Saturday, November 07, 2009
Rupert Murdoch voices his concerns about Kevin Rudd
Kevin Rudd is delusional if he thinks Australia can lead the world or act as a bridge between the US and China, according to Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corporation. He's very intelligent, he's very interesting, but he's kidding himself with the G20 - the grouping of the top 20 countries in the world, Mr Murdoch said.
"(President) Obama actually wants to cut the even more exclusive G8 to a G4 - and really, to a G2; just the US and China," Mr Murdoch said in a wide-ranging interview yesterday, the Herald Sun reports. "If Rudd thinks we can set an example for the rest of the world with a cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gas emissions - the ETS - all it would do is push up the cost of living in Australia and the rest of the world will laugh," he said. But is it hurting the country yet? No. But the Prime Minister should focus on running Australia.
Mr Murdoch said many difficulties had arisen from Mr Rudd making so much in the election campaign about his knowledge of China. It probably led the Chinese to expect too much from him, he said. "But I think he was right to disillusion them," he added immediately. And any idea that Australia could be a bridge between China and the US, that's "certainly delusional".
In another interview, Mr Murdoch has told The Weekend Australian that Mr Rudd is wasting time on spats with the media. Mr Murdoch's concerns follow public disagreements between Mr Rudd and editors at News Limited newspapers, including The Weekend Australian. "He's oversensitive and too sensitive for his own good," Mr Murdoch said. "I've said that to him, sympathetically. Politicians all over the world are paranoid about editorials and in their own interest they would be better employed reading something else, or albeit more laid back about it, put it that way."
Mr Rudd has accused News Limited of running vendettas against him and his government, citing things such as The Australian's scrutiny of the Rudd Government's "education revolution" and other stories, such as the Godwin Grech fake email affair.
SOURCE
Sea rise much slower than predicted
SEA levels on Australia's eastern seaboard are rising at less than a third of the rate that the New South Wales Government is predicting as it overhauls the state's planning laws and bans thousands of landowners from developing coastal sites. The Rees Government this week warned that coastal waters would rise 40cm on 1990 levels by 2050, with potentially disastrous effects. Even yesterday Kevin Rudd warned in a speech to the Lowy Institute that 700,000 homes and businesses, valued at up to $150 billion, were at risk from the surging tide.
However, if current sea-level rises continue, it would not be until about 2200 - another 191 years - before the east coast experienced the kind of increases that have been flagged. According to the most recent report by the Bureau of Meteorology's National Tidal Centre, issued in June, there has been an average yearly increase of 1.9mm in the combined net rate of relative sea level at Port Kembla, south of Sydney, since the station was installed in 1991. This is consistent with historical analysis showing that, throughout the 20th century, there was a modest rise in global sea levels of about 20cm, or 1.7mm per year on average.
By comparison, the NSW Government's projections - based on global modelling by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as CSIRO regional analysis - equate to a future rise of about 6.6mm a year. Such a projection has caused widespread concern for landowners and developers, derision from "climate sceptics" within the scientific community and even some head-scratching from Wollongong locals such as Kevin Court, 80.
"I have swum at this beach every day for the past 50 years, and nothing much changes here," Mr Court said yesterday as he emerged from the surf at Wollongong's North Beach, just a short paddle from the Port Kembla gauging station. "All this talk about rising sea levels - most of us old-timers haven't seen any change and we've been coming down here for decades. "A few years ago part of the bank at the back of the beach was eroded. But you look at it now, and all the grass has grown back over it. The water hasn't washed back there for years. "And that's nature. It's up and down, it comes and goes in cycles - nothing dramatic."
SOURCE
Incompetent African doctor stood down from public hospital
The cases of incompetent overseas doctors in Australian public hospitals never stop coming -- despite all the checks that are supposed to be done. Why? Because Australia does not train enough of its own doctors and public hospitals are desperate for staff
AUTHORITIES will investigate a doctor over concerns he was not fully qualified for his job and examine why it took a month for knowledge of a past criminal charge to reach the top. Queensland Health stood down Zimbabwe-trained Dr John Chibanda over concerns he was working outside the scope of his credentials at Emerald Hospital. The matter will be investigated by both the Health Quality and Complaints Commission and the state's Crime and Misconduct Commission.
Dr Chibanda, an Australian citizen, had previously worked at Katherine Hospital in the Northern Territory without incident. He started work in obstetrics at Emerald Hospital in late 2007 and was supervised due to the level of his experience. After complaints about the standard of his work around August 2008, he was stood down from obstetrics, but continued to work in emergency and other general areas of the hospital. He was again investigated after further complaints in May this year, and a Google search in late September turned up a criminal charge for fraud in Zimbabwe.
Health Minister Paul Lucas said Dr Chibanda was challenged about the information - which related to the fraudulent supply of a death certificate for insurance purposes - and he claimed the conviction had been quashed. "However, the form that one is required (to fill in) when one seeks registration as a doctor in Queensland clearly requires ... that one disclose not just criminal convictions but if one has ever been charged with a criminal offence," Mr Lucas said.
"I want to make it crystal clear. "I expect there to be a full and rigorous investigation of these matters. "If there is anyone who has misled, if the wrong thing has been done, then there will be no forgiveness, no mercy, there will be very, very strong action."
About a dozen complaints were made about Dr Chibanda - some from patients and some from nurses - but none relate to deaths or permanent injuries.
Also under investigation is why it took about a month for his criminal history to be reported to the top, with Queensland Health's centre for healthcare improvement chief Dr Tony O'Connell saying he only became aware of the matter this week.
Mr Lucas said the appropriate checks through medical bodies and referrals were done, in addition to an earlier Google search that had failed to pick up the fraud matter. "I would have thought that we would be bending over backwards to check these things," Mr Lucas said. "I would have thought that the relatively modest things that you can do in addition to the rigorous checks would be second nature, and I want it investigated as to why this happened."
Dr O'Connell said "a few dozen" obstetrics cases handled by Dr Chibanda and hundreds of other cases would be reviewed. Patients with concerns about treatment by the doctor were urged to come forward. Dr Chibanda is the second doctor to be stood down from Emerald Hospital within months. A doctor at the hospital was suspended in September over a disciplinary matter.
SOURCE
State headed for dumb, immoral future, warns teacher
And such problems are far from isolated to Queensland
A BRAVE Queensland teacher has spoken out against thousands of students and their parents who couldn't care less about education. Cooper Dawson, who has taught at 12 state primary schools across the Gold Coast and Cairns, says levels of apathy, petty crime and disrespect in classrooms are now so bad that Queensland faces a dumbed-down and immoral future.
While most teachers fear going public with such opinions, Mr Dawson, 38, says breaking the silence about pathetic learning attitudes and behaviours – often triggered and passively supported by parents – might be the only way to stimulate much-needed change. "As a teacher in an industry where the burnout rate is five years, I am taken aback, astounded and shocked by the behaviour and disinclination of students to learn," he said. "We are facing a generation of single-minded children equipped with little academic knowledge (through no fault of teachers) and wavering morals determined to ask or steal from society any tangible item. "And, remarkably, they believe they deserve it.
"The social behaviour of primary school children is hard to ignore when faced with the growing epidemic of school bullying and student suspensions. "Children from negative households and with parents who are disinterested or fail to see the importance of education are contributing to a cycle where their child is entering a world without the tools to become a positive part of society."
His view, backed in private by many teachers, principals and parents across the state, supports figures released by the State Government this year showing a 46 per cent spike in suspensions for "refusal to participate" from 2006 to 2008 (with 6620 last year). Over the same period, there was a 40 per cent spike in suspensions for "property misconduct" (with 3785 last year).
Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Association president Margaret Black said Mr Dawson's revelations and the suspension data were a reminder to parents and teachers to work together to solve the crisis. "There's nothing more powerful than a three-way (parent/teacher/child) partnership," she said.
A rapid rise in schoolyard bullying, including cyber-bullying, has also been documented this year, with an average of three students in each class bullied every day.
