSW, Education Minister Sarah Mitchell has persevered, despite strong opposition from the teacher unions who ignored the empirical evidence. The battle between reading by phonics and the whole language method is over, she says, and phonics offers the only realistic chance of remedying the scandal of mass illiteracy.
Finally, the think tank that I head, the Centre for Independent Studies (previously led by Greg Lindsay from 1976 to 2017), deserves recognition. For years, CIS pointed to the importance of using evidence-based teaching methods, including learning the sounds of letters as building blocks, to master reading and to reduce preventable achievement gaps.
The ultimate aim was for students to read widely with understanding, but learning to decode the words on the page was the necessary first step. If this sounded like common sense, it was. CIS’s philanthropically funded Five from Five project, led by my colleague Jennifer Buckingham (now MultiLit’s director of strategy), worked with a coalition of researchers, teachers, principals, parent advocacy groups, reading specialists and government allies to hammer home the message.
The lesson here is that the most important of school subjects remains English, the foundation of future learning. All children, regardless of their background or intelligence, are capable of being taught to read. The Phonics Check is the best way to detect quickly children who are failing at the first hurdle at school.
If other states followed SA and NSW, and if there were a general recognition across the nation that phonics is at the heart of the teaching of reading, then every Australian child would be afforded the best start in life.
Workers know a job is better than no job
In the early 1980s, I worked in the central office of the commonwealth government department responsible for securing the implementation of awards determined by the (then) Conciliation and Arbitration Commission, now termed the Fair Work Commission. During the 1982-83 recession, unemployment rose to more than 10 per cent. This was at a time when Australia’s industrial relations was more centralised.
At the time, it came to the department’s attention that, in some hard-hit areas of Australia, workers had petitioned their employers to work fewer hours, and thereby receive less weekly pay than that prescribed under existing awards. Often employees agreed with each other on this so that the employer did not need to lay off staff.
Such agreements made sense. However, if they were not sanctioned by the commission they were illegal. And many employers did not wish to apply for a legal exemption since this could become public knowledge and let competitors know of their economic plight. Unfortunately, such flexibility was not possible at the time and some workers joined the unemployment queues while some businesses closed.
Following the economic reforms of the Labor governments led by Bob Hawke and later Paul Keating, the inflexible system was made more flexible in the early 90s by the introduction of enterprise bargaining agreements negotiated between employers and employees. When the Coalition came to office in 1996, John Howard attempted to introduce more flexibility into the system, with some success. The combined impact of the recessions of the mid-70s, early 80s and early 90s led to the economic reforms of the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. The long-term effects of this reform process brought about a situation whereby, at the start of the pandemic recession, the Australian economy was among the best performing in the Western world.
In the wake of the Howard government defeat in 2007 and, with it, the demise of his Work Choices legislation, the Labor governments led by Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard set about increasing the level of regulation in the IR system. The Coalition governments led by Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison have done little to undo the Rudd-Gillard legislation — primarily because none had an automatic majority in the Senate.
Economic reform in Australia usually takes place following an economic shock of some kind. That made Work Choices difficult to sustain, since the economy was in good shape during the Howard years. The Morrison government, following discussion with trade union leaders and employer groups, now has set itself on a course of moderate IR reform to deal with the consequences of the 2020 recession.
On Wednesday, Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter delivered the second reading speech of the Fair Work Amendment Bill 2020. As Porter said, this is not an “ideologically based” legislation. Rather “it is founded on a series of practical, incremental solutions to key issues that are known barriers to creating jobs”.
In the 1982-83 recession, Australia’s highly regulated IR system was an impediment to economic recovery in general and the reduction in unemployment in particular. The current bill is designed to facilitate economic recovery and employment growth. A crucial part of the proposed legislation is aimed at hospitality and retail industries, which have been hit especially hard by the pandemic recession.
For a limited period of two years, the government wants to make it possible for the FWC to approve revised agreements previously negotiated between employers and employees with respect to wages and conditions under the better-off-overall test.
Currently, for the most part, agreements between employers and employees will not be approved if the latter are not judged to be better off overall.
The government wants to make it possible for the FWC to approve an agreement to which the BOOT standard does not apply, but only after assessing the circumstances of the employees, employers and employer organisations covered by the agreement and the impact of COVID-19 on the business in question plus the overall public interest.
In other words, it might be possible for an employee to not be better off as a result of the revised agreement — but only for two years, by which time it is anticipated that the economic recovery would have taken place throughout the whole economy, including the hospitality and retail industries.
So far, Australia’s economic recovery appears to be going well. But next year will bring its difficulties as JobKeeper and JobSeeker payments will be abolished or reduced. Some businesses forced to close down during the lockdowns — especially in Greater Melbourne, where the lockdowns were most extensive — are not likely to reopen.
On the basis that a job is infinitely better than no job, it makes sense for the industrial relations system to be more flexible than is currently the case. Yet early indications are that both the Labor Party and the trade union movement, through the ACTU, is opposed to the Morrison government’s non-ideological reform proposals.
And here’s the problem. Since early in the 20th century, the trade union movement has had the right to negotiate the pay and conditions of those entitled to be trade union members — even if they are not union members. Currently only 9 per cent of private sector workers are trade union members.
Yet ACTU leaders Sally McManus and Michele O’Neil proclaim the right to negotiate for hospitality and retail workers in, say, Launceston and Townsville irrespective of their wishes. That is akin to the situation that prevailed in the early 80s with deleterious effects on employment.
Workers better understand the economic circumstances of the businesses that employ them than trade unions executives in Melbourne or Sydney.
How COVID-19 has changed the domestic paradigm
How fortunate are we Australians? And don’t we know it.
Instead of the doom and gloom we expected from the time of COVID, a recent survey has shown that the pandemic caused a positive evaluation of our priorities. More than 80 per cent have a positive outlook.
The time of pandemic has pointed to the future, especially the future of the way we will work. It has allowed many families to recalibrate the work-life balance that until now has eluded us.
Previously, it was seen solely through the narrow prism of full-time work and institutional child care. But the push for the dual-income family with full-time working mother eluded the ideological script writers; instead, Australian women preferred working part-time — more than any other country in the OECD.
This suits women with children, and childcare is expensive. But among feminist groups and professional associations, still focused on the work side of the balance, the pandemic was an opportunity to push for even more childcare and, indeed, a continuation of free institutional care, good for single parents and poorer families.
However, the main reason it won’t be universal is not just the budget-breaking expense but the recalibration of family life in intact families caused by the work-from-home phenomenon.
Take the example of Kate and Josh, a young Sydney couple with two children. Kate is a public servant, Josh an industrial designer. Until the pandemic their work routine dictated family life. She had gradually transitioned to full-time work as the children went to school, and he was working full time, commuting to an inner-Sydney office. Commuting added to their long working day, with the children at after-school care.
However, working from home has completely changed their lives. They spend more time with one another and their children. But what is most interesting, and instructive for the future, is that their productivity has not fallen. In fact, it has increased.
Josh’s role as a technical designer may seem more difficult to translate to WFH, but the difficulties have been overcome by technology that was not available five years ago. “If this had happened even two years ago it might have been difficult. Now it is easy.” He emphasises that this is not just his view. His colleagues all feel the same. Many of them have been lobbying for working from home for years, but oversight within the office by various managers was deemed too important.
However, now staff members have proved those demands can be met. Josh has not been in his office for months. When he does go, he says, it is usually just to check something. However, working from home allows much more concentration, for even longer periods, hence higher productivity.
“You don’t realise how much time you spend at the office simply chatting!” he says.
For Josh and his colleagues, the hardest part of WFH in the pandemic was not being able to go to China to oversee production. But to general astonishment, one imaginative colleague set up his garage to experiment with bits of equipment.
What the ACTU would make of this type of innovation is uncertain. Unions are justified in examining the challenges of WFH conditions, but applying conditions to an essentially flexible WFH scenario is questionable. For example, Josh’s company has provided a whole range of technical support, but not all industries offer this. Security is another issue. However, the notion of fixed hours has gone out the window with WFH.
For Josh and Kate, the benefits far outweigh any increase in the hours of work. Recently, after taking the children to school, Josh and Kate went for a swim before putting in several hours in the little sun room-office. Josh later took a meeting sitting in his car while Kate was doing her regular mothers’ reading group. He has rearranged his life so that work and family are more seamlessly integrated, and this full-time working father can be much more involved with his family.
The feminist quest has always been for more paternal involvement, and the breakdown of the classic male-female domestic paradigm. The ideologues saw more women working and more institutional childcare as the way to do this. But this was an imposition of something that average mums and dads chafed against.
For mums, more involvement in the “outside” workforce did not mean less at home — if anything it meant more running around.
However, ironically, working from home has, to some extent, succeeded in the breakdown of that paradigm in many families — and they are happier for it.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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11 December, 2020
The major changes coming to Australian workplaces - and it's good news for casual workers AND small businesses
I guess there is some good news in it but the attack on casual work is an old push that does not deserve to get up. The labour laws about unfair dismissals and other things are onerous enough to cause many small employers to avoid hiring like the plague. They want to create jobs but risk a lot in doing so
Casual work is however not nearly so rule-bound so many employers hire casuals only. The employer gets a worker and the employee gets a job.
Any restrictions on that can only have adverse consequences. Employers will often fire a perfectly good casual worker just before the end of the period allowed for casual work -- thus inconveniencing everyone -- all because of government imposed rigidities
Casual workers will be the big winners when proposed workplace reforms are introduced in federal parliament this week, but the changes could have big impacts for small businesses.
The proposed shake-up of industrial relations laws aims to provide more certainty to thousands of working Australians.
Staff who have been with the same employer for a year and in regular shifts for six months must be offered a permanent position under the reforms.
More than half of Australia's 2.6 million casual workers will benefit from this change, but it could see less flexibility for small business owners forced to give out permanent contracts.
This means workers will have more job security.
Attorney-General and Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter hopes the reforms will end confusion surrounding casual workers.
'With so many Australians still out of work, or doing fewer hours as a result of the pandemic, we cannot do nothing when we have a situation where employers are delaying making hiring decisions because of ongoing confusion about the legal status of casual employment,' Mr Porter said.
He thanked employer groups and unions that helped to shape the reforms.
The legislation will introduce the statutory definition of a casual employment in the Fair Work Act, which will include employment being offered without any firm advance commitment that the work will continue indefinitely and follow an agreed pattern of work.
'Our definition of casual employment is likely broader than some business groups had wanted,' Mr Porter said.
'Unions are likely to say we should have made the definition broader still, suggesting to me that we have struck the right balance on this issue and delivered a fair and equitable outcome that will benefit both workers and employers.'
The legislation aims to address the so-called 'double-dipping' issue where employers currently may have to pay both for sick leave and other leave as well as the 25 per cent casual loading meant to compensate for those benefits.
The government will ensure employers do not have to pay worker entitlements twice by ensuring that a court deducts any identifiable casual loading paid to compensate the employee for the absence of one or more entitlements.
'These are significant reforms which together will solve the problem of uncertainty, provide better avenues for job security, remove the burden of double dipping claims and recognise employee choice.' Mr Porter said.
Pauline defends cashless welfare card
Pauline Hanson has declared people on welfare have “lost their rights” in a furious speech where she also attacked the fact an "Aboriginal" senator [Thorpe] had “a white father.”
Speaking in support of the cashless debit card that critics have dubbed as “racist”, the One Nation leader shocked the chamber on Wednesday by declaring anyone relying on welfare had forfeited their right to decide how they spend the money.
The card links 80 per cent of welfare payments to a cashless card to stop the purchase of drugs, alcohol and pornography.
“That’s what this card is about. It’s not about a person’s rights,’’ Senator Hanson said.
“When you go onto this card, you basically lose your rights as well. If you go on a welfare system, you’ve lost your rights.”
The Morrison Government’s hope to enshrine the cashless welfare card as a permanent feature appeared in strife last night after Senator Rex Patrick announced he would oppose the legislation.
But it was quickly revived via Centre Alliance’s Stirling Griff who indicated he would back amendments to extend it for two years.
Senator Hanson said there had been many positive effects that flowed from the cashless welfare card, that restricts welfare recipients from spending cash on drugs, alcohol and pornography.
“There have been increased purchases of baby items, food, clothing, shoes, toys and other goods for children,’’ she said.
“That’s why they are quite happy to be on the card. They can say: ‘I can’t give you money. I haven’t got it.’ Humbugging [begging] is in these communities. They know that family members are taking money from them.”
However, the One Nation leader then turned her sights on the Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe who has described the card as “racist.”
“I can’t let go what Senator Thorpe said earlier in this chamber. She commented that it’s her land,’’ Senator Hanson said.
“Senator Thorpe talks about her land. What about the white part? Where’s her white father in all of this, who I should say is a member of the One Nation party?.”
Greenie Senator Thorpe
The report the ABC tried to hide: Independent review confirms left wing election coverage bias - and bosses tried to prevent the criticism from going public
An independent review commissioned by the ABC has found the broadcaster 'favoured Labor' and lacked conservative voices in some of its coverage leading up to the 2019 federal election.
The report, tabled to parliament on Thursday, acknowledged 'potential problems of imbalance' on some panel shows, but found the ABC's news coverage 'consistently reflected a diversity of perspectives and covered a broad range of policy and campaign issues'.
The ABC had attempted to stop the report from being released but was forced to turn over the document as part of a Senate order.
An independent review commissioned by the ABC has found the broadcaster 'favoured Labor' and lacked conservative voices.
Renowned British journalist Kerry Blackburn was tasked with analysing five episodes of The Drum, four editions Insiders as well as a host of digital articles, radio segments and news broadcasts.
'Prominent conservative voices in Australia have argued that the ABC is left-leaning in its news and current affairs output,' the ITN, BBC and Channel Five veteran said.
'At first analysis, the review identified potential problems of imbalance across some significant segments of ABC content: to borrow from Barnaby Joyce, "it was Labor, Labor, Labor".
'But that was hardly surprising given the slimness of the government’s policy package and its campaign focus of attacking Labor, contrasted with Labor’s significant raft of policy and spending promises.'
Three out of five episodes of the Drum were found to have 'predominance of views which favoured Labor and/or the ideas and policies most often associated with the Left of politics'.
Mr Blackburn said the weekly Insiders programs were found to have been 'conducted fairly' and to have covered an appropriate range of topics.
But one of the biggest criticisms of the tax-payer funded network was that a consensus had developed around the idea that Bill Shorten would be 'getting the keys to the Lodge' - even if nobody came right out and said so.
'Many news stories on the ABC, and elsewhere, started from an assumption that Labor would shortly be in government; there was no other explanation for some of the angles taken,' Blackburn said.
The reviewer even noted two presenter slips which referred to Bill Shorten as the Prime Minister - only one was corrected.
When the election was done and dusted, the Coalition had won in a landslide taking most political commentators on the ABC and other networks by surprise.
Mr Blackburn's review recommends that 'more conservative voices and perspectives should have been included'.