SOURCE
It's Rudd's fatal shore
Andrew Bolt comments on the illegal immigrants who come to Australia on overcrowded small boats -- some of which sink. The "Fatal shore" is an allusion to the fact that many of the original British immigrants to Australia died on the way because of the primitive sailing-ship technology of the time
TWELVE more dead. Now will the Rudd Government finally see that its "compassion" kills? The sinking on Sunday of a boat carrying Sri Lankan asylum seekers brings to 54 the number of boat people who have died this year trying to reach us. Yes, 54. That's the price of the "compassion" this Government showed last year by weakening the laws that once deterred boat people from risking their lives like this.
And don't tell me I have no right to be angry. I've warned a dozen times, in print and on air, that people would die as a consequence of what Rudd had done. Just last week I showed that 42 boat people had died already in sinkings off Malaysia and Indonesia, and in an explosion at Ashmore Reef, proving the Government had again deceived you in claiming there was "no evidence" of these deaths. Now we have these latest deaths - including two boys - and more will die, too, unless this deceitful and opportunistic Prime Minister undoes the mischief he has wrought.
No, I do not blame Rudd directly for these deaths. He didn't man the boats or sink them. But I do blame him directly for luring people into such lethal voyages through his sheer foolishness, political opportunism and vanity. And I blame him for then deceitfully disclaiming all responsibility.
Let's first nail the worst of those deceits - his claim that he's actually been "tough" on boat people, and this year's 12-fold increase in arrivals has nothing to do with his policies: That it's outrageous to suggest that he's luring people to their deaths. Well, look at the graph on this page, taken from the website of his own Department of Immigration.
See the circle? I've added that to mark the date in late July last year when Rudd revealed his most dramatic changes to the boat people laws. And see the number of illegal immigrants caught and detained immediately soar? Draw your own conclusion.
As for Rudd being "tough" on boat people, let's check what he actually did that day to instead persuade them their luck was in, and Australia once more a soft touch.
Rudd had already scrapped the temporary protection visas, which allowed us to send back refugees who'd got here by boat once their countries were again safe. He'd also scrapped the "Pacific Solution", under which boat people were sent to Nauru and Manus Island, with no guarantees they'd ever be let into Australia. And on July 29, he sent the biggest signal of all to show that unlike wicked John Howard, he was compassionate. Automatic detention of boat people was over. From now on, children and adults cleared of security risk would no longer be held. They'd be free to stay at large while the government worked out if they really were refugees. What's more, the onus of proof would be switched: rather than making boat people prove they were no threat, the government would have to prove they were to keep them in detention.
How the Left cheered! How journalists praised. How rights activists sighed they could feel proud again. And how the people smugglers pricked up their ears.
Rudd denies he went weak, but this is how his grand gesture in July was hailed at the time by constitutional law expert Professor Clive Williams, a human rights activist and candidate for Labor pre-selection, who summed up well the mood in Rudd's ranks: "A clear break has been made from the Howard era ... this risk-based approach is more compassionate ... "
Rudd was warned against this "clear break", of course, and not just by some who-cares journalist. The Australian Federal Police, the International Organisation for Migration and Indonesian officials all said it gave people smugglers a green flag.
Look at the graph again: he had. Or ask boat people themselves if they'd seen this signal - people who'd waited in Indonesia for months, even years, for some such sign. An Iraqi told the ABC: "Kevin Rudd - he's changed everything about refugee. If I go to Australia now, different." An Afghan told The Australian: "I know Kevin Rudd is the new PM ... he has tried to get more immigrants. I have heard that if someone arrives it is easy."
But Rudd was too intoxicated with the easy praise to heed such warnings. Too pleased with this chance to damn the Liberals as the nasty party which put children "behind barbed wire". Oh, how easily Labor preened and mocked back then, and how feebly the spineless Liberals took it.
In the very month that Rudd watered down the laws, the Labor head of a joint parliamentary committee on migration toured the detention centre at Christmas Island and declared it "an enormous white elephant". Michael Danby said his committee agreed with him, and was now wondering what to do with Howard's "stalag". Could they turn it into a tourist centre, perhaps?
Still laughing, Michael? Thanks to the great wave of boats unleashed in large part by your boss, this "stalag" at Christmas Island is so crammed that Rudd is now having to double its size, and has rushed over dongas once intended for Aboriginal communities.
Of course, Rudd is trying to dodge any blame. Here's his latest spin to explain the surge in boats: "What we're faced with in Sri Lanka is 260,000 people displaced because of the civil war." More deceit, I'm afraid. In fact, that war ended in May with the defeat of a terrorist group the Tamil Tigers. Sri Lanka is now safer, not more dangerous, both for the Tamils and Sinhalese there.
While it's true that some Tamils, especially those connected with the Tigers regime, are now trying to leave Sri Lanka, not least for economic reasons, it's also true that many of the 78 rescued Tamil boat people now refusing to leave our patrol ship Oceanic Viking have said they'd actually left their island years ago, and have spent up to five years in Indonesia, waiting for this chance to sail here. And let's not forget that many of the boats now coming are filled not with Tamils but Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and even, it seems, some Sri Lankan Muslims.
But it's the lie of Rudd's "compassion" that most needs puncturing before more people die. LET me give just one more example of how misapplied "compassion" can actually kill. The Oceanic Viking Tamils were rescued by Australia last month after issuing a fake SOS from their ship, after reportedly drilling holes in the hull. Likewise, 42 Afghans were rescued in April at Ashmore Reef and even granted permanent residency here after blowing up their own boat, killing five.
How compassionate we were both times. And foolishly so, in the case of the Afghans, who can now stay despite refusing to say which of them set off the deadly explosion.
But now check the price of this compassion. The Government has just ordered a coroner's inquiry into the deaths on Sunday of the 12 Sri Lankans to find why their boat suddenly capsized off the Cocos Islands, just as they and 27 others were about to be rescued in Australian search-and-rescue territory. Why the inquiry? Because some of those involved in the rescue claim the Sri Lankans may have deliberately sunk their own boat. Plus, of course, an inquiry lets Rudd say "no comment" in the meantime.
Yes, it's nice to seem good. But it's far finer to actually do good, even if it makes you look bad. Kevin Rudd chose last year to seem good, but with the dead now bobbing in our waters, he must be judged instead by the deadly consequences. What has his "compassion" - of a flashy kind so common in this Age of Seeming - actually brought?
SOURCE
Kevin Rudd is delusional if he thinks Australia can lead the world or act as a bridge between the US and China, according to Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corporation. He's very intelligent, he's very interesting, but he's kidding himself with the G20 - the grouping of the top 20 countries in the world, Mr Murdoch said.
"(President) Obama actually wants to cut the even more exclusive G8 to a G4 - and really, to a G2; just the US and China," Mr Murdoch said in a wide-ranging interview yesterday, the Herald Sun reports. "If Rudd thinks we can set an example for the rest of the world with a cap-and-trade system on greenhouse gas emissions - the ETS - all it would do is push up the cost of living in Australia and the rest of the world will laugh," he said. But is it hurting the country yet? No. But the Prime Minister should focus on running Australia.
Mr Murdoch said many difficulties had arisen from Mr Rudd making so much in the election campaign about his knowledge of China. It probably led the Chinese to expect too much from him, he said. "But I think he was right to disillusion them," he added immediately. And any idea that Australia could be a bridge between China and the US, that's "certainly delusional".
In another interview, Mr Murdoch has told The Weekend Australian that Mr Rudd is wasting time on spats with the media. Mr Murdoch's concerns follow public disagreements between Mr Rudd and editors at News Limited newspapers, including The Weekend Australian. "He's oversensitive and too sensitive for his own good," Mr Murdoch said. "I've said that to him, sympathetically. Politicians all over the world are paranoid about editorials and in their own interest they would be better employed reading something else, or albeit more laid back about it, put it that way."
Mr Rudd has accused News Limited of running vendettas against him and his government, citing things such as The Australian's scrutiny of the Rudd Government's "education revolution" and other stories, such as the Godwin Grech fake email affair.
SOURCE
Sea rise much slower than predicted
SEA levels on Australia's eastern seaboard are rising at less than a third of the rate that the New South Wales Government is predicting as it overhauls the state's planning laws and bans thousands of landowners from developing coastal sites. The Rees Government this week warned that coastal waters would rise 40cm on 1990 levels by 2050, with potentially disastrous effects. Even yesterday Kevin Rudd warned in a speech to the Lowy Institute that 700,000 homes and businesses, valued at up to $150 billion, were at risk from the surging tide.
However, if current sea-level rises continue, it would not be until about 2200 - another 191 years - before the east coast experienced the kind of increases that have been flagged. According to the most recent report by the Bureau of Meteorology's National Tidal Centre, issued in June, there has been an average yearly increase of 1.9mm in the combined net rate of relative sea level at Port Kembla, south of Sydney, since the station was installed in 1991. This is consistent with historical analysis showing that, throughout the 20th century, there was a modest rise in global sea levels of about 20cm, or 1.7mm per year on average.
By comparison, the NSW Government's projections - based on global modelling by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as CSIRO regional analysis - equate to a future rise of about 6.6mm a year. Such a projection has caused widespread concern for landowners and developers, derision from "climate sceptics" within the scientific community and even some head-scratching from Wollongong locals such as Kevin Court, 80.
"I have swum at this beach every day for the past 50 years, and nothing much changes here," Mr Court said yesterday as he emerged from the surf at Wollongong's North Beach, just a short paddle from the Port Kembla gauging station. "All this talk about rising sea levels - most of us old-timers haven't seen any change and we've been coming down here for decades. "A few years ago part of the bank at the back of the beach was eroded. But you look at it now, and all the grass has grown back over it. The water hasn't washed back there for years. "And that's nature. It's up and down, it comes and goes in cycles - nothing dramatic."
SOURCE
Incompetent African doctor stood down from public hospital
The cases of incompetent overseas doctors in Australian public hospitals never stop coming -- despite all the checks that are supposed to be done. Why? Because Australia does not train enough of its own doctors and public hospitals are desperate for staff
AUTHORITIES will investigate a doctor over concerns he was not fully qualified for his job and examine why it took a month for knowledge of a past criminal charge to reach the top. Queensland Health stood down Zimbabwe-trained Dr John Chibanda over concerns he was working outside the scope of his credentials at Emerald Hospital. The matter will be investigated by both the Health Quality and Complaints Commission and the state's Crime and Misconduct Commission.
Dr Chibanda, an Australian citizen, had previously worked at Katherine Hospital in the Northern Territory without incident. He started work in obstetrics at Emerald Hospital in late 2007 and was supervised due to the level of his experience. After complaints about the standard of his work around August 2008, he was stood down from obstetrics, but continued to work in emergency and other general areas of the hospital. He was again investigated after further complaints in May this year, and a Google search in late September turned up a criminal charge for fraud in Zimbabwe.
Health Minister Paul Lucas said Dr Chibanda was challenged about the information - which related to the fraudulent supply of a death certificate for insurance purposes - and he claimed the conviction had been quashed. "However, the form that one is required (to fill in) when one seeks registration as a doctor in Queensland clearly requires ... that one disclose not just criminal convictions but if one has ever been charged with a criminal offence," Mr Lucas said.
"I want to make it crystal clear. "I expect there to be a full and rigorous investigation of these matters. "If there is anyone who has misled, if the wrong thing has been done, then there will be no forgiveness, no mercy, there will be very, very strong action."
About a dozen complaints were made about Dr Chibanda - some from patients and some from nurses - but none relate to deaths or permanent injuries.
Also under investigation is why it took about a month for his criminal history to be reported to the top, with Queensland Health's centre for healthcare improvement chief Dr Tony O'Connell saying he only became aware of the matter this week.
Mr Lucas said the appropriate checks through medical bodies and referrals were done, in addition to an earlier Google search that had failed to pick up the fraud matter. "I would have thought that we would be bending over backwards to check these things," Mr Lucas said. "I would have thought that the relatively modest things that you can do in addition to the rigorous checks would be second nature, and I want it investigated as to why this happened."
Dr O'Connell said "a few dozen" obstetrics cases handled by Dr Chibanda and hundreds of other cases would be reviewed. Patients with concerns about treatment by the doctor were urged to come forward. Dr Chibanda is the second doctor to be stood down from Emerald Hospital within months. A doctor at the hospital was suspended in September over a disciplinary matter.
SOURCE
State headed for dumb, immoral future, warns teacher
And such problems are far from isolated to Queensland
A BRAVE Queensland teacher has spoken out against thousands of students and their parents who couldn't care less about education. Cooper Dawson, who has taught at 12 state primary schools across the Gold Coast and Cairns, says levels of apathy, petty crime and disrespect in classrooms are now so bad that Queensland faces a dumbed-down and immoral future.
While most teachers fear going public with such opinions, Mr Dawson, 38, says breaking the silence about pathetic learning attitudes and behaviours – often triggered and passively supported by parents – might be the only way to stimulate much-needed change. "As a teacher in an industry where the burnout rate is five years, I am taken aback, astounded and shocked by the behaviour and disinclination of students to learn," he said. "We are facing a generation of single-minded children equipped with little academic knowledge (through no fault of teachers) and wavering morals determined to ask or steal from society any tangible item. "And, remarkably, they believe they deserve it.
"The social behaviour of primary school children is hard to ignore when faced with the growing epidemic of school bullying and student suspensions. "Children from negative households and with parents who are disinterested or fail to see the importance of education are contributing to a cycle where their child is entering a world without the tools to become a positive part of society."
His view, backed in private by many teachers, principals and parents across the state, supports figures released by the State Government this year showing a 46 per cent spike in suspensions for "refusal to participate" from 2006 to 2008 (with 6620 last year). Over the same period, there was a 40 per cent spike in suspensions for "property misconduct" (with 3785 last year).
Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Association president Margaret Black said Mr Dawson's revelations and the suspension data were a reminder to parents and teachers to work together to solve the crisis. "There's nothing more powerful than a three-way (parent/teacher/child) partnership," she said.
A rapid rise in schoolyard bullying, including cyber-bullying, has also been documented this year, with an average of three students in each class bullied every day.
SOURCE
It's Rudd's fatal shore
Andrew Bolt comments on the illegal immigrants who come to Australia on overcrowded small boats -- some of which sink. The "Fatal shore" is an allusion to the fact that many of the original British immigrants to Australia died on the way because of the primitive sailing-ship technology of the time
TWELVE more dead. Now will the Rudd Government finally see that its "compassion" kills? The sinking on Sunday of a boat carrying Sri Lankan asylum seekers brings to 54 the number of boat people who have died this year trying to reach us. Yes, 54. That's the price of the "compassion" this Government showed last year by weakening the laws that once deterred boat people from risking their lives like this.
And don't tell me I have no right to be angry. I've warned a dozen times, in print and on air, that people would die as a consequence of what Rudd had done. Just last week I showed that 42 boat people had died already in sinkings off Malaysia and Indonesia, and in an explosion at Ashmore Reef, proving the Government had again deceived you in claiming there was "no evidence" of these deaths. Now we have these latest deaths - including two boys - and more will die, too, unless this deceitful and opportunistic Prime Minister undoes the mischief he has wrought.
No, I do not blame Rudd directly for these deaths. He didn't man the boats or sink them. But I do blame him directly for luring people into such lethal voyages through his sheer foolishness, political opportunism and vanity. And I blame him for then deceitfully disclaiming all responsibility.
Let's first nail the worst of those deceits - his claim that he's actually been "tough" on boat people, and this year's 12-fold increase in arrivals has nothing to do with his policies: That it's outrageous to suggest that he's luring people to their deaths. Well, look at the graph on this page, taken from the website of his own Department of Immigration.
See the circle? I've added that to mark the date in late July last year when Rudd revealed his most dramatic changes to the boat people laws. And see the number of illegal immigrants caught and detained immediately soar? Draw your own conclusion.
As for Rudd being "tough" on boat people, let's check what he actually did that day to instead persuade them their luck was in, and Australia once more a soft touch.