But while Blackburn found faults with some of the coverage he said there was no evidence of bias at the Australian broadcaster.
'ABC content for the most part followed the weight of evidence and was duly impartial. The finding overall is that the content met the impartiality standard,' he said.
In a statement posted to the broadcaster's website, the ABC said it regularly commissions editorial reviews in order to get independent external feedback.
'The ABC takes seriously our editorial standards and statutory responsibilities and knows that as the public broadcaster we are held to a higher standard,' the statement said.
'ABC journalists and presenters were shown to have been fair and accurate in their writing, interviewing and presenting.
'This aligns with analysis of the Share of Voice data and the ABC's own internal monitoring of interviews of politicians, which showed the ABC was meticulous in ensuring that the competing parties were consistently treated in a fair and balanced manner.'
The release of the independent report comes after the minister for communications, Paul Fletcher, wrote to the ABC chair, Ita Buttrose, accusing the broadcaster's flagship program Four Corners of inappropriate reporting.
The Morrison government had been left reeling last month after allegations of bad behaviour and extramarital affairs with female staffers were levelled at two senior liberal MPs - Alan Tudge and Christian Porter.
ABC journalist Louise Milligan faced a backlash from the government and some section of the community claiming her investigative report into the private lives of politicians went too far.
After the fallout from the program, extra scrutiny has been placed on the ABC.
Ms Buttrose and the managing director of the broadcaster, David Anderson, expressed their strong objection to the internal review being made public.
In a letter to president of the Senate, Scott Ryan, they wrote the release would hinder the 'free exchange of ideas'.
'There is a public interest in the ABC being able to deliberate on and develop ideas for its program material in a confidential way,' Buttrose wrote to Ryan on Thursday, the Guardian reported.
'Public discussion on its internal deliberations on program material will hinder the free exchange of ideas about program material, and this is to the detriment of the public interest.'
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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December 10, 2020
Defence crisis as SIXTY outraged SAS soldiers 'will quit' in protest over squadron being scrapped due to 'war crimes' report
More than 60 outraged SAS soldiers may quit in protest against their squadron being disbanded over war crimes by some of its members in Afghanistan.
Chief of Army Rick Burr removed the 2 Squadron of the Special Air Service Regiment from the army's order of battle in the wake of the release of the Brereton Report.
The four-year inquiry uncovered a 'shameful record' of unlawful killings, including cases where new patrol members were told to shoot a prisoner to achieve their first kill in an 'appalling practice' known as 'blooding'.
Former officer in the Sydney-based special forces 2nd Commando Regiment Heston Russell said SAS members are now in 'absolute uproar' and already have or intend to resign over the 'group punishment'.
'The 2nd squadron has been there since 1964 and has generations of veterans who fought in Borneo, Vietnam and many other deployments in between, many of whom never even deployed to Afghanistan,' he told The Daily Telegraph.
'Disbanding punishes nearly 60 years, multiple generations, of those who served.'
Because the soldiers are unable to mount a public defence, they have written more than 350 letters to Prime Minister Scott Morrison to 'get their voice out in public'.
The mass exodus comes as veterans blast a morning tea and a parade at the SAS barracks in Perth on Tuesday to wrap up 2 Squadron as an 'insulting' slap in the face.
The event, which was slated to recognise the soldiers' service to Australia, has now been 'postponed' after families of soldiers said they wouldn't attend to take a stand against the disbandment of the squadron.
The ADF will instead wait until there is an implementation plan for what happens after the report to properly commemorate the disbanded unit.
Mr Russell, a former Major in the 2nd Commando Regiment and Voice of a Veteran founder, said members and their families were 'disgusted'.
'The biggest thing that veterans suffer from when they leave the military is a loss of purpose or a loss of identity,' he told The West Australian. 'Those that have fought under a unit that was 2 Squadron, and people have died under it. On Anzac Day when they get together that's part of their identity.
'We're just tearing down these symbols. Families of these old guys are calling me saying "hey it's actually really hurting my grandad".'
The ADF said it would work with the 2 Squadron veteran's community and ex-service organisations to 'appropriately acknowledge their service'.
The 465-page Brereton report, which blames the killings in part on a 'warrior hero' culture among special forces, recommended that 19 people face criminal investigation and called for sweeping reforms to Australia's military.
One particular incident, wholly redacted in the report, was described as 'possibly the most disgraceful episode in Australia's military history'.
There was also evidence that troops took part in 'body count competitions' and covered up illegal killings by staging skirmishes, planting weapons and retrospectively adding names to target lists.
Australia's Chief of Army said he was left 'sickened' by the landmark investigation. 'I was shocked by the extent of the alleged unlawful acts that were described in the report,' Lieutenant General Rick Burr told the Nine Network. 'That is absolutely not what I expect of anyone in our army, anywhere in our army at any time, and why I'm so determined to lead our army through this into a better place.'
The inquiry has also raised questions about how Australia's elite soldiers should be represented at the war memorial in Canberra.
The damning findings were outlined in a major report into alleged Australian war crimes in Afghanistan made public last month.
Paul Brereton, who led the four-year inquiry, found young soldiers were forced to kill Afghan soldiers in a practice known as 'blooding' to achieve their first kill.
'I was shocked by the extent of the alleged unlawful acts that were described in the report,' Lieutenant General Rick Burr told Nine Network.
All special forces soldiers who served in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2013 could also lose their meritorious unit citations.
Darren Chester, the minister for veterans' affairs and defence personnel, agrees with the recommendation. 'I think it's a tough call but I think in the circumstances it is a fair call,' he told ABC radio. 'I think it's a difficult decision, a difficult recommendation, but I think it's one we probably have to follow through with.'
However, Mr Chester is concerned for the vast majority of veterans who served with great distinction in Afghanistan. 'They have no reason to have their work in uniform either defined or diminished in any way because of these allegations that have come forward,' he said. 'The last thing they need right now is our judgement, they need our support.'
Gold miners boosting Australian economy
A surge in prices of the yellow metal is changing the face of the sharemarket and boosting Australia's export fortunes
Under the famous goldfields that transformed colonial Australia, a new gold rush is calling. From Bendigo and Ballarat to Bathurst and Kalgoorlie, sky-high gold prices of more than $US1800 an ounce are encouraging companies to spend more, expand mines and dig deeper towards ore bodies previously impossible to extract at a profit. With gold fetching some of its best prices in history – and new technology available to find it – there’s rock in the ground that suddenly looks a lot more promising.
The coronavirus pandemic. Money-printing by central banks. Donald Trump’s trade wars. As dark clouds gather over world economies, gold is shining brighter than ever. The seductive yellow metal – prized by civilizations for thousands of years for its rarity and use in jewellery – tends to be most sought after these days by investors as a safe place to store wealth in periods of uncertainty. Today’s most turbulent times are no exception. This year alone, the gold price has been riding a 30 per cent rally, one of the most aggressive runs the market has seen, and surpassed $US2000 for the first time ever.
“You’ve got generations of investors that may not understand gold’s history, but they are learning about it very quickly,” explains Sandeep Biswas, chief executive of top Australian gold miner Newcrest. “It’s a fantastic investment in terms of hedging, particularly in bad times.”
Like other commodities, gold prices are based on “futures” contracts - agreements to buy and sell a quantity of the metal at a future date at an agreed-upon price. Gold futures have soared to record new highs this year, above $US2000 an ounce.
After the United States took the US dollar off the gold standard in the 1970s, the gold price fluctuated up but always reverted to an average of around $US400 per ounce.
The only major exception was between 1979 and 1980, when it reached a high of $US850 an ounce, as investors rushed to gold as a safe haven following the outbreak of the Soviet-Afghan war and the Iranian Revolution.
From 2018, gold embarks on a most extraordinary rise, sealing its spot as one of the world’s best-performing traditional assets. This is attributed to investor alarm at the potentially long-term severity of the COVID-19 crisis and the trillions of dollars being unleashed by central banks and world governments to revive their battered economies, which raises the risk of inflation.
Few countries stand to reap the benefits of this rally as much as Australia, where investment in gold exploration boomed to a record-high $1.2 billion over the 2019-20 financial year, gold production climbed to 328 tonnes and the value of gold exports reached $24 billion. If the chief economist’s latest forecasts come to pass, national gold exports will exceed $30 billion this year and Australia is on track to overtake China to become the world’s No. 1 gold producer.
While rarely making headlines like Australia’s larger commodity exports of iron ore, coal and gas, gold has a hallowed place in Australia’s resources sector. More than 165 years since the first gold rushes, gold remains part of the nation’s fabric, an important economic driver, and, as the Minerals Council of Australia’s Tania Constable explains, has an impact in every corner of the country. Even the ACT benefits, with workers from Canberra employed at the Dargues Reef gold mine just across the border in NSW. “When we started mining here, it was all about gold,” Constable says. “It’s been a key economic contributor since those early settlement days, and it’s the only commodity that touches every state and territory.”
Australia is estimated to have slightly less than 19 per cent of the world's gold resources, the most of any country, ahead of South Africa with 11 per cent, Russia with 10 per cent and the United States with about 6 per cent.
However, Australia's gold mine output of 315 tonnes accounts for 10 per cent of global production, second to China with 400 tonnes, but ahead of Russia (295 tonnes) and the US (210 tonnes).
At 2020’s annual Diggers and Dealers conference in WA’s Kalgoorlie, an overwhelming air of optimism surrounded the gold sector as the rising prices sent companies’ share prices soaring. South African-listed Gold Fields' stock has surged 116 per cent since January. The world No. 1 gold miner, New York Stock-listed Newmont, is up 43 per cent.
A long list of Australian miners are thriving right now, banking more profit for the same amount of work while previously unviable deposits are looking more attractive.
“With the Aussie dollar going down and the gold price going up their costs will generally stay the same, but their margins are getting bigger and bigger,” says Andrew Muir, an ex-geologist who now runs junior gold explorer NTM. “That’s why all of the share prices have been going up without doing anything different.”
After surging to more than $US2000 on inflation fears, gold prices began trending slightly lower after Pfizer, Moderna and AstraZeneca all reported vaccines with promising results in preventing COVID-19.
As Commonwealth Bank commodities analyst Vivekh Dhar explains, the precious metal is caught between stimulus and vaccine.
“For a decline in gold to be sustained it would require positive news on the vaccine front to offset the prospect of more US stimulus,” says Dhar. “We think it’s a little too early to make that call, particularly with increasing COVID?19 restrictions and a Biden presidency on the horizon.”
https://www.smh.com.au/interactive/2020/all-the-glitters-might-just-be-gold/index.html
************************************Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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December 08, 2020
The grim reality facing Australia if we get into a full-blown trade war with China: The price of most consumer items would DOUBLE
This is vastly overegged. It overlooks that most of the things we get from China could be sourced from elsewhere in Asia at little additional cost. Vietnam, for instance, has lower wage costs than China and has a rapidly expanding manufacturing sector
And Korea already sends us heaps. Their labour costs are high but that is largely counteracted by their high degree of automation. Expanding their offerings to us would be easy
Australians would be paying double the price for common imported consumer goods if Prime Minister Scott Morrison matched China's trade tariffs.
Without China, Australians would miss out on having affordable Apple iPhones, $49 air fryers from Kmart and even brand new SUVs for $20,000.
China, Australia's biggest trading partner, is the largest buyer of iron ore exports and is by far the largest supplier of imports.
The Communist power has been punishing Australia with punitive 80 per cent tariffs on barley and 200 per cent import taxes on wine, as the diplomatic spat over coronavirus extends into the eighth month.
Leading trade expert Professor Tim Harcourt, however, said Australian consumers would be the real victims if Australia retaliated by slapping import taxes on Chinese goods.
'I don't think it's a real good idea to get a tit-for-tat exchange because that could only be worse,' he told Daily Mail Australia.
Little more than three decades ago, imported electronic goods sold in Australia incurred 45 per cent tariffs.
Should Australia retaliate against China - with 80 per cent tariffs on imports - common consumer goods would almost double in price.
CIS’s phonics victory
Sinking scores, poor sentence construction, misspelling words. In recent years, the process of teaching school children to read and write has been such a disaster across the nation there was bound to be a correction. It has finally arrived, and I am pleased to say CIS has helped lead the way.
In a groundbreaking article in CIS’s Policy magazine in 2013, Jennifer Buckingham – a long-time education director at CIS, now a board member – along with professor Kevin Wheldall and Dr. Robyn Wheldall wrote a frank analysis of the problem and came to the conclusion that ideology was trumping evidence in government and university departments of education.
This article was followed by an event, “Why Jaydon Can’t Read: A Forum on Fixing Literacy” at which Jennifer Buckingham, Justine Ferrari and Tom Alegounarias exposed a worrisome fad in education. Schools had replaced time-honoured and proven methods of teaching reading with the “look-say” method or what has become known as a “whole language.” These new techniques, they argued, had no scientific basis and did not help children learn to read.
The result was that for several years Jennifer and the CIS education team, via research, media outlets and events, stressed the crucial role of phonics – the ability to recognise the relationships between letters and sounds – in learning to read.
As a consequence, we have achieved policy success. Last week NSW became the second state after South Australia to introduce compulsory phonics screening for Year 1 students. It follows the success of phonics in the Festival State. Whereas in 2018, just 43 per cent of Year 1 students met the expected achievement level in SA, this year 63 per cent of SA state school students demonstrated phonics skills at the benchmark level or higher.
No wonder the NSW education minister, Sarah Mitchell, has declared that the battle between reading by phonics and the whole language method is over and that phonics has won. For more, watch our 2018 CIS phonics debate in Sydney in front of nearly 500 delegates.
As the Sydney Morning Herald, The Australian and the Australian Financial Review have editorialised, phonics is the best way to detect quickly children who are failing at the first hurdle in school.
Another victory for common-sense education policy is the NSW government’s recent announcement to back the Teach for Australia program – joining Victoria, Western Australia, Tasmania, and Northern Territory. This is just the kind of initiative needed to bring flexible entry points to teaching and provide meaningful on-the-job training. As our education research fellow, Glenn Fahey penned at the Australian Financial Review in September, a higher quality teaching workforce is best achieved by boosting supply and competition – not restricting it by blocking new entrants and imposing rigid regulations.
Meanwhile, CIS continues to challenge education orthodoxies. In a recent paper that has attracted widespread media attention, Glenn, makes the case for reform of Australian school funding. More money has achieved declining student results, he argues, so it’s time to lift our educational performance by targeting teaching quality instead. Writing in the Australian Financial Review, Glenn argues that to properly marry resourcing with higher quality, we must bring the school workforce out of the dark ages and embrace – rather than eschew – market-based approaches.
Email from: Tom Switzer CIS cis@cis.org.au
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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7 December, 2020
Another white "Aborigine"
Indigenous rendition of Advance Australia Fair leaves rugby fans with 'goosebumps' as every Wallabies player joins in. Many claimed it was the best rendition of the national anthem they'd ever heard
Proud Wiradjuri woman Olivia Fox sung the Australian anthem in the Indigenous Eora language before the Tri Nations rugby union game between the Wallabies and Argentina on Saturday night.