Rudd had already scrapped the temporary protection visas, which allowed us to send back refugees who'd got here by boat once their countries were again safe. He'd also scrapped the "Pacific Solution", under which boat people were sent to Nauru and Manus Island, with no guarantees they'd ever be let into Australia. And on July 29, he sent the biggest signal of all to show that unlike wicked John Howard, he was compassionate. Automatic detention of boat people was over. From now on, children and adults cleared of security risk would no longer be held. They'd be free to stay at large while the government worked out if they really were refugees. What's more, the onus of proof would be switched: rather than making boat people prove they were no threat, the government would have to prove they were to keep them in detention.
How the Left cheered! How journalists praised. How rights activists sighed they could feel proud again. And how the people smugglers pricked up their ears.
Rudd denies he went weak, but this is how his grand gesture in July was hailed at the time by constitutional law expert Professor Clive Williams, a human rights activist and candidate for Labor pre-selection, who summed up well the mood in Rudd's ranks: "A clear break has been made from the Howard era ... this risk-based approach is more compassionate ... "
Rudd was warned against this "clear break", of course, and not just by some who-cares journalist. The Australian Federal Police, the International Organisation for Migration and Indonesian officials all said it gave people smugglers a green flag.
Look at the graph again: he had. Or ask boat people themselves if they'd seen this signal - people who'd waited in Indonesia for months, even years, for some such sign. An Iraqi told the ABC: "Kevin Rudd - he's changed everything about refugee. If I go to Australia now, different." An Afghan told The Australian: "I know Kevin Rudd is the new PM ... he has tried to get more immigrants. I have heard that if someone arrives it is easy."
But Rudd was too intoxicated with the easy praise to heed such warnings. Too pleased with this chance to damn the Liberals as the nasty party which put children "behind barbed wire". Oh, how easily Labor preened and mocked back then, and how feebly the spineless Liberals took it.
In the very month that Rudd watered down the laws, the Labor head of a joint parliamentary committee on migration toured the detention centre at Christmas Island and declared it "an enormous white elephant". Michael Danby said his committee agreed with him, and was now wondering what to do with Howard's "stalag". Could they turn it into a tourist centre, perhaps?
Still laughing, Michael? Thanks to the great wave of boats unleashed in large part by your boss, this "stalag" at Christmas Island is so crammed that Rudd is now having to double its size, and has rushed over dongas once intended for Aboriginal communities.
Of course, Rudd is trying to dodge any blame. Here's his latest spin to explain the surge in boats: "What we're faced with in Sri Lanka is 260,000 people displaced because of the civil war." More deceit, I'm afraid. In fact, that war ended in May with the defeat of a terrorist group the Tamil Tigers. Sri Lanka is now safer, not more dangerous, both for the Tamils and Sinhalese there.
While it's true that some Tamils, especially those connected with the Tigers regime, are now trying to leave Sri Lanka, not least for economic reasons, it's also true that many of the 78 rescued Tamil boat people now refusing to leave our patrol ship Oceanic Viking have said they'd actually left their island years ago, and have spent up to five years in Indonesia, waiting for this chance to sail here. And let's not forget that many of the boats now coming are filled not with Tamils but Afghans, Pakistanis, Iraqis and even, it seems, some Sri Lankan Muslims.
But it's the lie of Rudd's "compassion" that most needs puncturing before more people die. LET me give just one more example of how misapplied "compassion" can actually kill. The Oceanic Viking Tamils were rescued by Australia last month after issuing a fake SOS from their ship, after reportedly drilling holes in the hull. Likewise, 42 Afghans were rescued in April at Ashmore Reef and even granted permanent residency here after blowing up their own boat, killing five.
How compassionate we were both times. And foolishly so, in the case of the Afghans, who can now stay despite refusing to say which of them set off the deadly explosion.
But now check the price of this compassion. The Government has just ordered a coroner's inquiry into the deaths on Sunday of the 12 Sri Lankans to find why their boat suddenly capsized off the Cocos Islands, just as they and 27 others were about to be rescued in Australian search-and-rescue territory. Why the inquiry? Because some of those involved in the rescue claim the Sri Lankans may have deliberately sunk their own boat. Plus, of course, an inquiry lets Rudd say "no comment" in the meantime.
Yes, it's nice to seem good. But it's far finer to actually do good, even if it makes you look bad. Kevin Rudd chose last year to seem good, but with the dead now bobbing in our waters, he must be judged instead by the deadly consequences. What has his "compassion" - of a flashy kind so common in this Age of Seeming - actually brought?
SOURCE
Friday, November 06, 2009
Woman forced to wait six-hours in public hospital emergency department after suffering suspected miscarriage
A WOMAN who presented at Geelong Hospital on Sunday after a suspected miscarriage was forced to wait six hours in emergency before being told her case was not serious enough to receive an ultrasound. The young couple last night told the Geelong Advertiser how they endured a frustrating day agonising over whether their first child was still alive as they waited in a crowded waiting room for medical attention.
Pregnant Jess, not her real name, was eventually seen late in the afternoon, but was told only urgent cases with a serious health risk were entitled to ultrasounds on weekends. Instead, Jess received a blood test, followed by a secondary blood test on Tuesday, revealing she had suffered a miscarriage.
Husband Rob, also not his real name, said they should have been told they were not eligible for an ultrasound upon arrival, saving his suffering wife six hours of languishing in a waiting room.
Barwon Health spokesperson Kate Nelson said all patients were categorised using the five triage categories identified by the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine. "Unfortunately, at times of high demand, which it was on this occasion, patients with a triage category of four may experience extended waiting times or stays in a cubicle," she said in a written statement.
SOURCE
Australian Govt policy 'benefits people smugglers'
Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has accused the government of outsourcing its immigration program to people smugglers as 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers continue to refuse to leave an Australian customs vessel.
Australia has been trying for almost two weeks to convince the ethnic Tamils to voluntarily leave the Oceanic Viking and enter the Tanjung Pinang Detention Centre on the Indonesian island of Bintan. Security clearance for the vessel to remain in Indonesia expires on Friday night and it is not yet known whether Indonesia will grant another extension.
Mr Turnbull said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's changes to the previous government's asylum-seeker policy had resulted in a system that benefited people smugglers. "He made those changes and what do we have? Thousands, 2,000, unauthorised arrivals, a surge in people smuggling. Our immigration program is being outsourced to the people smugglers," Mr Turnbull told ABC Radio on Friday.
He said he was reluctant to give advice about the current situation on which he was not fully briefed, but said his party had a clear policy on border protection. "If we have an election next year and I win and become the next prime minister, our border protection policies will be tougher and we will over time once again, as we have before, eliminate people smugglers," he said.
SOURCE
Student beats the Tax Office
Succeeds in claiming education expenses
UNIVERSITY undergraduates will be able to claim educational expenses as a tax deduction after a former student had a landmark win in the full Federal Court yesterday. Symone Anstis, a former Australian Catholic University student, was successful in her bid to claim $920 as self-education expenses after fighting the Taxation Office through a number of jurisdictions over three years.
While studying full-time to be a primary teacher, Ms Anstis worked as a part-time sales assistant for retail chain Katies, where she earned $14,946. She also received a youth allowance of $3622 during the 2006 income year. She claimed education expenses including travel costs, supplies for children during teaching rounds, student administration fees and depreciation of her computer.
The Tax Office rejected the claim, so Ms Anstis and her father, Michael, who is a qualified solicitor but does not work as a lawyer, fought it all the way to the hearing in Melbourne yesterday. The full court of the Federal Court upheld an earlier decision that because the former student had to be enrolled in a full-time course of study to get her assessable income of Youth Allowance, any costs incurred in the course of studying should be deductible.
''I am very happy with the outcome; my Dad did a very good job,'' she said. ''When you are a student everything makes a difference, every little bit helps. I think I will be able to get $300 back. I have been waiting a long time but it will go pretty quickly.''
Tax experts say hundreds of thousands of university students who receive Youth Allowance could benefit from the ruling, but they will need to generate a taxable income above $15,000. About 440,000 students receive Youth Allowance or Austudy. Many of these students would earn enough with the addition of part-time work to have a tax liability, according to Asssociate Professor Dale Boccabella from the University of NSW.
He said items including computer depreciation, stationery or textbooks could now be claimed as a deduction. In the past, the Taxation Office had made it clear it would not allow educational expenses to be claimed against welfare payments. "The decision further complicates tax administration in the area of self-education expenses, an area that is already riddled with difficulties," he said.
A spokeswoman for the Tax Office said the decision was being assessed.
SOURCE
Killers, rapists and other criminally insane patients walking streets of Melbourne
KILLERS, rapists and other criminally insane patients are walking the streets of Melbourne on outings to the movies, fishing and shopping. The controversial leave pass program at the Thomas Embling Hospital was hastily shut down after inmate Peko Lakovski allegedly committed a gruesome double murder with a carving knife. Lakovski was considered a low security risk and allowed out on day leave.
Almost a third of the inmates at the 118-bed facility in Fairfield have been approved for unescorted leave in the past year. The hospital sanctioned 8900 leave passes in 2008-09, most of them supervised trips for court and medical reasons. The hospital houses mentally ill patients including some offenders referred from the criminal justice system. Inmates include killers, sex offenders, arsonists and even a man who attempted to hijack a commercial plane. But the system allows the inmates to graduate from supervised walks within the grounds to unescorted visits to public locations.
A 2003 report said on a given day more than a dozen inmates are walking the streets near the hospital.
Embattled Minister for Mental Health Lisa Neville was forced to order a snap review of the hospital's internal processes after admitting that "something has gone wrong in this particular case". Ms Neville could not explain how patients in a secure psychiatric hospital, many of whom have killed before and are suffering with schizophrenia, had access to knives. Ms Neville has overseen a series of major departmental bungles in recent months including the shocking incest case with a man accused of fathering children with his daughter over a 30-year period.
The day leave program at Thomas Embling Hospital was cancelled after the alleged rampage left two people dead. The frenzied attacks were sparked by an argument between two room-mates and fishing buddies. Lakovski, 59 is facing charges of fatally stabbing Paul Notas, 36, and Raymond Splatt, 54. Police will allege Lakovski went on a stabbing rampage with a carving knife about 11pm on Wednesday in a low-security residential area of the hospital after getting into an argument with Splatt. It was alleged he then went to another room and repeatedly stabbed Notas.
The Department of Human Services increased security at the site in January but arrangements are again under review.
Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu said the "safety and security" of the community must be put ahead of the rehabilitation of patients.
Since the hospital opened in 2000, at least three inmates have escaped with a further 15 absconding while on day leave. Escapes by killers Neville Garden and Robert Debruyn while on the leave sparked major manhunts. Others on day release to escape include sex offender Sean Broaders and Peter John Evans, who both slipped their minders at the Austin Hospital.
A hospital insider told the Herald Sun in 2007 that David Mark Robinson, who tried to hijack a Qantas jet in May 2003, walked out of the hospital without minders. Robinson was armed with sharpened wooden stakes, a cigarette lighter and aerosol cans to use as flame-throwers when he threatened staff on the Melbourne-Launceston flight. A cabin manager and flight attendant thwarted his attempt to kill all 56 passengers.
There has been a significant increase in inmates applying for leave in the past decade.
The report into Wednesday night's rampage is expected to focus on the decision to allow Lakovski to move into Jardine Unit, which has the lowest level of security in the facility. Victoria's chief psychiatrist, Ruth Vine, admitted the leave assessment process was "not a perfect science" as it involved factors with regard to the patient and the community. All of the patients in the Jardine Unit are under active consideration for release. Dr Vine said patients must undergo a clinical assessment before they are moved to the unit, which has no security camera and allows patients access to kitchen knives.
SOURCE
A WOMAN who presented at Geelong Hospital on Sunday after a suspected miscarriage was forced to wait six hours in emergency before being told her case was not serious enough to receive an ultrasound. The young couple last night told the Geelong Advertiser how they endured a frustrating day agonising over whether their first child was still alive as they waited in a crowded waiting room for medical attention.
Pregnant Jess, not her real name, was eventually seen late in the afternoon, but was told only urgent cases with a serious health risk were entitled to ultrasounds on weekends. Instead, Jess received a blood test, followed by a secondary blood test on Tuesday, revealing she had suffered a miscarriage.
Husband Rob, also not his real name, said they should have been told they were not eligible for an ultrasound upon arrival, saving his suffering wife six hours of languishing in a waiting room.
Barwon Health spokesperson Kate Nelson said all patients were categorised using the five triage categories identified by the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine. "Unfortunately, at times of high demand, which it was on this occasion, patients with a triage category of four may experience extended waiting times or stays in a cubicle," she said in a written statement.
SOURCE
Australian Govt policy 'benefits people smugglers'
Federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull has accused the government of outsourcing its immigration program to people smugglers as 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers continue to refuse to leave an Australian customs vessel.
Australia has been trying for almost two weeks to convince the ethnic Tamils to voluntarily leave the Oceanic Viking and enter the Tanjung Pinang Detention Centre on the Indonesian island of Bintan. Security clearance for the vessel to remain in Indonesia expires on Friday night and it is not yet known whether Indonesia will grant another extension.
Mr Turnbull said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's changes to the previous government's asylum-seeker policy had resulted in a system that benefited people smugglers. "He made those changes and what do we have? Thousands, 2,000, unauthorised arrivals, a surge in people smuggling. Our immigration program is being outsourced to the people smugglers," Mr Turnbull told ABC Radio on Friday.
He said he was reluctant to give advice about the current situation on which he was not fully briefed, but said his party had a clear policy on border protection. "If we have an election next year and I win and become the next prime minister, our border protection policies will be tougher and we will over time once again, as we have before, eliminate people smugglers," he said.
SOURCE
Student beats the Tax Office
Succeeds in claiming education expenses
UNIVERSITY undergraduates will be able to claim educational expenses as a tax deduction after a former student had a landmark win in the full Federal Court yesterday. Symone Anstis, a former Australian Catholic University student, was successful in her bid to claim $920 as self-education expenses after fighting the Taxation Office through a number of jurisdictions over three years.
While studying full-time to be a primary teacher, Ms Anstis worked as a part-time sales assistant for retail chain Katies, where she earned $14,946. She also received a youth allowance of $3622 during the 2006 income year. She claimed education expenses including travel costs, supplies for children during teaching rounds, student administration fees and depreciation of her computer.
The Tax Office rejected the claim, so Ms Anstis and her father, Michael, who is a qualified solicitor but does not work as a lawyer, fought it all the way to the hearing in Melbourne yesterday. The full court of the Federal Court upheld an earlier decision that because the former student had to be enrolled in a full-time course of study to get her assessable income of Youth Allowance, any costs incurred in the course of studying should be deductible.
''I am very happy with the outcome; my Dad did a very good job,'' she said. ''When you are a student everything makes a difference, every little bit helps. I think I will be able to get $300 back. I have been waiting a long time but it will go pretty quickly.''
Tax experts say hundreds of thousands of university students who receive Youth Allowance could benefit from the ruling, but they will need to generate a taxable income above $15,000. About 440,000 students receive Youth Allowance or Austudy. Many of these students would earn enough with the addition of part-time work to have a tax liability, according to Asssociate Professor Dale Boccabella from the University of NSW.
He said items including computer depreciation, stationery or textbooks could now be claimed as a deduction. In the past, the Taxation Office had made it clear it would not allow educational expenses to be claimed against welfare payments. "The decision further complicates tax administration in the area of self-education expenses, an area that is already riddled with difficulties," he said.
A spokeswoman for the Tax Office said the decision was being assessed.
SOURCE
Killers, rapists and other criminally insane patients walking streets of Melbourne
KILLERS, rapists and other criminally insane patients are walking the streets of Melbourne on outings to the movies, fishing and shopping. The controversial leave pass program at the Thomas Embling Hospital was hastily shut down after inmate Peko Lakovski allegedly committed a gruesome double murder with a carving knife. Lakovski was considered a low security risk and allowed out on day leave.
Almost a third of the inmates at the 118-bed facility in Fairfield have been approved for unescorted leave in the past year. The hospital sanctioned 8900 leave passes in 2008-09, most of them supervised trips for court and medical reasons. The hospital houses mentally ill patients including some offenders referred from the criminal justice system. Inmates include killers, sex offenders, arsonists and even a man who attempted to hijack a commercial plane. But the system allows the inmates to graduate from supervised walks within the grounds to unescorted visits to public locations.