Every player from the Wallabies learned the words to the Indigenous verse and sung along, leaving fans touched.
Saturday's national anthem is the first time the joint-language song was performed at an international sporting event in Australia.
It is understood Ms Fox held practice sessions with the Wallabies players to ensure they knew all the words for the performance, to make sure the moment received respect.
Rugby Union fans were positive about the national anthem, with many viewers welcoming the change.
Butterfly Foundation centre to treat eating disorders shut amid surge in cases
Eating disorders are often a serious mental illness and can easily cause death. They can be very hard to cure and residential care is sometimes the only thing that works. Telling people to "buck up" does nothing for any mental illness.
Government care for the illness is however sparse so one would think it deserves more priority. Why not redeploy a few bureaucats to provide the services needed?
Sufferers are often people who otherwise have a lot of potential. Below is a lady -- Lexi Crouch --who recovered and who now helps others
Australia’s first ever residential facility for treating eating disorders can’t open its doors despite a fifty per cent increase in crisis calls about the conditions during COVID-19.
The Butterfly Foundation’s new Wandi Nerida facility was built using a $6 million federal government grant but does not have the $2.5 million it needs to staff the centre.
Nearly a million Australians suffer from eating disorders like anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa and binge eating.
And during the pandemic, the number of people contacting The Butterfly Foundation’s support line and webchat service for help had soared by 50 per cent during COVID.
Girls and boys as young a seven were developing the conditions that have a devastating impact and can lead to them taking their own lives.
The centre on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast was to pilot a new holistic care approach where patients from right across the country would spend around two months living in the 13-bed facility.
Around 50 staff, including psychiatrists, psychologists, dietitians and other health professionals, were to deliver them round the clock care.
The Butterfly Foundation said an application for funding support for the staff was rejected by the Queensland State Government during the recent state election campaign and fundraising activities were not possible due to COVID-19 restrictions.
The centre is even more essential than ever because sufferers are now unable to travel to the US for comprehensive residential-style care.
More than 200 people from around Australia are already on a waiting list to use the centre if it ever opens.
“We’re after two and a half million (dollars) from this fundraising campaign to get us up and running and our doors open and so we can fund individuals who don’t have any capacity to pay (for the care),” Butterfly Foundation CEO Kevin Barrow said.
“Eating disorders are quite severe and complex mental illnesses and actually have one of the highest mortality rates and also have a very high suicide rate.”
A Deloitte study found the total social and economic cost of eating disorders in Australia was $69.7 billion.
Their burden in terms of lost years of life is higher than that of depression and anxiety combined.
Of those with eating disorders: 47 per cent have Binge Eating Disorder, 12 per cent have Bulimia Nervosa, 3 per cent have Anorexia Nervosa and 38 per cent have other eating disorders.
Recovery from an eating disorder can take between one to six years, while up to 25 per cent of sufferers experience a severe and long-term illness.
Early detection and intervention is the key to a good recovery, Mr Barrow said.
“We do know that if you intervene early with a psychologist, dietitian, psychiatrist and general practitioner or working with the family outcomes can be very, very good (for around three in four people),” Mr Barrow said.
“We also know on the converse that if you do nothing and the illness is allowed to stay around for a period of time, it becomes harder and harder to manage,” he said.
'Zones of aspiration': NSW Schools to be grilled if students fail to meet performance targets
The NSW Department of Education will intervene in public schools that fail to meet performance targets in priority areas such as HSC and NAPLAN results, attendance, wellbeing and whether students are studying or can find work after they graduate.
The targets will require department executives to take more responsibility for school outcomes after the state government admitted its decision eight years ago to hand decision-making to principals left it with little influence over how schools spent their money or made their educational decisions.
Education Minister Sarah Mitchell said everyone in the education system, right up to the department's secretary, needed to shoulder responsibility for student success.
"The School Success Model provides the transparency and support mechanisms for schools to successfully manage their record funding and make decisions that will benefit their students," Ms Mitchell said. "[It] will champion our best schools and help those who are struggling."
If the school exceeds its target, the department will identify the factors driving that success and see if it can export them to other schools. If it fails to meet it, the department will review its teaching practices and look at whether the school's money might be better spent.
The achievement benchmarks drew fire when they were first described to principals as stretch targets, so they have been rebadged as "zones of aspiration” in HSC and NAPLAN, student growth, phonics, attendance, wellbeing, Aboriginal education and post-school pathways.
Department secretary Mark Scott said each school’s target was determined by looking at how its data compares with 40 statistically-similar schools, then discussing that particular school’s challenges with the principal.
"The schools agree to their targets,” Mr Scott said in a recent interview with consultancy McKinsey & Company. "There can be some healthy debate and discussion.”
The department already keeps the attendance, HSC and NAPLAN data that it will use to measure school performance. Primary schools will be set targets for achievement in the year 1 phonics check, which becomes compulsory from next year.
The wellbeing target will be measured by a bi-yearly survey known as Tell Them From Me, which looks at students’ sense of belonging, their relationships with teachers and peers, and their experiences of bullying.
Pathways targets will be based on data to be collected from next year showing whether students are studying, working or unemployed five years after they leave school.
The head of the Secondary Principals Council, Craig Petersen, said school leaders have been told that the policy is intended to ensure the department shoulders more responsibility for supporting schools.
"Previously, if I wasn’t meeting my literacy targets, it was my responsibility,” Mr Petersen said. "What’s being proposed, is now the department is saying [to its own executives], what are you doing to support that school? Right up to the secretary, is what’s been explained to us.
"If that’s what happens, and it’s a supportive process, then there’s merit in that.”
Principals have already been discussing targets with their regional directors. "Some are happy, some think they can do better, others are saying we’ve got such a high level of disadvantage, even the lower level of aspiration will be very challenging for us,” Mr Petersen said.
However, Mr Petersen had reservations about some of the data that will be used for the measurements. "Some schools find Tell them From Me to be of great value,” he said. "But particularly in secondary schools, we find the completion rate too varied.
"We’re concerned it is not yet fit for purpose, particularly if you are going to mandate it as a target-setting tool.”
Robyn Evans, the president of the Primary Principals Association, said most schools were already striving to excel.
"To make that announcement at this time of year is a tricky one, but that’s our job, that’s our role,” she said. "We have expert teachers in our schools, and we will deliver. Principals are striving for that continually.”
In 2012, the Coalition introduced Local Schools, Local Decisions to allow principals to make financial and educational choices that best suited their students. It also axed support staff within the department who travelled to schools to provide help.
The government has admitted the decision had "unintended consequences", such as making it harder to centrally track increasing amounts of Gonski money, and hindering its ability to intervene when schools struggled.
The School Success Model will replace Local Schools, Local Decisions.
Government poised to banish 'outrageous' disappointment fees in family law
The federal government is poised to ban the "outrageous" fees sometimes charged by barristers when family law cases are unexpectedly settled early, which can be as high as $12,000 a day and are particularly common in Sydney.
It will likely form part of a suite of family law reforms to be examined next year after the proposed merger of the Family and Federal courts, which passed the lower house last week and is now before the Senate.
Barristers can charge cancellation fees - or "disappointment fees", as they are also known - when cases settle early. The fees are supposed to compensate for time the barrister had blocked out of their schedule expecting to spend in court.
Family Court judge Robert Benjamin lashed out at the practice in a 2018 judgment, saying the fees enabled barristers "to be paid for doing nothing".
Two federal parliamentary inquiries have heard the fees are especially prevalent in Sydney, even though the NSW Bar Association told a Senate hearing that it opposes them in principle.
Attorney-General Christian Porter seized on those remarks, saying it was "promising to see" the NSW Bar opposed the fees and giving a strong indication he would ban or cap them.
"It is my view that disappointment fees are outrageous," Mr Porter told The Sun-Herald. "The focus of the system, and of those who are supposed to be helping families through this process, should be to make sure parties can separate as cheaply, quickly and efficiently as possible."
Liberal senator Sarah Henderson, who has pursued the matter at inquiries, said disappointment fees in family law court cases were "a rort" and should be banned. They also discouraged clients from settling cases because they still have to pay much of the costs of going to trial, she said.
There is confusion about the legal fraternity's exact position on the fees. In October, the NSW Bar senior vice-president Michael McHugh told a Senate inquiry the Bar opposed cancellation fees. He added there were "swings and roundabouts" because "if people put a month or two weeks away in their diary and the case settles on the first day, they're left without work".
"People, particularly the more senior practitioners, cannot just pick up another trial the next day," he said.
Senator Henderson rejected that argument. "If a trial does not proceed, any barrister worth his or her salt has plenty of other work to go on with," she said.
In a statement to The Sun-Herald, Mr McHugh said his evidence at the inquiry had been disrupted by a Senate division. He noted barristers could only charge a "reservation fee" if it was permitted in the contract, and they were rarely utilised.
But if a barrister couldn't obtain alternative work, "the commercial opportunity to generate fees which would otherwise have been generated has been lost," he said. Therefore cancellation fees "seek to promote access to justice by offering improved certainty and comfort to clients that a barrister will be exclusively available to them for the duration of the matter".
At a separate parliamentary inquiry into family law in March, the Law Council of Australia's chair of family law Paul Doolan explained why disappointment fees were more common in Sydney.
"There is more money in Sydney," he said. "The money ultimately leads to very complicated arguments in some cases about tax, about valuations, about control of assets. Interventions by third-party companies in the Family Court happen quite regularly in the Sydney registry. It's a different practice, I must say, to other cities."
Patrick Parkinson, the outgoing chair of the University of Queensland's law school, said the fees were typically charged by senior counsel who were "in great demand", especially in Sydney.
"It's widely regarded by other parts of the Bar as an unethical practice," he said. It was fair to charge for work done in preparation for the case, he said, but the fees must be proportionate.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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6 December, 2020
A SPECIAL Forces soldier who deployed to Afghanistan seven times says the Australian Defence Force "created the beast'' by sending men out to kill "every other day or night.''
I have always found "General" Campbell rather loathsome and the story below reinforces that. He is a bureaucrat where a proper military leader was needed
Wes H Hennessey CSM, 48, from Toowoomba in Queensland, said he felt compelled to defend the Special Forces community in the wake of the Brereton report, which referred 19 current and former soldiers to police for investigation over war crimes including murder.
The soldier, who uses his former protected identity initial H, said he was not investigated by the Brereton inquiry.
He said he did not condone the actions alleged in the report, including “bloodings’’, where rookie solders were ordered by their superiors to execute prisoners for their first kill.
He said those found to have committed war crimes “should be held accountable, 100 per cent.’’
But he said the entire Special Forces community had been smeared by the alleged actions of a few, and that senior leadership within the ADF – who trained the Special Forces soldiers and encouraged the “can-do’’ attitudes of its top operators – were not being held accountable.
“To me, they created the beast,’’ he said.
“They needed the capacity, they needed us to be the strategic tool for them. They referred to us as the scalpel and sometimes the sledgehammer.’’
H, a former 2nd Commando Regiment Warrant Officer who joined the military at 17 and spent 18 years in the Special Forces, was deployed in Afghanistan seven times, including two back-to-back deployments totalling 13 months in 2013-2014.
He said he was mentally fatigued by the end and there had been numerous operations in which “we were out killing people every other day or night.’’
H, who left the Army in 2014, decided to step out of the shadows and join the national debate when he became infuriated by the decision of Chief of the Defence Force General Angus Campbell to accept the recommendation of Assistant Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force, Justice Paul Brereton, to recommend the revocation of the Meritorious Unit Citation.
The citation has been awarded to around 3000 people who served in the Special Operations Task Group during Operation Slipper in Afghanistan between 2007-2013.
Gen. Campbell has since back-pedalled and said no decision had been made, following public concerns expressed by Prime Minister Scott Morrison.
H is also campaigning for improvements to mental health services available to veterans’ and their families, and says he wants to ensure ADF leadership figures were also held accountable, where appropriate.
He said the decision to publicly release the report had opened the door for disinformation campaigns such as the one launched by China this week, where a senior diplomat tweeted a distasteful faked image of an Australian soldier about to cut the throat of a terrified Afghani child.
“What you (Gen. Campbell) have done, and how you have done it has affected every Australian,’’ he said. “This should have remained classified. “It’s – allegedly – a very small group. Fix the small group.’’
He questioned how Justice Brereton and Gen. Campbell could so categorically state that the incidents that occurred were not in the “heat of battle’’ or “fog of war’’. “How does he psychologically assess the guys’ state of mind on the ground?’’ he asked.
“I know how I was. I was cooked. But if you’d asked me at the time you would have got me saying ‘I’m fine, good to go, no problem’.
“Part of our coping mechanism to protect ourselves is compartmentalising. When you’re in the vortex, you’re in the vortex. It’s not a job, it’s a lifestyle and when you’re in it, you have to be focused on it 100 per cent every single minute.’’
H was 16 and working on a sheep farm near Longreach when he lodged his papers to join the Australian Defence Force.
In 1990, at 17, he was accepted, and began a military career that saw him posted to Iraq, Afghanistan, East Timor, Somalia and Solomon Islands.
“I always wanted to join the army. Ever since I was young, I wanted to join the military,’’ he said.
In 1998 he joined the Commandos at Holsworthy and embarked on a Special Forces career that ultimately saw him awarded for Exceptionally Valorous Achievement as an Assault Team member in 2006, Exceptionally Meritorious Achievement whilst deployed in 2008 and Conspicuous Service in the 2nd Commando Regiment over an extended period of time in 2009.
He does not pretend he was perfect. He was investigated over a prisoner death some years ago. No action was taken. He was charged with disobedience of a general order after unauthorised ammunition was found in his locker back in Australia. He has upset ADF leadership several times, including as recently as a few months ago, when he took part in the Life on the Line podcast for veterans, and, identified only as H, revealed supervision had been so lacking in Afghanistan he was able to freelance with other western allied forces.
His separation from the ADF in 2014 was acrimonious – he was in a bad head space, exhausted, and upset at the munitions charge (to which he pleaded guilty).
The seemingly-endless cycle of rotations took its toll. He said he had become addicted to combat. “I recognise now I should not have deployed. It was my fault. The only place I wanted to be in the world was in Afghanistan, in combat.
“Now, the CDF, how do you know what was going on in our minds when we didn’t know? We were cooked.
“I must have done 100 psychologist interviews. I can outsmart them, we all can. We know what to say and what boxes to tick.’’
By 2014, H was done. He put in his discharge papers. He struggled to reintegrate and made bad choices. He drove his car like a maniac. He looked for risk. There were addictions. His marriage to the mother of his children broke down. He worked in the private sector but couldn’t settle down.
In 2019, his stock horse Tobi almost did what the Taliban couldn’t in Afghanistan. She kicked him off while he was working some cattle at a yard outside Toowoomba. His 100kg frame landed heavily, and he broke seven ribs. As his lungs filled with blood, he was rushed by helicopter to Brisbane where he spent two weeks in ICU before beginning a long, slow recovery.
On his left hand, a new tattoo depicts a compass, and the word Life. He looks at it every day to remind himself of his moral compass, and the need to make good choices as he rebuilds his civilian life.
H said he was not defending any individual. “I am not defending any of them. I am defending the Special Forces community, the meritorious and valorous work we have done. Members of the Special Operations Task Group who went there over 10 years and did thousands and thousands of operation without error.
“(But) mistakes happen, we are human and it is war. We are being over-judged, from a safe distance.’’
Sister of murder victim Anne-Marie Culleton launches petition to keep killer rapists in jail
The release on parole of a rapist murderer could spark a national review of sentencing laws with at least three states prepared to look at toughening sentences for domestic and family homicides, in a move that could go before the next State Attorneys-General gathering.
From her home on the NSW north coast Eileen Culleton has launched a national petition calling for law reform to remove parole options for rapist killers after the murder of her sister Anne-Marie Culleton.
In it she lists examples from various states of sex offenders getting parole and going on to reoffend including murder and has already attracted thousands of signatures in support.
Anne-Marie was 20 and living in Darwin in 1988 when in the night of February 22 her neighbour Jonathan Peter Bakewell broke into the flat where she was sleeping before torturing, raping and choking her to death.
He was sentenced to life in 1989 but given parole in 2016, breached parole and was jailed again four times before being released from a South Australian jail again in October last year.
SA Parole Board chairwoman Frances Nelson QC declared at the time he was unlikely to reoffend and the laws in that state were clear.
Eileen Culleton petitioned the South Australian authorities for justice for her sister but failing there has now turned to the public with a national campaign for law reform where life sentences with no parole exist for sexual assault/murders for other potential victims and families.
And help could come from NSW, Queensland and Victorian authorities with NSW Attorney-General and Minister for the Prevention of Domestic Violence Mark Speakman agreeing laws had to match community expectations and Queensland Attorney-General and Minister for Justice Shannon Fentiman saying she would listen.
The Victorian Government too yesterday said it was on board to participate in a national discussion.
Speaking about the national Culleton petition, Mr Speakman said moves were already afoot in NSW to address perceived shortcomings.
“I could never fully comprehend the ongoing anguish suffered by those whose loved ones are murdered and violated in this way. I recognise that no punishment would ever be enough to erase the grief of these terrible crimes,” he said, adding even though life sentences existed, some courts retained the power to impose lesser sentences.
“Because of my concern that sentences for murder in NSW may not be consistent with community expectations, I asked the NSW Sentencing Council to prepare a review of sentencing for homicides, including domestic and family violence homicides.”
That report due soon is expected to go to all state attorneys general.
Ms Fentiman said she was committed to working with her Corrective Services and the police minister on sentencing and parole “to ensure we have a fair and just legal system”.
“And I would welcome a discussion with Eileen Culleton on what more we could do here in Queensland,” she said.
Victorian Attorney-General Jill Hennessy agreed sentences had to reflect safety of Victorians.
“What happened to Anne-Marie Culleton was a horrendous act – the effects of which are still felt by her family and friends every day,” she said.
“Every woman has the right to live her life without fear – that’s why we’ve strengthened our laws to protect victims and hold perpetrators to account. This included creating a ‘standard sentence’ scheme which increased sentences for 12 of Victoria’s most serious crimes, including murder, rape and sexual offences involving children, as well as increasing penalties for manslaughter.
“Too many women continue to be murdered in Australia by men intent on robbing them of their dignity, and our sentencing laws must recognise this.”
Federal Attorney-General Christian Porter said a meeting of attorneys general could be the forum to raise such issues.
“The Attorney-General is aware of the petition and the sad history attached to it,” a spokesman for Mr Porter said yesterday.
“As murder-rape offences are state/territory offences, it’s appropriate that any push for reform in this area is driven by state and territory jurisdictions.”
Mrs Culleton said all states should be concerned with “life” not literally meaning life in most circumstances.
“It is a state issue but violence against women is a national crisis,” she said yesterday.
“It just needs to go on the agenda for discussion, the public don’t realise that life doesn’t necessarily mean life.
“One in five women in Australia are sexually assaulted and one woman a week is murdered. A national crisis demands a national response. We need national laws to send a strong message in society and help to reduce all violent crimes against women,” she said.
She added the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) recommended Australia adopt federal legislation to better address violence against women.
“There is little I can do about Bakewell but I can certainly fight for law reform to prevent more women being raped and murdered,” she said.
Fatal distraction sees too many children die in hot cars
I must say I know about this. I was once driving little Suzie to her school on my way to where I was working.
I was miles past the school when I realized that little Suzie was still sitting there beside me, saying nothing but enjoying the ride. If you can forget a beloved child under those circumstances how can anybody be free of such an error?
The death of a Townsville toddler has horrified Queenslanders but forgetting a child in a car can happen to anyone, writes Kylie Lang.
The terrible tragedy of a three-year-old girl dying in a hot car has justifiably horrified Queenslanders.
And it’s not as if this incident is a one-off – too many precious innocents have perished this way.
But we don’t know all the facts, so instead of vilifying mother-of-four Laura Peverill on social media where everyone’s an expert, people need to calm the hell down.
Peverill, 37, and her new boyfriend Aaron Hill, 29, were charged with manslaughter after allegedly failing to realise Rylee Rose Black was locked in a car for several hours on a scorching Townsville day.
The couple was allegedly watching Netflix while the child died in Peverill’s Toyota Prado, parked in the driveway, on November 27 when ambient temperatures soared to 32.8C.
Horrendously, inside that vehicle, the temperature could have been as high as 75C, using data from an RACQ survey.
A more agonising and terrifying death is difficult to imagine. That poor little angel.
More details should emerge when Peverill and Hill, both on bail, front Townsville Magistrates Court on December 14, but police have ruled out drugs and alcohol.
For now, we are left shaking our heads and asking why. How could anyone forget their own child? How is this even possible?
Neuroscience offers some clues.
David Diamond is a professor of neurobiology at the University of South Florida, and a renowned expert on memory.
He likens memory to an imperfect machine. If we can leave our mobile phone in a shop, we can potentially leave our child in a car, he postures.
It has to do with the complexity of the brain, and not simply whether or not we are “good” parents.
While our prefrontal cortex thinks and analyses on the spot and our hippocampus makes memories, our basal ganglia is primarily concerned with forming habits and routine movement.
Professor Diamond says in instances where the basal ganglia rises up and takes over – typically when we are under great stress, sleep deprived or acutely distracted causing the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus to be overcome – we move into autopilot.
It’s why we might drive from A to B without paying attention to how we got there.
I’ve done it, and I bet you have too.
When my son was small, I once forgot to pick him up from daycare. I got all the way home – replaying work dramas in my exhausted head – before realising there was no babbling toddler in the back.
Another time I forgot to drop him off, arriving at work in the morning with him still strapped in his car seat. I thought what a goose I was, and sheepishly called the centre to advise he’d be late.
Psychologist Michael Carr-Gregg says it is common for people to operate in a “state of flow”, blithely carrying out routine tasks while focusing on other things.
Dr Carr-Gregg once put his child’s safety seat on the roof of his car. “The child wasn’t in it, but I drove off with the bloody thing on top; I had no memory at all of not putting it in the back seat,” he admits.
There but for the grace of God go we.
In 2013, a Perth father’s apparent lapse of memory led to utter tragedy. The man arrived at his child’s daycare centre one afternoon to collect his 11-month-old son only to be told the child never arrived that morning.
The baby’s lifeless body was found in the back seat of his Honda Civic, and frantic attempts by staff to revive the child failed. Police said the death was not suspicious, and the man was not charged.
In a chillingly similar case in the US, a father was acquitted of manslaughter after forgetting to drop his 21-month-old son to daycare, inadvertently leaving him to bake to death in the car. Miles Harrison fainted when the verdict was read out, and said while his wife had forgiven him, he could not forgive himself.
In the US, more than 800 children have died in hot cars since 1998, and over half of those deaths have been accidental, according to the National Safety Council.
In Australia, more than 5000 children are rescued from hot cars each year, and charity Kidsafe describes cars as “unconventional ovens”.
For more than 20 years, American non-profit group KidsandCars.org has campaigned for child sensory technology to be mandated in new cars.
In a welcome move earlier this year, the House of Representatives passed the Hot Cars Act, which now awaits Senate approval and presidential sign off.
While Hyundai has already introduced motion sensors to detect children and pets, many other manufacturers are slow to act.
In February, Australia’s car safety rating body ANCAP (Australasia New Car Assessment Program) said such vital technology would be required for cars to get the highest safety rating by authorities here and in Europe from 2022.
Some detection systems are apparently so low cost they could become standard in all vehicles. Manufacturers have no excuse for dragging the chain on this.
But at the same time, people need to accept the reality of fatal distraction.
Leaving kids in cars is not something that happens only to “other” people or “bad” parents.
While it is understandable to rage at the tragic death of innocents, human fallibility suggests no one is immune.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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5 December, 2020
Woke women and the captured culture
The latest bulletin from Bettina Arndt
Cracks are emerging in the TEQSA-based operation running the campus processes and I’m hopeful we might soon have the means to blow the whole thing apart.
But in the meantime, I’m helping two young men who’ve faced biased, deeply flawed campus investigations. It’s astonishing how the university administrators make up rules as they go along, banning accused students from completing courses, throwing them out of colleges – and all without any proper authority. Since universities across Australia allow convicted criminals to study on campus there’s no legal justification for excluding a student who has simply been accused.
Another glaring problem is that the university regulations apply to both staff and students and as employers, universities do have a duty of care to staff. But students pay fees and therefore are customers of a business. Businesses have no right to control the private behaviour of their customers. That shoots a pretty big hole in TEQSA’s justification of the whole regulatory mechanism, doesn’t it?
Woke women are killing marriage and dating
Now something more cheerful for the start of the silly season, as we limp to the end of this annus horribilis.
Next Tues morning (Dec 8, 9.30 am AEDT) I’ve lined up a chat on thinkspot with American marriage coach Suzanne Venker who recently posted an article suggesting women needed to lower their unrealistic expectations of marriage. She was swamped with angry abuse which hardly surprised this outspoken woman who has made a name for herself by telling the truth about the poisonous influence of feminism on current relationships. Read the recent article she wrote about this issue for The Washington Examiner.
Suzanne argues that America’s values have shifted dramatically—away from love and family, toward an unhealthy individualism. This is especially true for women who for decades have been taught to be independent at all costs and to "never depend on a man." The result is that when women do marry (as most still do), their marriages become mired in conflict. You can't succeed at something you've been groomed to de-prioritize and even resent, Suzanne suggests.
I’m on the same page since I once spent five years working as an online dating coach, struggling to persuade many of my female clients to get real. Here’s the link if you want to sign up and listen to our discussion – you’ll see the times on Monday Dec 7 for the American audience. And thinkspot will post a recording after the event. We’d love some questions or comments posted in advance.
Cate Blanchett plays Schlafly through gritted teeth.
Funnily enough, Suzanne Venker is the niece of Phyllis Schlafly, the conservative activist who successfully defeated the 1970’s feminist push supporting the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). Schlafly was the Trump of her time, winning battle after battle despite being despised by all the liberal establishment.
It was pretty amusing watching Cate Blanchett portray this formidable woman in the recent television series, Mrs America, based on the clash between Schlafly and the second wave feminists like Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug. Blanchett does a great job, even though Blanchett’s woke views mean she no doubt despises everything Schlafly stood for.
Naturally the producers can’t resist rewriting history, including all sorts of distortions in the portrayal of Schlafly and downplaying her very real achievements. Here Suzanne sets the record straight about her powerful aunt, making the point that now that Schlafly is dead “feminists can rewrite history to their heart's content, and few will stop them, in part because so few people alive today know the truth.”
Whilst Mrs America gives the impression that the Steinem and her cronies were an unstoppable force, in fact Schlafly won. The ERA never made it into law. I’d recommend you read Suzanne’s blog on how that happened, given there’s no chance of the true history getting a run in the current climate.
There was still a certain pleasure to be gained from watching the show struggle to present this admirable, powerful woman who would have been a feminist hero had she not batted for the wrong team. It’s very similar to the portrayal of the formidable Margaret Thatcher in the latest cringe-worthy season of The Crown. How the woke crowd hates women who don’t toe the leftist, feminist line!
Grumpy old woman
The woke capture of the entertainment industry is turning me into a very grumpy old woman, prone to yelling at my television set and giving up on endless movies and shows.
Recently a friend recommended an Italian crime drama, Petra, now showing on SBS. Here was the usual troubled heroine, a beautiful but clearly damaged police inspector. When Petra gets to lead a rape investigation, she is confronted by an obnoxious young sex offender who, during their interview, taunts her in the most sexually provocative, foul manner. And how does she respond? She sexually humiliates him. Forces him to stand and strip naked, exposing his genitals right in front of her sneering face and then taunts him until tears pour down his cheeks – all in front of an older male colleague.
I assume we are supposed to applaud. There is an interview with the actress Paula Cortellesi where she expresses delight at playing a woman with the “courage to free herself from female clichés, first and foremost the need to please others.” She clearly delighted in playing this brave new woman who beats men at their own game.
I thought the scene was actually a telling example of the latest twist in #MeToo, as women take vengeance on men by descending to their very worst behaviour.
It’s driving me crazy that every second novel I read now includes lurid descriptions of men’s depravity, child abuse, domestic violence, evil man after evil man. I turfed the latest highly recommended work after wading through chapter after chapter on racial hatred only to discover the nice new boyfriend of the main character was trans. Enough already!
Do me a favour and send in your recommendations of wonderful, meaty novels, movies, television show that avoid any hint of this preachy, self-righteous PC culture. I’d love some stimulating, intelligent entertainment for the summer break.
Aussie men suffering coercive control
Finally, I am sure many of you know UK researcher Deborah Powney, whom I have interviewed previously. Deborah is now continuing her excellent work on male victims of domestic violence with a new survey on coercive control.
This new ragbag category of abuse – which includes emotional, psychological, financial and sexual means of tormenting a partner - is being set up as the latest weapon in the feminist armoury used to destroy men. In theory, the coercive control can be practised by either gender but the UK experience has shown only men tend to be charged, given men’s reluctance to define themselves as victims and the reluctance of police and the legal system to believe those who do.
It’s really important that as many men as possible fill in this survey which will provide proper data proving men suffer similar manipulation from their partners. We need this data to resist new Australian laws set to be introduced in NSW next year. Currently the NSW inquiry is only hearing from the proponents of this change in our laws.
Here’s the survey – which has already attracted 1250 participants, including 366 Australians. Deborah has sent through some fascinating initial findings:
45% said they were always/often threatened with false allegations
69% said partners controlled whom they were allowed to see
60% had phones/social media monitored
52% said partners refused to work
49% of men said ex-partners withheld contact with children unless demands for money were met
60% had sex withheld as punishment always/often
Well, the last point hardly comes as a surprise, given my previous research on sex-starved husbands. Men having to grovel for the sex is an excellent illustration of women asserting coercive control. Can’t see that argument getting public traction any time soon, can you?