A 2003 report said on a given day more than a dozen inmates are walking the streets near the hospital.
Embattled Minister for Mental Health Lisa Neville was forced to order a snap review of the hospital's internal processes after admitting that "something has gone wrong in this particular case". Ms Neville could not explain how patients in a secure psychiatric hospital, many of whom have killed before and are suffering with schizophrenia, had access to knives. Ms Neville has overseen a series of major departmental bungles in recent months including the shocking incest case with a man accused of fathering children with his daughter over a 30-year period.
The day leave program at Thomas Embling Hospital was cancelled after the alleged rampage left two people dead. The frenzied attacks were sparked by an argument between two room-mates and fishing buddies. Lakovski, 59 is facing charges of fatally stabbing Paul Notas, 36, and Raymond Splatt, 54. Police will allege Lakovski went on a stabbing rampage with a carving knife about 11pm on Wednesday in a low-security residential area of the hospital after getting into an argument with Splatt. It was alleged he then went to another room and repeatedly stabbed Notas.
The Department of Human Services increased security at the site in January but arrangements are again under review.
Opposition Leader Ted Baillieu said the "safety and security" of the community must be put ahead of the rehabilitation of patients.
Since the hospital opened in 2000, at least three inmates have escaped with a further 15 absconding while on day leave. Escapes by killers Neville Garden and Robert Debruyn while on the leave sparked major manhunts. Others on day release to escape include sex offender Sean Broaders and Peter John Evans, who both slipped their minders at the Austin Hospital.
A hospital insider told the Herald Sun in 2007 that David Mark Robinson, who tried to hijack a Qantas jet in May 2003, walked out of the hospital without minders. Robinson was armed with sharpened wooden stakes, a cigarette lighter and aerosol cans to use as flame-throwers when he threatened staff on the Melbourne-Launceston flight. A cabin manager and flight attendant thwarted his attempt to kill all 56 passengers.
There has been a significant increase in inmates applying for leave in the past decade.
The report into Wednesday night's rampage is expected to focus on the decision to allow Lakovski to move into Jardine Unit, which has the lowest level of security in the facility. Victoria's chief psychiatrist, Ruth Vine, admitted the leave assessment process was "not a perfect science" as it involved factors with regard to the patient and the community. All of the patients in the Jardine Unit are under active consideration for release. Dr Vine said patients must undergo a clinical assessment before they are moved to the unit, which has no security camera and allows patients access to kitchen knives.
SOURCE
Thursday, November 05, 2009
ZEG
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG thinks that Kevvy should admit that he has got it wrong with his handling of illegal immigrants
Prolonged degrees at Melbourne university not popular
Despite the spin. Melbourne is moving to the American model of a generalist first degree followed by specialized study only at the graduate level -- which increases the time you need to spend in order to get a useful qualification. Australia has always in the past followed the Scottish model -- which allows considerable specialization from Day 1.
MONASH University has again topped the Victorian first preference popularity polls while rival Melbourne University has suffered a steep fall as it transitions to its graduate model and cuts undergraduate courses.
Melbourne stresses that the fall is expected as it discontinues undergraduate courses in professions that are becoming graduate-only like law, dentistry and physiotherapy. But nevertheless, timely first preferences have dropped from 9771 last year to 8022 this year, a fall of 1749. That cuts its share of first preferences from 17 per cent to 13 per cent.
On the plus side Melbourne says first preferences for its "new generation" undergraduate degrees, that are to be the feeders to postgraduate study, are up by 3 per cent. But the drop in Melbourne's first preferences clearly indicates that many would-be students are prepared to look elsewhere so they can take professional disciplines at undergraduate level. But at over 8000, Melbourne's first preferences are still well above its 2010 undergraduate intake that will be limited to about 5000, in line with 2009.
In a statement Melbourne University's new provost John Dewar was upbeat, saying the numbers were "a welcome endorsement" of the new model.
Melbourne's Group of Eight rival Monash was buoyed by an 11.6 per cent rise in first preferences to 15,175, giving it 24 per cent market share.
Demand for places at Deakin University was also strong as its first preferences rose by 16 per cent to 9978 giving it 16 per cent market share.
La Trobe University secured a 15 per cent rise in first preferences to 6767, reversing its falling market share over the past two years. La Trobe's share of first preferences rose to 11 per cent from 10 per cent. At time of writing data from the other Victorian universities had yet to be released.
SOURCE
Australian government being conned by Tamil tall tales about persecution
By Michael Roberts (Adjunct associate professor of anthropology at the University of Adelaide)
AS a dual Australian Sri Lankan national, what has struck me most about the ongoing debate in Australia about Sri Lankan boat people is the abysmal ignorance about Sri Lanka's geography and distribution of peoples. This has led to the inability of Australians to put Tamil migration in its historical context and instead to uncritically accept tales of Tamil persecution and even genocide that are patently untrue.
Those known as Ceylon Tamils did not just begin migrating because of the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka. In fact, Tamil migration is a two-stage process and it has been under way for more than a century.
Ceylon Tamils began migrating from the north to the south in search of jobs from the late 19th century. By 1921, they constituted 11.5 per cent of the population in Colombo, while Indian Tamils (more recent migrants from the nearby state on the Indian mainland of Tamil Nadu) accounted for 13.4 per cent. So Tamils, (both Ceylonese and of more recent Indian origin), have resided in the city environs for generations. Some Ceylon Tamils have also been a segment of its Westernised elite. However, such status did not protect them during the mini-pogroms of 1958 and 1977 and the major pogrom of July 1983, which involved widespread assaults on Tamil persons and property in the south of the island.
It is worth noting that although the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had been formed in 1976, and the goal of an independent state of Eelam proclaimed that year, the pogrom of 1983 - which followed a deadly assault by Tigers on the military - is widely regarded as the start of the civil war.
While middle-class Tamils have, together with Burgher, Sinhalese and Muslim families, been participating in the migration from Sri Lanka in search of better employment and education for their children since the 50s, the big surge in migration occurred after July 1983.
Despite this migration, Colombo District has not been denuded of its Tamil population. The Tamil population as a whole rose from 11.2 per cent in 1981 to 12.2 per cent in 2001. The number in the metropolitan cluster in fact rose by 58,291 in that period. This is because migration to foreign lands has been exceeded by internal movements from the northern and eastern parts of the island, to escape the conflict and in search of better economic opportunities.
Tamils have been under-represented in state-sector employment for some time, no doubt at least in part due to positive discrimination in favour of Sinhalese and negative discrimination against Tamils. Remarkably, however, a handful of senior Tamil officers remained in the armed services, a minute proportion of the senior ranks, but notable in a context where one might anticipate a zero figure. Moreover, a number of Tamils are sprinkled through the mercantile sector and professions. Indeed, some of the richest entrepreneurs are Tamil. Such success, however, has not eliminated memories of July 1983 and the sense of political marginalisation among some Tamils.
Such sentiments encourage some Tamils to migrate; but in a fair proportion of cases, the desire to migrate is inspired by a concern for the educational prospects of their children and the monetary support provided by kinfolk who are already in some Western country. The migration of Tamils from the Jaffna Peninsula and Batticaloa regions to Colombo in the recent past, therefore, is often a first stage in a projected step outwards.
This second step, of outmigration, calls for patience. Not all can meet the strict criteria laid down in Australia for skilled migrants or family reunion. Some, therefore, seek the illegal pathway provided by people smugglers who take them to Italy or Australia. It is usually young males, mostly Sinhalese but also Tamils and Muslims, who take the sea lanes by trawler to Italy.
It appears recently a few families elected to fly to Malaysia where they boarded the Jaya Lestari. This was a costly exercise. It also required passports and visas. It is unlikely that any of the Tamils (numbers uncertain) who slipped out of the internally displaced persons camps by, say, July could have secured the necessary papers in two months, unless they had connections with the LTTE or criminals engaged in forgery. In view of all the above, my conjecture is that Brindha, the tearful nine-year-old filmed by the ABC pleading for asylum, and her family did not spend time "in the jungle" as they claimed and were not fleeing the IDP camps, but are much more likely to be from the Tamil communities of Jaffna or Colombo. This is not to say they should be refused admission to Australia as migrants, simply that they are unlikely to be refugees.