Bettina Arndt newsletter: newsletter@bettinaarndt.com.au
Shameful police crookedness in the Northern Territory
Concealing exculpatory evidence is a serious offence. The cop concerned should be fired
Indigenous man bailed after Darwin Local Court shown CCTV footage police said did not exist
An Indigenous man who spent more than 100 days in prison has been released on bail after a Darwin court heard CCTV footage shows he is not responsible for an assault he was charged over.
Police and prosecutors had both denied the footage existed, prompting the man's lawyer, Patrick McNally, to subpoena a copy from the casino.
Zarak Bolga, 44, was charged with aggravated assault and breaching a domestic violence order and then jailed on August 25 after his partner was assaulted outside Darwin's Mindil Beach Casino.
At a bail hearing on Thursday, Mr McNally tendered CCTV to the Darwin Local Court that he says shows an unidentified woman carried out the attack.
But in a November 23 email read to the court, prosecutor Lee Campbell told Mr McNally the incident was not captured on camera. "There is no casino CCTV available. Their CCTV does not cover the area outside the casino and they wipe their footage every two weeks," the email read.
The court heard there had been two previous court orders, issued by Judge Greg Macdonald and Chief Judge Elizabeth Morris, compelling police to produce the footage.
"Numerous attempts were made to get the police to, I say, do their job and obtain this material — including orders by Judge Macdonald — which haven't been complied with, and further orders by Her Honour the Chief Judge as well," Mr McNally said.
"This is a matter where orders of the court have not been complied with and there's been attempts made by members of the police to, I say, defy orders of the court," Mr McNally said.
Constable summonsed to court
The court heard Mr Bolga went to Royal Darwin Hospital with the victim after the incident and was later arrested. He initially applied for bail in August but was refused.
Before CCTV of the assault was played to the court, Local Court Judge Michael Carey asked: "Does this footage show females attacking the victim?"
"It does, Your Honour," Mr McNally replied.
The court also heard that during his arrest, Mr Bolga told police: "I didn't do it. Get the CCTV at the casino; it'll show what happened".
Mr McNally requested the police officer in charge of the investigation, Constable Jessica Speckman, be summoned to the court on Monday to "explain how this matter has come so far, such that this man has been remanded since the 25th of August".
"I have very, very serious issues with the conduct of the investigation and the prosecution in this matter," Mr McNally said.
"The question is: is [Constable Speckman] lazy and did she not ask [for CCTV], or is she lying?"
Judge Carey suggested Constable Speckman may have been told by staff members at the casino that the CCTV did not exist.
Prosecutors did not speak at Mr Bolga's bail hearing on Thursday.
"Looks like the Crown case is in very serious trouble," Judge Carey said.
Constable Speckman was ordered to attend court to give evidence.
The case will return to court on Monday, December 7.
A tough new policy will see mobile phones banned in Australian primary schools – but is it fair?
Mobile phones will be banned in primary schools in South Australia from 2021 under a new policy to curb distraction in class.
Under the draft policy students are allowed to bring their phones to school but are not allowed to use them - with the schools choosing if the devices are stored in lockers, bags, with a teacher, or in the school office.
SA's ban would leave Queensland as the only state where students are allowed to use their phones at school.
Some parents welcomed the move saying phones only distract from learning, but some argue phones are too essential to ban.
The restriction does not apply to bring-your-own laptops or tablets which are used for digital learning in class.
The change will also only affect the state's primary schools and will not cover high schools or private schools - which decide their own rules on digital devices.
'Such a great idea. Social media is a huge problem with bullying and lessening the access to phones during school hours will make a huge difference' one parent posted online about the policy.'
'For sure, primary school kids do not need phones at school. Collect them at the end of the day if they are absolutely necessary,' another person said.
Some people were not as convinced though saying that there are reasons children should be allowed to have their phones.
'When my daughter had hers I used to text her if I was running a bit late or start walking, I also used to text her where I was parked,' one parent argued. 'Kids need to have the ability to stay in touch with parents. Specially in these times.' one person said.
'There are children who actually need to use devices to help them out. Sight impaired or hearing impaired children count on these devices to communicate,' added another.
Yet another person questioned how the procedure would even work if dozens of students are handing similar phones into the teacher or office it would take 'an hour' just to sort out who owns each phone.
South Australia is one of the last states in Australia to move to ban phones in primary school classrooms with New South Wales, Western Australia, Victoria, and Tasmania introducing policies in 2020.
The draft policy will be released for consultation with primary schools before the 2021 school year.
Untested war crime allegations let China attack us: Liberal MP Hastie
Liberal MP Andrew Hastie has lashed the Australian Defence Force for publicly releasing allegations that special forces soldiers murdered children in Afghanistan, saying the disclosure has allowed China to malign Australian troops.
Mr Hastie, a former captain with the SAS who served in Afghanistan, also slammed social media giant Twitter for not deleting a fabricated photo posted by a Chinese government official showing an Australian soldier slitting the throat of a child.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison on Thursday launched a direct appeal to Chinese Australians for unity, as Chinese social media sites censored his messages and allies rally around the Australian government.
"Any Australian of Chinese heritage in Australia, I want only to feel as valued as any other Australian," the Prime Minister said.
The Chinese government has sought to capitalise on the release of a report by NSW Court of Appeal Justice Paul Brereton, which found Australian special forces soldiers allegedly committed 39 murders in Afghanistan.
A report produced by defence consultant Samantha Crompvoets, attached to the redacted version of the Brereton report, also contained allegations that two 14-year-old boys suspected of being Taliban sympathisers had their throats slit.
"Crompvoets detailed unproven rumours of Australian soldiers murdering Afghan children ... the Brereton report neither rules these rumours in or out. So why are they out in the open?" Mr Hastie said in a speech to Federal Parliament on Thursday afternoon.
Mr Hastie said the release of the allegations had "undermined public confidence in the process and allowed the People's Republic of China to malign our troops".
He said he was "particularly angry" at the leak of the Crompvoets report to The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald two weeks prior to the release of the Brereton report.
"I am unhappy that the author of the report appeared on 60 Minutes four days prior to the release of the Brereton report," Mr Hastie said. "I also disagree with the decision to release the Crompvoets report unredacted, alongside the redacted Brereton report."
Chinese social media site WeChat on Wednesday night blocked Mr Morrison's response to the Chinese government, after he said Australia was dealing with the war crimes allegations against Australian special forces in an "honest and transparent way".
Twitter has refused to remove the original tweet from China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, arguing it did not breach its rules because it was commentary from a government official. But WeChat, which is partly controlled by the Chinese government, moved swiftly on Wednesday to remove Mr Morrison's message, stating it contained "non-objective facts" and fabricated historical issues.
Mr Morrison reiterated his statement in person on Thursday and called for unity, stating Chinese Australians had played a critical role in Australia's health and economic success in managing COVID-19.
Mr Hastie said the tweet was "enabled by Silicon Valley social media oligarchs in the United States".
He also directly took on critics of Mr Morrison, including veteran broadcaster Alan Jones, saying the Prime Minister had "stood up for the ADF".
Mr Jones on Thursday demanded Mr Morrison apologise to Australia for his response to the Brereton inquiry, accusing the Prime Minister of giving China an opening to attack Australian troops.
"I, too, found the tweet by the People's Republic of China to be a repugnant slur on the serving men and women of the Australian Defence Force," Mr Hastie said.
"Our Diggers don't ask for much. They want strong leadership and a boss who has their back: the Prime Minister called out this slur. And the PM has also consistently defended their conduct and integrity since Brereton report was released."
Chinese-language media outlets in Australia, some of which are controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, ridiculed Mr Morrison's reaction to the tweet this week, prompting the Prime Minister to attempt to reach the community directly through social media.
"They are trying to style themselves as defenders of freedom and democracy, but it is a travesty of freedom and democracy," she said. "It is all double standards and hypocrisy."
The Australian government's response has now secured the support of allies in Europe, the US and New Zealand, and former prime ministers Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott. Labor has become increasingly critical of the Morrison government's handling of the crisis, accusing the Coalition of being responsible for a breakdown in the relationship.
Mr Morrison accused Labor leader Anthony Albanese of having "an each-way bet" on national security.
A spokesman for the German foreign ministry in Berlin said on Thursday that China's decision to publish a fabricated image on social media was "unacceptable".
"The Australian government is facing up to the responsibility to investigate alleged crimes by its special forces in an exemplary manner," the spokesman said.
"This goes to show that Australia takes human rights and the investigation of alleged crimes seriously and contrary to others – we very much respect Australia's approach.”
Jake Sullivan, the national security adviser for US-President elect Joe Biden, on Thursday said America would stand "shoulder to shoulder" with Australia and "rally fellow democracies to advance our shared security, prosperity, and values".
Democratic Senator Robert Menendez, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said of the tweet: "This is despicable & beneath the dignity of a nation with 5000 years of culture & history."
Republican Senator Marco Rubio, the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey to complain that the image had not been removed from the social media platform.
"It defies belief that Twitter is unaware of the image, which falsely portrays an Australian soldier holding a bloody knife to the throat of a young Afghan child, as Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison requested the image be taken down," Senator Rubio said.
But amid rising tensions with China, the 10 ASEAN states – all of whom are heavily dependent on economic ties with China – have been noticeably silent on the escalating diplomatic and trade dispute between Beijing and Canberra.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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4 December, 2020
Australian wine: China scores an own goal
China has gradually ratcheted up the punitive measures it levies on Australia to repay the impertinence of the Australian government in criticizing China. As a country of only 25 million people, Australia must have seemed a weak target that could be pressured into greater compliance with Chinese wishes.
There was no sign of any of the pressure working so they recently added a few more pressures. And one of those was a huge mistake. They cut off imports of Australian wine
So that became the best advertising campaign ever for Australian wine. The most unlikely countries jumped onto the bandwagon of "saving" the Australian wine industry. Australian wine is good quality so any excuse to drink more of it was seized on. And if all you needed to do to oppose Chinese bullying was to have a pleasant drinkie or three why not? It was an easy response.
What the Chinese appear to have overlooked is that Anglo-Saxon countries have a lot of friends and allies. When they go to war, Anglo Saxons nearly always do so as one of a group of allies. Seeking and maintaining allies is part of the Anglo Saxon core culture. It is an ingrained policy that goes back centuries. So when taking on little Australia, China was taking on all those traditional friends and allies. From Japan to Italy, to Sweden those friends and allies rallied to the cause.
And an integral part of the message about Australian wines was that China was being a "Bully", surely not a remotely desirable image for China to project. So China has really shot itself in the foot. It has blown sky high any sort of friendly image it was trying to project while being a great advertising agent for Australian wine. Win 1 for Australia and 0 for China. If only Australians had not been so extremely well-connected!
Millions of people around the world are being urged to buy an Australian bottle of wine or two, as a way of showing Chinese President Xi Jinping that the world will not be intimidated by his "bullying of Australia".
The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC), comprising more than 200 MPs from a range of political parties and representing 19 country legislatures, has launched a campaign to convince people to buy and drink Australian wine in December, as a show of solidarity.
It comes after China slapped tariffs of up to 212 per cent against Australian wine producers, which Trade Minister Simon Birmingham said would spell a "hellishly tough time for Australia’s winemakers."
The global alliance of cross-party representatives, who have banded together to try to counter China's increasing aggression particularly against Australia, released a video in which MPs from Japan, Italy, Germany, the United States and even Australia's wine-producing rival New Zealand, among others, urge their citizens to enjoy an Australian drop. The video is subtitled in Chinese and English.
"Italy is the country that exports the most wine of any country in the world," Italian Democratic Party Senator Roberto Rampi says in Italian, holding up a bottle of Italian red.
A video campaign has also been launched by an alliance of politicians from around the world to convince people to buy and drink Australian wine amid growing tensions with Beijing.
"C'mon, who needs wine when you have Aquavit?" jokes Norway's former Liberal party leader and MP Trine Skei Grande.
"You know what? Japanese sake is the best!" says Shiori Yamao, an independent member of Japan's House of Representatives before Republican Senator Ted Yoho declares "two words - Napa Valley", before saying it is time to "drink something a little bit different" and buy Australian wine, "because our friends need our help".
"We are asking you all to join us in standing against Xi Jinping's authoritarian bullying," says Miriam Lexmann, a Christian Democrat Member of the European Parliament.
"By drinking a bottle or two of Australian wine and letting the Chinese Communist Party know that we will not be bullied," says Swedish Christian Democratic, Elisabet Lann, a municipal councillor who holds up a glass of Penfolds.
The video features one Australian MP – Labor Senator Kimberley Kitching from Victoria – who said that China's attempts to bully Australia, including its list of 14 grievances, was an attack on "free countries everywhere".
It also features footage of Zhao Lijian, the Chinese government spokesman and Foreign Ministry official, who posted an inflammatory tweet on Monday showing a fabricated image of an Australian soldier slitting the throat of a child.
"Australia is not alone," Samuel Armstrong, London-based spokesman for the IPAC told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. "When China threatens Australia, it threatens us all. Standing up for our allies and shared values is sometimes costly but when the drinking is this good, doing nothing to protect our Antipodean friends would not just be immoral, it would be a good bottle wasted."
The IPAC was founded by former Tory party leader Iain Duncan Smith in June, when it counted with 19 legislators who wanted their governments to take a tougher and collective stance towards China. Its stated aim is to collaborate to safeguard the international rules based order, uphold human rights and promote trade fairness among others.
The campaign follows a groundswell of online support among diplomats and China-watchers across Europe who have also urged the drinking of Australian wine.
"It’s not a bad idea to buy some extra wine these days to show solidarity," Sweden's former prime minister Carl Bildt said this week. He predicted that China's attempts to weaponise trade in its political disputes would backfire but urged the world to pay attention to the developments.
Even the US National Security Council tweeted that Australian wine would be featured at a White House function this week. "Pity vino lovers in China who, due to Beijing’s coercive tariffs on Aussie vintners, will miss out," the post said, along with the hashtag "AussieAussieAussieOiOiOi".
But any attempt to drive sales of Australian wine will need to be significant to have any impact for winemakers.
Australia exports wine to 117 countries but 39 per cent of it goes to China. Its next biggest markets are the US and the United Kingdom, which make up 15 and 14 per cent of total Australian wine exports respectively.
The export market was valued at $4 billion in September, before the tariffs were imposed.
“Biosecurity and cultural” concerns have stopped firefighters from using local freshwater to help stop the Fraser Island blaze as it heads towards Lake McKenzie.
What's that about cultural concerns? Sounds like Aboriginal superstitions are being placated. When that is harmless, who cares? But if it interferes with firefighting it is obnoxious
A massive bushfire on Fraser Island is now tracking south-west, directly on course with another of the island’s iconic landmarks - Lake McKenzie.
Government fire mapping shows spot fires have been blown south of Kingfisher Bay Resort and Village - with one spot fire detected at 10.30pm last night.