Australians engaged in public debate about Sri Lanka need to be better informed. People such as Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young have uncritically accepted "the stories of the conditions in the camps . . . of people being persecuted and executed simply because they say, 'We don't want to be here any more' ". The fact is there is absolutely no evidence that people are being persecuted, much less executed. There is a vital distinction between political dissatisfaction and a well-founded fear of persecution, and Australians need to recognise that what is driving Tamil boatpeople is a mix of political grievance and economic hope, which is inspiring migratory moves along uncomfortable, and even perilous, paths.
SOURCE
Being overweight blamed on food, as usual
The fact that obsessive "safety" rules now ban many traditional childhood activities and thus reduce exercise is rarely mentioned. And politically correct bans on anybody "winning" are very bad for sport. So it is in fact government meddling that has created much of the problem and abolishing the meddling would be the surest path to solving it
It's the weighty issue that can no longer be ignored and one that is being blamed for an alarming rise in obesity among young girls. New research released yesterday shows that tweens are wearing their food choices on their waistlines, setting themselves up to be overweight as adults and suffer major health problems such as infertility.
The muffin top, made famous by the TV show Kath and Kim, is now the norm for teen girls who are between 5-20kg overweight, with one in three girls aged between nine and 13 overweight or obese.
Health experts yesterday warned that the sensitive issue could no longer be ignored, and had been avoided in the past out of fear it could lead to eating disorders. "It is a particular age group that has been overlooked and there needs to be more focus because they are much more in control of their food choices," Associate Dean of Clinical and Molecular Medicine at Flinders University Professor Lynne Cobiac said. "If they are overweight now, most, but not all, will often go on to be overweight when they are adults and they could [COULD being the operative word. Most fat people do NOT get diabetes] develop diabetes, heart disease and even cancer. It's really important that we understand what is influencing their choices so we can help them to be healthy, and set them on the right path."
Professor Cobiac's research found that by age 12, girls are doing almost no exercise, compounding weight problems. As they grow older, girls become more body conscious, restricting meals or overeating and developing disorders. Girls fall into two dietary patterns, eating meat, fruit and vegetables - or snacks, no meat and vegetables. Those on the snack, no meat and vegetable diet eat smaller lighter meals, characterised by more cereals, chocolate, fried chips and soft drinks.
Professor Cobiac's findings, based on the 2007 National Children's Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey, reveal that at least 30 per cent of girls are overweight before they enter high school. "Part of the explanation is that they are pre-pubescent and that can sometimes increase weight," she said. "What we found is that they are having a high fat diet on weekends and in school holidays." In some cases, girls were starving themselves during the school day but then "demolishing a pack of Tim Tams" when they got home.
What is concerning experts is the drastic change in girls' attitudes towards sport in high school. Paediatric nutritionist at The Children's Hospital at Westmead Susie Burrell said this was an age group that had been neglected in the past.
SOURCE
Traffic engineering stupidity
I must say that anyone who has driven in Los Angeles must wonder why left turns at red lights are not allowed in Australia. Such turns work well and do speed up traffic. It's just bureaucratic fear of change that obstructs reform
RED lights cost precious fuel. Yet Queenslanders are still not allowed to turn left on the red. Queenslanders have to cop another set of traffic lights for almost every new housing or shopping centre development dotted across the southeast. And stop at isolated intersections in the middle of the night when flashing amber lights could suffice.
Queenslanders still have to stop at pedestrian crossings where there is not a person in sight; when someone has pushed the button and scurried across before the walk signal.
How come Los Angeles' drivers are allowed - all by themselves - to work out a four-, even five-way intersection with just a set of stop signs? How come there, in one of the most motorised cities on Earth, drivers across six lanes will stop for simple flashing pedestrian lights - when there is a pedestrian?
Then, back here, there is the business (or not) of synchronisation of traffic lights. In all the discussions about saving fossil fuel, in all the mandates hurled at car manufacturers and drivers, there appears to be little talk about the role of traffic engineers and planners and common sense. As efficient as modern cars can be, stop-start traffic guzzles fuel. Decelerating, accelerating costs energy.
At least the state and Brisbane City Council are working towards a single system of traffic lights with some 1400 sets soon to be controlled by one management system, at an estimated cost of $6 million. A synchronised trial at a dozen lights in the Indooroopilly area found travel times down 13 per cent during weekday peak periods and 17 per cent on weekends. Hallelujah. Less travel time equates to less fuel used.
Anecdotal evidence suggests a two-litre fuel saving over 10km of commute in school holidays when Brisbane roads are less congested.
Still, too many traffic controls and too many rules are framed for the lowest common denominator. Rather than educating drivers, we dumb them down. Every K over is a killer? That's trite. And tripe. But that's veering off the subject.
If we are going to have motorised transport, even if it becomes all-electric (and to save the planet, that power must come from non-polluting sources), we need progress to be as smooth as possible down the road. This should mean less stop-start traffic. Why do we have 10 cars idling either side of a minor street while one or two cars dribble out of a shopping centre? It should mean cars turning left, with care, at red lights.
It should mean fewer traffic lights, less roadside signage screaming dire threats, more 7am-7pm clearways to stop wastage as motorists brake and swerve around parked cars.
Dutch civil engineer Hans Moderman had radical ideas about modern traffic. His view was to make drivers more responsible for their own actions by removing most traditional road markings and signs, creating spaces shared by all. Moderman's reasoning was that people became more civilised, more thoughtful about the right-of-way principle. Moderman, who died early last year, managed to engineer 100 of these shared spaces across his native country. Most saw accidents and incidents drop.
So, with less regulation, road users of all types can become a little more caring and sharing. More adult. And it would save fuel and frayed tempers as Queensland's summer of congestion approaches.
SOURCE
A truly heartening story
Doctor cures 'Baby Z' of molybdenum cofactor deficiency in medical world first. Pity about the bureaucratic hurdles, though. The baby would have done better if the drug could have been given immediately
A MELBOURNE baby given no chance of survival has amazed doctors after being saved with one of the biggest long shots in medical history. "Baby Z's" brain started virtually dissolving soon after she was born 18 months ago because she had too much toxic sulphite in her system.
But her parents and doctors refused to give in to the one-in-a-million genetic condition and stumbled on a highly experimental drug. The Herald Sun can reveal treatment began a month after she was born and within days Baby Z "woke up". "It was really like awakening - it was just bang, and she was switched on," pioneering neonatologist Dr Alex Veldman said.
Baby Z's overjoyed mother said she had grown into a happy and determined little girl. "She is absolutely delightful and as stubborn as anything - I don't know where she gets that from," she said. "She has just started saying a few words and is constantly moving around. "Every day just gets better and better. We look at her every day and just think, 'Wow'."
The first person to be cured of molybdenum cofactor deficiency - a condition that poisons the brain and kills within months of birth - Baby Z has made world medical and legal history for Monash Children's at Southern Health. The child and her parents cannot be named for legal reasons and to protect their privacy. But her relieved mother told the Herald Sun she refused to accept her daughter would die, even when told she had no chance. "(The procedure) was a tiny bit of hope but, when you have nothing, that is a lot of hope. She might have one bad gene but she has a lot of other good and strong genes."
Soon after she was born in 2008, Baby Z's toxic sulphite levels were almost 30 times higher than normal and were dissolving her brain. After three weeks looking for answers, biochemist Dr Rob Gianello found a research paper by German plant biologist Prof Gunther Schwarz describing how he had developed an experimental drug that was able to save mice with the disease in 2004. The drug had hardly been used in animals and nobody had more than an educated guess at what it would do in a human.
But Monash's Dr Alex Veldman contacted Prof Schwarz in Cologne and appealed to the hospital's ethics committee to use the drug on Baby Z. The long shot was backed because the only other option was a painful death.
The Office of the Public Advocate then called on special medical procedure powers - used just twice before - to convince the Family Court to allow the unique treatment to go ahead. Within an hour of the court's approval, Baby Z was given the drug.