A spot fire was detected in the vicinity of Lake McKenzie on Wednesday morning, but it remains several kilometres north-east of the landmark.
The blaze comes as the Department of Environment and Science said that firefighters are unable to use freshwater from landmarks like Lake McKenzie, due to “biosecurity and cultural” concerns.
Firefighters were this morning continuing to battle the fire near Boon Boon Creek, to the east of Kingfisher Bay.
More than 1 million litres of water and gel has been dropped on the island since the bushfire began in October.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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3 December, 2020
Iron ore is Australia's silver lining to its darkening China cloud
In the midst of a bitter, escalating and rather one-sided trade confrontation, the price of our biggest export to China has just hit its highest price for more than seven years.
The iron ore price, while it was knocked around by the initial impact of the pandemic in March, has been climbing strongly ever since and has now reached $US136.29 a tonne, its highest level since September 2013 and nearly 50 per cent higher than it traded for at the start of this year.
The miners have, ironically, China to thank for that. More than 80 per cent of Australia’s iron ore exports go to China, accounting for 60 per cent of China’s supply.
While China has been happily slapping tariffs and other trade barriers on Australian products like coal, barley, lobsters and wine, it has left iron ore untouched, largely because it has no alternative either now or in the medium term or perhaps even longer.
Australia’s miners, notably Rio Tinto, BHP and Fortescue, dominate the seaborne trade in iron ore. Their main competitor, Brazil’s Vale, is still recovering from its tailing dam disasters and, more recently, the impact of the pandemic and heavy rains on its production.
Earlier this week, Vale lowered its forecasts for this year’s production by 5 million to 10 million tonnes, from an already-reduced target of 310 million tonnes.
That Vale-aided tightness in supply, which is expected to continue into the first half of next year at least, has coincided with a surge in China’s demand.
China’s response to an economic downturn is consistent. It injects massive sums into expanded investment in infrastructure which in turn flows into increased demand for steel.
It did that in response to the 2008 global financial crisis, sparking a historic boom in commodity volumes and prices that played a major role in the relatively modest economic impacts of the crisis on Australia.
It’s done so again in response to the coronavirus. China’s October steel production was 13 per cent above the same month in 2019 and, while slightly lower than the previous month’s output, was in line with industry estimates that the Chinese steel mills are producing at a record annualised rate of about 1.1 billion tonnes.
China’s response to the pandemic has worked, to a degree. It is forecast by most of the major international economic agencies to generate GDP growth of just under 2 per cent this year.
While well short of the 6.1 per cent growth rate last year, or the double-digit growth rates it achieved in the immediate aftermath of the financial crisis, any growth at all would make it the only major economy to end the year in positive territory.
It has long been a source of frustration and concern for China that it is so reliant on Australia for the most critical feedstock for its industrial base.
It has tried to diversify its sources of supply, pursuing economic and financial ties with Brazil to help promote its industry and lower its shipping costs and therefore reduce the competitive disadvantage of Brazil’s distance relative to the Australian miners.
It wasted billions to try to secure ownership of its own Australian supply in the mid-western regions of the Pilbara in Western Australia. It controls very large deposits of ore that it hasn’t, so far, been able to develop.
China’s response to an economic downturn is consistent. It injects massive sums into expanded investment in infrastructure which in turn flows into increased demand for steel.
It even got close to effective control of Rio when the biggest of the Pilbara miners nearly fell over during the financial crisis, before Rio eventually walked away from the controversial deal (which the Rudd government may well have blocked anyway).
The search for new supply sources hasn’t ended. Much has been written about the potential for the vast Simandou deposits in Guinea – more than 2 billion tonnes of high-quality ore with the “potential” to produce perhaps 150 million tonnes of ore a year – to displace or at least diminish the Pilbara’s strategic hold on China’s steel industry.
The resource, which has a colourful history, has tantalised a succession of potential developers, including Rio, which once controlled the entire deposit and spent more than a decade trying to work up a feasible plan for developing the two (of four) blocks that it has retained an interest in. That interest has been shared with China’s Chinalco. The other blocks are now held by a consortium of Chinese, Singaporean and French companies.
Even during the peak of the iron ore boom, when iron ore’s price was spiking up towards $US200 a tonne, the economics of developing the project proved difficult because it would require the building of a new port and, at the Guinean government’s insistence, a new 650-kilometre rail line through difficult terrain.
Rio estimated it would cost close to $US20 billion ($27 billion) to develop the mine and infrastructure for its blocks. The other consortium has put a price-tag of $US14 billion on the cost of its development.
Even if the two projects shared the transport infrastructure, the cost and complexity would be enormous and it would be more than a decade before serious volumes of ore could be sold.
History suggests both the cost and timelines would be significantly larger and longer than forecast even without the additional threat posed by previous outbreaks of Ebola in Guinea and the poor record of developing large-scale projects in African countries other than South Africa.
In the meantime, all three Pilbara majors – already highly efficient – are lowering their costs and expanding their production through incremental additions to the capital already sunk – and the infrastructure depreciated.
Simandou might have a very large deposit of high-quality ore but it won’t be at a lower cost than the ore Rio, BHP and Fortescue produce from mines and ports that have been operating since the 1960s.
Thus, for the foreseeable future, China might be able to impose bans on Australian products where it has alternative sources of supply and accept the increased cost and reduced quality from banning Australian coal, for instance, or the reduced consumer choice of the punitive tariffs on Australian wine, but it has no substitute when it comes to iron ore unless it wants to shut down its steel industry and economy.
Given that iron ore represents more than 40 per cent (and rising) of the value of our exports to China, that’s something of a silver lining within a darkening cloud.
2 December, 2020
China is right
The principles of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648 have long influenced international relations. The principles put an end to Europe's long religious wars and are often quoted to this day.
So what do the principles say? In summary, they say that nations should not interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. But as the summary below reveals, Australia has not remotely done that. Morrison has in fact repeatedly done things likely to antagonize China. It is a wonder that China has taken so long to respond. They have been very patient
So how to get out of the mess? Morrison should simply acknowledge that he has flouted the principles of Westphalia and undertake not to do that again. The Muslim Uighurs are not our concern and an inquiry into the origin of the coronavirus is pointles.
He would simply be acknowledging international law to do so
A series of defence, trade and foreign policy disputes have led to what is seen as the lowest point in two countries’ ties in decades.
In May, China curbed Australian beef imports and levied tariffs totalling 80.5 percent on Australian barley [AP Photo]
In May, China curbed Australian beef imports and levied tariffs totalling 80.5 percent on Australian barley [AP Photo]
1 Dec 2020
Relations between China and Australia are fast unravelling.
The growing diplomatic dispute – the culmination of a series of defence, trade and foreign policy disputes – took a nasty turn on Monday when a spokesman for the Chinese government tweeted a doctored image of an Australian soldier holding a knife to the throat of an Afghan child.
The Australian newspaper said the latest spat marked the lowest point in China-Australia relations in 50 years.
How did things get here?
China’s assertive foreign policy and the rapid modernisation of its military has long unsettled Australian politicians. A turning point occurred in 2017 when Australia banned foreign political donations, with officials warning of “disturbing reports” of Chinese attempts to influence the political process in Canberra.
The following year, Australia became the first country to ban Chinese tech giant Huawei from its 5G network. It also reportedly went on to block 10 Chinese investment deals across infrastructure, agriculture and animal husbandry.
Relations worsened further this year when Australia called for an inquiry into the origins of the new coronavirus, which was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Beijing has also been angered by Australian criticism of its actions in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan and the South China Sea.
“They have repeatedly made wrong statements and actions on issues concerning China’s core interests,” Zhao Lijian, the Chinese government spokesman said last month, urging Australia to undertake “deep reflection”.
Another source of tensions has been Australia’s participation in the Quad, an informal grouping that includes the United States, India and Japan.
Beijing has called the alliance a US-led attempt to create an “Asian version of NATO”.
China’s response
In May, China curbed Australian beef imports and levied tariffs totalling 80.5 percent on Australian barley. Then in November, it imposed tariffs worth 200 percent on Australian wine and is expected to block further imports, including sugar, lobster, coal and copper ore.
With China accounting for about 35 percent of Australia’s total trade, some experts fear an all-out trade war could cost the latter 6 percent of its GDP. In contrast, Australia accounts for less than 4 percent of China’s commerce.
“Australia is playing above its head by trying to politically pressure China when its dependent on China for its economy,” said Einar Tangen, a Beijing-based analyst and economic adviser to the Chinese government.
Journalists have gotten caught up in the spat, too. In June, Australian intelligence and police raided the homes of four Chinese journalists over alleged influence campaigns, while authorities in China questioned two Australian journalists in a national security probe in September, prompting them to leave the country.
Will Australia back down?
Writing in The Interpreter last month, Henry Storey, an Australian analyst, said if Australia wants to resolve the dispute, it may need to apologise for calling for the COVID-19 inquiry, distance itself from the Quad and promise to respect China’s core interests.
But that appears unlikely.
Morrison, the Australian prime minister, signalled Australia will not reverse its China policy after the Chinese embassy shared a list of its grievances with the Australian media.
“I can assure you, we will always be Australia, act in our interests and in accordance with our values,” he told the Seven News Network.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2020/12/1/australia-china-tensions-explained-in-500-words
UPDATEThis is not the place for a full discussion of the Peace of Westphalia but it might be of interest to see a short summary of its provisions:
The main tenets of the Peace of Westphalia were:
1). All parties would recognise the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, in which each prince would have the right to determine the religion of his own state (the principle of cuius regio, eius religio). The options were Catholicism, Lutheranism, and now Calvinism.
2). Christians living in principalities where their denomination was not the established church were guaranteed the right to practice their faith in private, as well as in public during allotted hours.
3). France and Sweden were recognised as guarantors of the imperial constitution with a right to intercede.
It is often argued that the Peace of Westphalia resulted in a general recognition of the exclusive sovereignty of each party over its lands, people, and agents abroad, as well as responsibility for the warlike acts of any of its citizens or agents
So it is clear that the ruler in each country affected by the treaty has exclusive power over his citizens in the issue of the day, which was religion. A limited exemption to that (point 2 above) was however that Protestants could escape the religious edicts of a Catholic ruler by practicing their religion in private. There was no such tolerance for non-Christian religions. Jews were tolerated in the Netherlands only
2 December, 2020
"Progressive" education: Some people will never learn
Below we have a "new" type of schooling promoted. But there is in fact nothing new about it. It is a brain fart that appears to happen to someone every few years. It goes back at least to Maria Montessori and A.S. Neill's "Summer hill".
And while it seems good and noble it just does not work well. It works for some students but is not remotely applicable to an entire educational system.
I myself spent a year teaching in such a school so I observed close-up what happens. About half of the students are given a push to learn from their parents and they do fairly well. The other half just fool around and learn almost nothing -- resulting in failure at the end of year exams.
It will always be so. Some kids need pushing to learn and will be glad of it in the end. The nonsense below betrays them badly
Underlying this type of school is a Leftist assumption that the existing system is wrong and a determination to prove that. It is blithely assumed that children will be happiest in such a school. But that may not be so. I sponsor a British 9-year-old to go to a top British "public" (Fee paying) preparatory school, an extremely traditional and demanding school. So the boy is oppressed by the demanding system? Far from it. He loves it and really spreads his wings.
In one corner of the entrance hall, children play a grand piano. In another, they watch koi swim around a glass-walled fish pond. And over on vintage leather couches at the cafe, teenagers play chess and cards.
At this government school unlike any other, there are no uniforms. Students address teachers by their first names. While the school supports “learning beyond the school day”, it does not use the term homework.
But that’s just the beginning of Lindfield Learning Village’s departure from traditional teaching.
The kindergarten to year 12 school - which some describe as an experiment, and others hail as a refreshing new direction for education - opened last year in the former Ku-ring-gai campus of the University of Technology Sydney, tucked in the leafy back streets of the upper north shore.
Parents rushed to enrol their children. Students came from wealthy private schools, religious schools and Montessori schools. Some had been home schooled, and others had long refused to attend any type of school at all.
“The fact we have 2500 still on the waiting list … [shows] people are looking for something different,” says principal Stephanie McConnell.
In setting up Lindfield Learning Village from scratch, McConnell has been given unusual latitude for a NSW public school principal. “We are not limited by boundaries, we will break stereotypes,” promises the vision statement.
With her team, McConnell has thrown out the conventions of the so-called “industrial model” of teaching: the tests, the bells, the traditional timetable, and the idea of one teacher standing in front of 30-odd students.
“[We have been] unlearning what school is, and shedding those assumptions that we bring as educators to what school has to have,” says McConnell.
“Assemblies and merit awards and calling teachers by their surname, uniforms and bells - all those constraints people think schools have to have. Is that about learning, or is it about control? If it’s about control, we have to question that.”
They have scrapped age-based classes at primary level in favour of mixing three or four age cohorts together, taught by a team of teachers who group the students according to their learning needs, rather than their age.
“It’s so much more effective,” says McConnell. “Kids are happier, teachers are happier. If I have five strugglers in that group, I can accommodate them because I’ve got enough teachers in my team to work with other groups.”
Teachers are focusing on developing students’ so-called ''soft skills'', such as creativity and communication, and are designing ways to assess them. They use cross-subject projects to ensure their pupils engage those skills and take charge of their own learning.
In a project that combined drama and language, for example, students worked on a play in a different tongue. In a history-focused ''quest'', they acted the part of convict, free settler or lord in a re-enactment of early Australia.
"We've got to build resilience, we've got to teach them to think creatively," says deputy principal Lou Deibe. "It's not about teaching them the content, it's about exposing them to content and looking at what we can do with that content and that knowledge to create new solutions.
"Do we only value what we assess, or do we try to assess what we actually value? That’s been the missing piece in education for a long time."
It’s an approach that many parents find attractive.
“My daughter has really flourished there, [although] it took a bit of getting used to how things work,” says parent Chris Goringe, whose 13-year-old daughter started at Lindfield in year 7 last year. “She’s very positive about the school.
“They are less spoon fed and led, more scaffolded and supported. The no uniform, first name [with teachers], no bells - I absolutely love that. The whole school is built around a far more human and far less industrial approach.”
While there is no set homework, Goringe’s daughter does it voluntarily. “I suspect she does more work at home than she would if she was set homework,” he says. “She is interested in doing work with her friends, they are enjoying it.”
There is no official school catchment yet - given the school was built to take pressure off local primary and high schools, one is expected to be drawn up early next year - but most of the primary students are from the region.
High school students, however, travel from further afield. Some live around Newtown, others on the northern beaches. Many came because they had been struggling with the traditional high school model.
The executive team interviews potential enrolments - not because it is selective, but because its model is so unusual, says McConnell. “It’s about us saying this is who we are, are you sure this is what you want?”
“The handful of kids we have found have moved on because the model didn’t suit them, was actually [that] the model didn’t suit the parents. The parents couldn’t cope with the mind shift they needed to undertake,'' says McConnell.
“Those who are really deeply trusting us, and believing in what we are doing here, are the ones who will stick by and say, this is totally beyond my comfort zone and my experience, but I can see the difference it’s making in my child.”
Teachers are also from different backgrounds. Some came from selective schools, others from private schools. Deputies Deibe and Mark Burgess came from Northern Beaches Christian School.
Next year, the school will expand from 375 to 550 students and have its first HSC candidature. But it will take its time expanding to the maximum capacity of 2000 students, as it fine tunes its approach and ensures it can focus on each individual student's learning even as the numbers grow.
"We will keep adding in a way we can manage over the coming years," says McConnell.
Some in the education community, however, are concerned that the Lindfield is too experimental. “There isn’t a lot of evidence that this style of schooling works,” says Jennifer Buckingham, a strategy director at reading company Multilit.
“If this was a school of choice it would be less worrying. It would be parents making informed decisions about the education outcomes for children. It bothers me it’s a designated school with a catchment, and students don’t have the option to go elsewhere.
“It would be great to see an evaluation. If it’s working then that’s great, but if it’s not, a re-think might be in order. No matter what philosophical commitments people might have, it should come down to outcomes.”
2 December, 2020
Australian Reconciliation Barometer finds 43 per cent think country is racist
This proves nothing. It show only what people have been propagandized into believing
At least 18 people have been arrested at protests in Brisbane over the death of an Aboriginal woman in police custody.
The number of Australians who believe the country is racist has increased to its highest level in more than five years.
The 2020 Australian Reconciliation Barometer, released on Monday, found 43 per cent of people thought the country had a race issue.
This was compared with the 38 per cent of people who agreed with the statement in 2018 and just 35 per cent in 2014.
When asked if they agreed or disagreed with the same statement, “Australia is a racist country”, 60 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people said yes.
It was an increase of 9 per cent on the results of the 2018 survey.
Reconciliation Australia chief executive Karen Mundine said the Black Lives Matter movement both in Australia and overseas had increased awareness about racial prejudice.
“Through the 2020 barometer we hear many more people speaking up, speaking the truth, asking the hard questions, seeing the hard facts, and moving from a space of safe to brave on issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples,” she said.
The survey found more than half of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people had experienced at least one form of racial prejudice in the past six months, up 9 per cent compared with 2018.
It also found 81 per cent of the general population believed it was important for Indigenous people to be included in the Constitution.
But Ms Mundine said change wouldn’t happen until everyone played their part.
“Our barometer shows that community attitudes are well ahead of the political response to issues around self-determination, representation, treaty, and in understanding and learning about history,” she said.
“This provides a basis for demanding more of our political leaders.”
The 2020 Australian Reconciliation Barometer surveyed 1988 people from the general population and 495 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people.
Queensland property prices defy COVID-19 downturn as interstate buyers head north in droves
The latest monthly data released by CoreLogic showed prices grew in every capital city rising by 0.8 per cent nationally.
CoreLogic's Head of Research Tim Lawless said price growth in regional Australia was stronger than in the capital cities, with values in regional Queensland leading the way — rising by 3.2 per cent over the past three months.
"That was the fastest growth rate across any of the regional markets around the country and it really demonstrates the trend we're seeing towards housing demands really rising, particularly in those markets adjacent to Brisbane on the back of relatively low supply levels," he said.
Mr Lawless said if the current growth persisted, Australian home values were likely to surpass pre-COVID-19 levels early next year.
"Of course extremely low interest rates are one of the primary factors that's driving housing markets, but on top of that there's a lot of other different types of incentives … first homebuyers, building grants."
He said there seemed to be "some increasing urgency in the market".
"This does seem to be very much a seller's market, we are seeing relatively slim levels of advertised stock available for sale, homes are selling very quickly, vendors are offering up very little in the way of discount as well.
"So these are all factors that are pushing prices higher."
Interstate arrivals help fuel price growth
Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ) chief executive officer Antonia Mercorella said the REIQ estimated interstate demand for property had increased by about 20 per cent on last year.
"The interest from interstate is very significant at the moment, even before COVID-19 Queensland was the number one destination for interstate migration," she said.
"Of course since this pandemic has hit, that demand from interstate buyers — particularly New South Wales and Victoria — has grown even stronger."
She said the lack of supply was also playing a major role.
"Interstate demand is absolutely having an impact, but it's really demand overall that's having the impact," she said.
"We have quite limited stock and of course when there is strong demand with limited stock, what that means is that properties are being snapped up and it's a very competitive landscape and that does drive up prices."
Ms Mercorella said homeowners were reluctant to sell.
"Once upon a time, we used to talk about people owing their properties on average seven years and here in Queensland we're getting close to 12 years now, so we are holding onto our properties much tighter and longer than we ever have before," she said.
Southern states clamour for Gold Coast property
Gold Coast real estate agent Tolemy Stevens said there was an "insatiable" appetite for property from interstate buyers.
"At least 80 per cent of our enquiries at this stage — particularly for luxury beachfront real estate on the Gold Coast — is coming from interstate clients," he said.
"Eighty to 90 per cent of my transactions over the last three to six months alone have all been from buyers either in Melbourne or in Sydney, which is just a phenomenal statistic."
Mr Stevens said local prices represented "outstanding" value for money.
"What a million dollars here can buy you — opposed to what it would buy you in Sydney and Melbourne — is almost two for one," he said.
"We are at all-time lows, record lows, in the volume of stock that we have to sell … we do not have enough to sell and meet the demand that is currently coming from Sydney and Melbourne.
"That's not only on the sales division, it's also being seen across in the rentals division as well, which as I've said is exploding at the same time."
He said demand was strong for all types of properties.
"Whether it's low, mid or high, it seems to be the same story all round — we simply just do not have enough to sell," Mr Stevens said.
"Our vendors that we are trying to get onto the market are simply saying 'well why would I sell, what am I going to do with the money, you know it's not really earning anything for me in the bank'."
Grain harvest tipped to be second biggest on record, as trade tensions with China escalate
Australian farmers are on track to produce the second biggest grain crop ever, following years of drought and as trade relations with China grow frostier.
Commodity forecaster the Australian Bureau of Agricultural Resource Economics and Sciences (ABARES) has tipped a 51.5-million-tonne national winter crop — 7.4 per cent higher than the most recent prediction in September.
ABARES said New South Wales, after unprecedented drought, was "on the verge" of a record crop, with a forecast production of more than 17.6 million tonnes.
The high yields are due to decent rainfall and growing conditions there, as well as in Victoria and South Australia, meaning winter crops such as wheat, barley and chickpeas had been given a boost.
"New South Wales has had good rain at the start of the season and all the way through the season really," ABARES senior economist Peter Collins said.
"And this year's national crop is second only to the really big crop we had in 2016–17."
For the major winter crops, wheat production is forecast to increase by 106 per cent from last year to 31.2 million tonnes — the second highest on record.
Barley production should grow by 33 per cent to 12 million tonnes — also the second highest — while canola production is forecast to rise by 59 per cent to 3.7 million tonnes.
Michelle Penrose, site manager for Riordan Grain Services at Edenhope in Victoria’s grain growing heartland of the Wimmera, said she expects grain handling facilities to fill up completely this season.
"We have had probably a text book season really, we have had rain exactly when we needed it," she said.
"The [grain storage sites] in this area either filled up or got to 90 per cent capacity last season, but this year the yields are up on that again by quite a bit, so its fantastic for farmers in the area."
Ms Penrose said that meant farmers might have to truck their grain further for storage, or opt to keep it on farm for longer until space was available.
For rural communities recovering from drought and the economic woes associated with the coronavirus pandemic, the high yields come as a big relief.
"Your farmers are your base. If they are doing well, the rest of your community will do really well, so a good season in a small community has a massive effect," Ms Penrose said.
A child's hand touches wheat. blurred in the background is the wheat crop ready for harvest and other blurred people.
NSW is expected to get its biggest crop ever this year, a welcome relief after years of drought.(ABC News: Jess Davis)
Growing conditions in late winter and early spring had been drier in southern Queensland and in Western Australia, meaning production forecasts have been revised down slightly for those states.
Mr Collins, however, said crop yields would still be strong.
"Even with the downward revision for Western Australia it is still going to be around its long-term average, so it's not a disaster by any stretch of the imagination," he said.
"And in Queensland, significant parts of their cropping area have been drier than average for large parts of the year."
Bumper harvest as trade tensions high
Victorian grain grower David Jochinke is well into his harvest near Horsham in the state's west, and said the results were "absolutely fantastic" for the south-eastern states.
It has been a tense year for the grains industry, after China kicked off a trade war with Australia by announcing hefty trade tariffs on Australian barley.
Mr Jochinke said he hoped this season's high yields would help offset the financial damage caused by the spat.
"If we can't make it up in price, we'd prefer to make it up in yields," he said.
But he said it would be a challenge to find markets for barley, given China had been a premium purchaser for several years.
"For the average consumer, you won't necessarily see this price in the supermarket, but for the farmers, they'll feel it on the profitability of their businesses, especially those farms coming out of drought."
He said growers might have already sold barley domestically while other countries, such as Saudi Arabia, were likely to buy at a discounted price.
Next week ABARES will release a report addressing the impact of China trade tensions on various commodities.
Mr Collins acknowledged growers would have to find new markets and likely sell into them at lower prices, but it would be "pre-emptive" to say more at this stage.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-12-01/australian-grain-harvest-to-set-new-records/12935994
Zoloft enters list of 10 most commonly prescribed drugs in AustraliaLockdowns causing depression
An increase in women being diagnosed with depression is partly behind a significant rise in prescriptions of the antidepressant sertraline – sold under the brand name Zoloft – which is in the list of Australia’s most commonly prescribed drugs for the first time.
On Tuesday Australian Prescriber published its annual list of the 10 most commonly taken drugs – based on standard daily doses for every 1,000 people in the population each day – along with a list of the 10 most costly drugs to government, and the 10 most common drugs by prescription counts.
The data was collected between July 2019 and June 2020. The top drugs by daily dose per thousand in the population is the most useful measure of drug usage rather than prescription counts, because the supply of medication in each prescription changes over time.
The first eight drugs are all used to treat and prevent heart disease and stroke. The top two most commonly taken drugs by Australians are both statins, which are cholesterol-lowering drugs taken by people at risk of cardiovascular disease. A range of drugs used to treat hypertension, a risk for stroke and heart attack, made up the rest of the top eight. Heart disease is the leading underlying cause of death in Australians.
Metformin, used to control blood sugar levels in people with type 2 diabetes, came in at number 10. Diabetes contributes to more than 10% of deaths in Australia each year.
Sertraline entered the top 10 for the first time, coming in at number nine. Almost 26 doses of the drug are taken each day per 1,000 Australians, the data shows.
The director of the Monash Alfred psychiatry research centre, Prof Jayashri Kulkarni, said she was not surprised to see sertraline enter the list.
“Zoloft is one of the starter drugs for depression, so it means it is often prescribed to people presenting with depression for the first time, and it has also been shown to be clinically useful for anxiety,” she said.
“We are seeing more people experiencing a major depressive disorder for the first time, and anxiety requiring medical treatment, and Covid has accelerated some people from a subclinical depression into a clinical condition that needs stronger treatment.”
Women in particular were being affected, Kulkarni said.
But Kulkarni said she was concerned people were being prescribed sertraline too readily, without also attending psychology sessions. Medication alone was often not enough to reliably treat depression in the long term, she said.
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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1 December, 2020
Scott Morrison and Angus Campbell at odds over Afghanistan war crimes report recommendation
General Campbell gets it wrong -- again. Past wisdom: "He decided that it was terribly wrong for our service personnel to be wearing “symbology” portraying death. Seemingly ignoring the fact that a soldier’s job is to engage and kill the enemy, Campbell says, “This is not where we need to be as a national institution. As soldiers our purpose is to serve the state, employing violence with humility always and compassion wherever possible. The symbology to which I refer erodes this ethos of service.”
The Sydney Daily Telegraph got it right when it said, “There’s your new army slogan: “Employing Violence with Humility”. It’ll probably sound less stupid in Latin.
It appears to have escaped General Campbell’s notice that he himself wears the Infantry Combat Badge that displays a bayonet. The bayonet has one purpose and that is to kill and maim. Is this befuddled General going to ban that badge too.
General Angus Campbell seems to favour focusing on gender issues instead of concentrating on our reduced military capabilities within our own region. Last year Campbell addressed a Defence Force conference on recruitment at which time he said,
“The number one priority I have with respect to recruitment is increasing our diversity, with a focus on women and indigenous Australians.” In summing this up Cori Bernardi also took into account the issuing of Halals ration to our troops when he said, “This demonstrates just how our military has been captured by minority interests and appears to have suspended the application of common sense.”
Campbell is a Duntroon graduate so has some claim to being a real soldier but as far as I can tell he has never been shot at so his judgement seems to be essentially civilian. Why can we not have a real soldier with substantial combat experience running our forces?
One consolation is that he has not emulated the extremely politically correct Lieutenant General David Morrison, best known for walking around in women's high heeled shoes! What has the army come to? It is a long way from the army I served in many years ago
It's not often we see the Prime Minister and the Chief of Defence at odds, but the Brereton Report detailing allegations of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan has exposed a public rift between the two and it's already pretty clear who will win the argument.
General Angus Campbell won mostly praise for his handling of this bombshell report released 10 days ago.
As Chief of Army, he was the one who commissioned the inquiry four years ago and now as Defence Chief, General Campbell accepted the findings and recommendations with the seriousness and gravity they deserved.
In one of the darkest moments for the Australian Defence Force, the General is seen by both sides of politics to have responded well.
Mostly, anyway. Then came the reaction
On one matter, there was immediate controversy: the decision to strip a group citation for the special forces in Afghanistan. It was hardly the most significant recommendation of the report; a unit citation is not a war medal and stripping it is hardly akin to what might be in store for those who committed war crimes.
But it was by far the most sensitive recommendation, given the number of troops affected and the signal sent to the broader veteran community.
When he released the report, General Campbell was clear.
"I have accepted the Inspector-General's recommendation," he said in his opening remarks to a nationally televised press conference, "and will again write to the Governor-General, requesting he revoke the Meritorious Unit Citation awarded to Special Operations Task Group rotations serving in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2013."
It was presented as a final decision. The Chief of Defence had spoken. No ifs, no buts. A deployment marred by 39 alleged war crimes could hardly be considered "meritorious" any longer. The group citation was being revoked.
Then came the reaction, from the public, the veteran's community and inevitably, the politicians. Some of those who served honourably in Afghanistan and did nothing wrong wondered why they were being punished. The furious father of one commando killed in action said the citation would have to be collected "from his gravestone".
An online petition to "save" the unit citation received more than 40,000 signatures at last count.
Labor MP Luke Gosling, himself a former commando, suggested it would be "cruel" to strip the honour from 3,000 personnel, the overwhelming majority of whom served with distinction.
Within the Government, a similar view formed.
'Decisions haven't been made yet'
While the citation may not have been issued to the special forces if we knew then what we know now about events in Afghanistan, most agreed the idea of revoking it was crazy and at the end of the day, impossible to implement.
Veterans Affairs Minister Darren Chester, who initially supported the CDF's decision, noted calls to the Open Arms support line for veterans had doubled in the space of a week.
The Prime Minister was asked by Ben Fordham on 2GB why thousands were being punished for the "sins of a couple of dozen".
His response made it clear he was uncomfortable with General Campbell's position. "Decisions haven't been made yet on these things", he suggested, "so let's see how each step unfolds".
Morrison went on to say he was "very sensitive to the issues … as is the Defence Minister".
Morrison has a finely tuned political radar and could well be right in detecting where community sentiment lies on this issue.
Ultimately though, someone must decide. The worst outcome would be leaving it to the Governor-General (himself a former chief of defence) to choose between conflicting advice from General Campbell and the Prime Minister. To avoid that, it appears Defence has decided to blink.
Asked if General Campbell is still going to write to the Governor-General recommending the citation be revoked, a spokesperson for Defence told the ABC in a written statement, "Defence is preparing a comprehensive implementation plan to action the Inspector-General's recommendations", and "final decisions on this advice will be a matter for Government."
Decoding the language of Defence Media, it appears General Campbell's declaration 10 days ago that he would write to the Governor-General is now in doubt.
Pressure from veterans, the public and most importantly Defence's political masters has undoubtedly had an impact. It now seems most unlikely the citation will be revoked.
Instead, the special forces deployment to Afghanistan will continue to be regarded as "meritorious", despite the 39 alleged war crimes.
Russia accused of 'hypocrisy' after attacking Australia over Afghanistan war crimes report
Russia says Australia's commitment to a rules-based world order cannot be taken seriously following the release of damning findings of alleged war crimes committed by special forces in Afghanistan.
The ABC has uncovered recent comments by the Russian Foreign Ministry in which it claimed Australian soldiers accused of murdering civilians and prisoners would not be "held accountable".
Earlier this month, Australian Defence Force Chief Angus Campbell released the Brereton report, which found special forces had committed at least 39 unlawful killings during the Afghanistan war.
"This is a truly shocking report," Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova said in prepared remarks at a press briefing conducted in Russian late last week.
"The circumstances make us truly doubt the genuine capacity of Australian authorities to actually hold accountable all the servicemen who are guilty of such crimes."
The Russian Foreign Ministry spokesperson claimed Australia's credibility on the world stage had been shattered by the revelations.
"It makes us reassess the true meaning of the official line pronounced by Canberra to protect the rules-based world order," Ms Zakharova said.
Russia's comments were delivered just hours after China's Foreign Ministry similarly attacked Australia over the Brereton report findings.
"The facts revealed by this report fully exposed the hypocrisy of the 'human rights' and 'freedom' these Western countries are always chanting," Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Friday.
Diplomatic relations between Australia and Russia have been particularly strained since the 2014 downing of a Malaysian Airlines flight carrying 298 passengers over Ukraine.
Last month Moscow withdrew from talks with Australia and the Netherlands, accusing both countries of not wanting to establish what really happened when MH17 was brought down by a Russian-made missile fired from territory held by pro-Russian rebels.
All those on board, including 39 Australians, died.
Australian Strategic Policy Institute executive director Peter Jennings called the latest comments from the Russian Government the "height of hypocrisy".
"This is the Russia that was responsible for the shootdown of MH17 over Ukraine, the invasion of Crimea, support to [President Bashar al-] Assad in Syria in murderous ways," he said.
"To hear these comments from the Russian Foreign Ministry just tells me the height of hypocrisy that the Russians are prepared to go to in their sustained attack on the Western democracies."
The Australian Government has so far not responded to the Russian Foreign Ministry's remarks.
Australia praised for its handling of the coronavirus pandemic by a top doctor
Australia's handling of the coronavirus pandemic has been hailed as the 'epitome of success' by America's top doctor.
Dr Anthony Fauci said Australia's ability to 'uniformly implement' public health measures, as well as ordinary citizens embracing lockdown, helped to save it from the worst of the pandemic.
'What Australia has done is the proof of the pudding,' Dr Fauci, who has been helping to lead America's response to the pandemic, said.
'When you uniformly implement public health measures, be that full lockdown or partial lockdown, you can turn off the surges. That worked,' he told The Australian.
Shortly after the World Health Organisation officially declared a pandemic on March 12, Australia initiated a number of strict lockdown measures to prevent the spread of the disease.
The borders were closed to all non-residents on March 20 and social distancing rules were introduced. Hospitality venues, such as pubs, cafes, restaurants and clubs were forced to close, offering a take away service only.
The rules saw the number of cases drop significantly by April, with fewer than 20 cases reported each day by the end of the month across the whole country, allowing the tougher restrictions to be eased.
A second wave in Victoria in May was brought under control by a strict 112-day lockdown. The state celebrated 31 days with no new COVID-19 cases or deaths on Sunday.
Australians have since been reaping the rewards with daily life returning to normal with only a few restrictions in place.
Dr Fauci said much of the success came down to Australians accepting lockdowns were part of the greater public health benefit.
He said part of the struggle for the US was the country's individualistic spirit.
'It's clear that countries and states that do not embrace restrictions do not blunt the curve as well as those that do. The epitome of that has been the success of Australia,' he said.
Dr Fauci raised fears that the worst may be yet to come after the country celebrated Thanksgiving over the the weekend.
Renewables-loving NSW energy minister takes an extraordinary swipe at mining 'barons' despite 80% of power during 40C heatwave coming from coal
New South Wales energy minister Matt Kean took a swipe at 'coal barons' on Sunday after passing new laws to tackle climate change - even though coal still provides most of the state's power.
Mr Kean boasted that his plan to encourage $32billion of private investment in renewable energy projects by 2030 was a slap in the face for 'vested interests.'
In a tweet on Sunday morning, he wrote: 'Those powerful vested interests - the big energy money, the coal barons, that have decided energy policy in this country for generations - now will have to face policy settings that favour the community not their own self interest.'
Suggesting that coal power has no future, the Liberal energy minster said coal magnates complaining about his plan were like 'Blockbuster complaining about Netflix'.
Just 24 hours earlier coal was providing 80 per cent of the state's electricity as residents fired up their air-conditioning units to tackle sweltering 40C temperatures, reported the Daily Telegraph.
Mr Kean's comments were met with criticism from opponents who say his new laws, supported by Labor and the Greens, may push up power prices.
NSW One Nation leader told Daily Mail Australia that far from being a blow to vested interests, the energy bill which passed on Friday was a huge win for the major players in the renewables sector.
'It certainly represents guaranteed income for renewable energy companies and their lobbyists, paid for by electricity consumers,' he said.
The state government wants wind, pumped hydro and solar projects to replace four coal-fired power stations which are due to shut over the next 15 years.
Mr Kean says the plan - which will create Renewable Energy Zones in Dubbo and the south west - will cut household bills by $130 and small business bills by $430 a year between 2023 and 2040.
The plan will support 12 gigawatts of renewable energy and two gigawatts of storage, such as pumped hydro, and reduce carbon emissions by 90 million tonnes to 2030.
Landholders are expected to pocket $1.5 billion in rent by 2042 for hosting new infrastructure.
More than 10,000 construction and ongoing jobs will be created by 2026, with an estimated 2800 ongoing jobs in 2030, the government says.
Coal-fired power made up 77 per cent of NSW's total electricity generation in 2019 - higher than the national average of 56 per cent - but four of the state's five plants will stop by 2035.
Renewables made up 19 per cent.
The Australian Energy Council warned the government's intervention may encourage too many energy assets to be built in places where they may not be needed.
'This would ultimately mean higher costs for households,' it said in statement.
Tony Wood, energy director at the Grattan Institute, said the plan takes risk away from investors and transfers them to consumers who would potentially foot larger bills.
A portait of Gladys
Tucked away at the end of a long profile piece on Gladys Berejiklian prior to the last election was her admission - or perhaps it was intended as a brag - that she does not even take Panadol.
It sounded ridiculous (and frankly it was) but it was also classic Berejiklian: tough, determined to power through and incorruptible even by something as innocuous as paracetamol.
That version of the Premier seems almost foreign now. In six weeks, we have learnt about her long-term, on-again-off-again relationship with disgraced former MP Daryl Maguire and discovered that her office shredded and deleted key documents related to the council grants scandal. We have seen her shrug off her failure to isolate while awaiting the results of a rapid COVID-19 test and dismiss pork barrelling on the basis that everyone does it and it's not illegal.
Yet the available polling shows Berejiklian's approval rating is persistently high (64 per cent in the latest Ipsos survey), driven by her capable handling of the pandemic, which has seen NSW dodge a second wave and maintain basic freedoms while doing more than any other state to quarantine Australians returning from overseas.
Clearly, that's what matters most to the public. But in Parliament, more than a few eyebrows are being raised about the Premier's judgment. Her style of governance has evolved from cautious to confident, but on occasions it seems to be progressing into the realm of careless and cavalier.
Berejiklian's environment minister, Matt Kean, says she has been emboldened by her success in steering the state through COVID. "Everyone's always known her to be smart, diligent and hard-working," he says. "She now believes in herself as much as the rest of us around her do ... She's just won the climate wars in NSW. This is not the form of someone that doesn't want to use her political capital to make our country better."
Like many of the Premier's close observers, Kean concedes there have been mistakes, but chalks them up to a busy and bruising year that started with last summer's bushfires and proceeded into the pandemic, the koala wars and then a personal crisis.
"I think they're mistakes that happen when you've had a tough year and it has been a long year ... when you're tired and stressed and have been under enormous pressure for a very long time. If anyone is entitled to make a slip it's probably Gladys Berejiklian," Kean says.
At times the exhaustion is visible. In the words of one person from outside politics who attended a function with the Premier during the week: "She looked like somebody who last slept in April".
However, some colleagues are growing concerned. One senior Liberal lamented the show had been "all over the place" lately and says they were preparing to approach her with her some "blunt advice", including that she consider taking a holiday.
Kean agreed. "You can't keep functioning at that pace, at that level without needing a rest," he says. "No one would begrudge her for going away and having a nice island retreat."
There can be a fine line between being confident and careless. Confidence might be Berejiklian's intervention, revealed in last week's Sun-Herald, calling on Prime Minister Scott Morrison to let NSW take in 1000 international students and specialist workers each week instead of returning Australian travellers.
Carelessness, on the other hand, might be the Premier flouting the health guidelines by not isolating while awaiting the results of her budget day COVID-19 test. It caused a world of unnecessary pain for the government and health officials, and left frontbencher Stuart Ayres contorting himself to justify his boss's actions on the ABC's Q+A.
Her hoarse throat barely counted as a symptom and the state had already gone more than a week without a new coronavirus case, so there was negligible health risks in Berejiklian's decision. The risks were entirely political.
Many government sources The Sun-Herald spoke with for this story also complained about the operation of the Premier's office and her media strategy.
Berejiklian rankled senior colleagues last week when her office briefed select media outlets about the slated easing of COVID-19 restrictions ahead of a planned Wednesday announcement.
Several ministers were pushing for the government to wind back density limits to two square metres per person at large hospitality venues, only to be told the Premier had already informed the media of this, her preferred outcome.
Then on Thursday Berejiklian "said the quiet part loud and the loud part quiet", to borrow a phrase from The Simpsons, when she admitted both sides of government engaged in pork barrelling their favoured electorates and even though it might seem distasteful, it wasn't illegal.
"Governments in all positions make commitments to the community in order to curry favour," she said. "I think that's part of the political process whether we like it or not."
One might appreciate the honesty but the statement does raise further questions. For one, if the pork barrelling involved in the $250 million council grants fund was routine and unremarkable, why did the Premier's office shred the evidence?
Altogether, it was a clumsy week and the Premier's most senior colleagues were alarmed. Deputy Premier John Barilaro says the recent string of mistakes was "not the Gladys I know".
"She's had a big year, she's led us through recovery," he says. "The reality here is Gladys is a very disciplined, cautious leader, but we probably haven't seen that in the last couple of days. A break would do her good."
Barilaro has previously defended pork barrelling for regional seats, even dubbing himself "Pork Barilaro". However, "that's what people would expect from me", he says. "But it's not her."
Those remarks are certain to irk the Deputy Premier's colleagues. "Barilaro gets to run around calling himself Pork Barilaro - now that's hubris," says one senior government MP, who did not want to be named.
The MP did not think Berejiklian was worn out. "She is copping it from all angles, eventually something is going to give. She's an absolute machine when it comes to work, but invariably you are going to have good and bad days in terms of your messaging ... but I wouldn't put it down to tiredness or needing a break."
Former NSW Liberal MP and deputy leader Bruce Baird says Berejiklian was only stating the obvious when she acknowledged pork barrelling was commonplace.
"One would always like to have some degree of balance but the reality of political life is when you're in government you tend to look after those areas that have been very loyal to your government, and that's a fact of life," he told The Sun-Herald. "People object to that, but it's the reality."
Baird, sometimes described as the father of Berejiklian's moderate faction, says it is possible for hubris to creep in to a government, particularly when a leader is "very popular". He doesn't think that's the case with this Premier, but says she may have lost patience with the media pressure.
"You get to a point where you just get sick of it, you speak your mind. On a psychological basis, if people keep on pursuing you, you finally get sick of it and you start to hand it back a bit."
Baird continued: "It's a bit like that song ... tell me what you want, what you really really want", referring to the Spice Girls' 1996 hit Wannabe.
Liberal upper house member Catherine Cusack, who the Premier sacked from her parliamentary secretary role this month after crossing the floor on the ''koala'' bill, says the Berejiklian government is fundamentally very good but is let down by a lack of political nous.
"I feel the government is cloistered on Gladys' reputation and the positives around her personally, and has not had a proper political strategy. Is there hubris? I think yes, probably - I would agree with that, including with Gladys."
Cusack has known Berejiklian for decades and says the Premier "hasn't changed at all". She has always been confident enough to make a firm decision - a skill not possessed by all leaders.
"Just because things have gone well doesn't mean that Gladys hasn't been taking risks," Cusack says. "There's pressure on Gladys that is new. I don't think she has changed, it's just that there's not much experience there in dealing with that pressure."
Cusack says Berejiklian has a lot of capable lawyers around her, such as ministers Mark Speakman and Damien Tudehope, who are good with law and policy. But she needs "smarter political advice".
"They're a good government and its performance speaks for itself," she says. "But unless it gets its act together politically they are going to get into trouble."
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE TIED)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
https://heofen.blogspot.com/ (MY OTHER BLOGS)
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For the notes appearing at the side of the original blog see HERE
Pictures put up on a blog sometimes do not last long. They stay up only as long as the original host keeps them up. Some newsapers keep their published pictures online for as little as a week. I therefore keep archives of all the pictures that I use. The recent archives are online and are in two parts:
Archive of side pictures here
Archive of this year's pictures in the body of the blog. Note that the filename of the picture is clickable and reflects the date on which the picture was posted. See here
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