Within hours of receiving her first daily dose of cPMP (cyclic pyranopterin monophosphate), tests showed Baby Z's sulphite levels immediately dropped from near 300 to below 100. Within three days they fell to the normal level of about 10.
Baby Z's neurological development is delayed due to some brain damage in the weeks it took to find the cure, but she is now improving. The full details of the treatment are now being analysed for a planned human trial of the medication at Southern Health. Victorian Public Advocate Colleen Pearce said she was thrilled everything had fallen into place for Baby Z and her family.
SOURCE
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG thinks that Kevvy should admit that he has got it wrong with his handling of illegal immigrants
Prolonged degrees at Melbourne university not popular
Despite the spin. Melbourne is moving to the American model of a generalist first degree followed by specialized study only at the graduate level -- which increases the time you need to spend in order to get a useful qualification. Australia has always in the past followed the Scottish model -- which allows considerable specialization from Day 1.
MONASH University has again topped the Victorian first preference popularity polls while rival Melbourne University has suffered a steep fall as it transitions to its graduate model and cuts undergraduate courses.
Melbourne stresses that the fall is expected as it discontinues undergraduate courses in professions that are becoming graduate-only like law, dentistry and physiotherapy. But nevertheless, timely first preferences have dropped from 9771 last year to 8022 this year, a fall of 1749. That cuts its share of first preferences from 17 per cent to 13 per cent.
On the plus side Melbourne says first preferences for its "new generation" undergraduate degrees, that are to be the feeders to postgraduate study, are up by 3 per cent. But the drop in Melbourne's first preferences clearly indicates that many would-be students are prepared to look elsewhere so they can take professional disciplines at undergraduate level. But at over 8000, Melbourne's first preferences are still well above its 2010 undergraduate intake that will be limited to about 5000, in line with 2009.
In a statement Melbourne University's new provost John Dewar was upbeat, saying the numbers were "a welcome endorsement" of the new model.
Melbourne's Group of Eight rival Monash was buoyed by an 11.6 per cent rise in first preferences to 15,175, giving it 24 per cent market share.
Demand for places at Deakin University was also strong as its first preferences rose by 16 per cent to 9978 giving it 16 per cent market share.
La Trobe University secured a 15 per cent rise in first preferences to 6767, reversing its falling market share over the past two years. La Trobe's share of first preferences rose to 11 per cent from 10 per cent. At time of writing data from the other Victorian universities had yet to be released.
SOURCE
Australian government being conned by Tamil tall tales about persecution
By Michael Roberts (Adjunct associate professor of anthropology at the University of Adelaide)
AS a dual Australian Sri Lankan national, what has struck me most about the ongoing debate in Australia about Sri Lankan boat people is the abysmal ignorance about Sri Lanka's geography and distribution of peoples. This has led to the inability of Australians to put Tamil migration in its historical context and instead to uncritically accept tales of Tamil persecution and even genocide that are patently untrue.
Those known as Ceylon Tamils did not just begin migrating because of the end of the civil war in Sri Lanka. In fact, Tamil migration is a two-stage process and it has been under way for more than a century.
Ceylon Tamils began migrating from the north to the south in search of jobs from the late 19th century. By 1921, they constituted 11.5 per cent of the population in Colombo, while Indian Tamils (more recent migrants from the nearby state on the Indian mainland of Tamil Nadu) accounted for 13.4 per cent. So Tamils, (both Ceylonese and of more recent Indian origin), have resided in the city environs for generations. Some Ceylon Tamils have also been a segment of its Westernised elite. However, such status did not protect them during the mini-pogroms of 1958 and 1977 and the major pogrom of July 1983, which involved widespread assaults on Tamil persons and property in the south of the island.
It is worth noting that although the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had been formed in 1976, and the goal of an independent state of Eelam proclaimed that year, the pogrom of 1983 - which followed a deadly assault by Tigers on the military - is widely regarded as the start of the civil war.
While middle-class Tamils have, together with Burgher, Sinhalese and Muslim families, been participating in the migration from Sri Lanka in search of better employment and education for their children since the 50s, the big surge in migration occurred after July 1983.
Despite this migration, Colombo District has not been denuded of its Tamil population. The Tamil population as a whole rose from 11.2 per cent in 1981 to 12.2 per cent in 2001. The number in the metropolitan cluster in fact rose by 58,291 in that period. This is because migration to foreign lands has been exceeded by internal movements from the northern and eastern parts of the island, to escape the conflict and in search of better economic opportunities.
Tamils have been under-represented in state-sector employment for some time, no doubt at least in part due to positive discrimination in favour of Sinhalese and negative discrimination against Tamils. Remarkably, however, a handful of senior Tamil officers remained in the armed services, a minute proportion of the senior ranks, but notable in a context where one might anticipate a zero figure. Moreover, a number of Tamils are sprinkled through the mercantile sector and professions. Indeed, some of the richest entrepreneurs are Tamil. Such success, however, has not eliminated memories of July 1983 and the sense of political marginalisation among some Tamils.
Such sentiments encourage some Tamils to migrate; but in a fair proportion of cases, the desire to migrate is inspired by a concern for the educational prospects of their children and the monetary support provided by kinfolk who are already in some Western country. The migration of Tamils from the Jaffna Peninsula and Batticaloa regions to Colombo in the recent past, therefore, is often a first stage in a projected step outwards.
This second step, of outmigration, calls for patience. Not all can meet the strict criteria laid down in Australia for skilled migrants or family reunion. Some, therefore, seek the illegal pathway provided by people smugglers who take them to Italy or Australia. It is usually young males, mostly Sinhalese but also Tamils and Muslims, who take the sea lanes by trawler to Italy.
It appears recently a few families elected to fly to Malaysia where they boarded the Jaya Lestari. This was a costly exercise. It also required passports and visas. It is unlikely that any of the Tamils (numbers uncertain) who slipped out of the internally displaced persons camps by, say, July could have secured the necessary papers in two months, unless they had connections with the LTTE or criminals engaged in forgery. In view of all the above, my conjecture is that Brindha, the tearful nine-year-old filmed by the ABC pleading for asylum, and her family did not spend time "in the jungle" as they claimed and were not fleeing the IDP camps, but are much more likely to be from the Tamil communities of Jaffna or Colombo. This is not to say they should be refused admission to Australia as migrants, simply that they are unlikely to be refugees.
Australians engaged in public debate about Sri Lanka need to be better informed. People such as Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young have uncritically accepted "the stories of the conditions in the camps . . . of people being persecuted and executed simply because they say, 'We don't want to be here any more' ". The fact is there is absolutely no evidence that people are being persecuted, much less executed. There is a vital distinction between political dissatisfaction and a well-founded fear of persecution, and Australians need to recognise that what is driving Tamil boatpeople is a mix of political grievance and economic hope, which is inspiring migratory moves along uncomfortable, and even perilous, paths.
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Being overweight blamed on food, as usual
The fact that obsessive "safety" rules now ban many traditional childhood activities and thus reduce exercise is rarely mentioned. And politically correct bans on anybody "winning" are very bad for sport. So it is in fact government meddling that has created much of the problem and abolishing the meddling would be the surest path to solving it
It's the weighty issue that can no longer be ignored and one that is being blamed for an alarming rise in obesity among young girls. New research released yesterday shows that tweens are wearing their food choices on their waistlines, setting themselves up to be overweight as adults and suffer major health problems such as infertility.
The muffin top, made famous by the TV show Kath and Kim, is now the norm for teen girls who are between 5-20kg overweight, with one in three girls aged between nine and 13 overweight or obese.
Health experts yesterday warned that the sensitive issue could no longer be ignored, and had been avoided in the past out of fear it could lead to eating disorders. "It is a particular age group that has been overlooked and there needs to be more focus because they are much more in control of their food choices," Associate Dean of Clinical and Molecular Medicine at Flinders University Professor Lynne Cobiac said. "If they are overweight now, most, but not all, will often go on to be overweight when they are adults and they could [COULD being the operative word. Most fat people do NOT get diabetes] develop diabetes, heart disease and even cancer. It's really important that we understand what is influencing their choices so we can help them to be healthy, and set them on the right path."
Professor Cobiac's research found that by age 12, girls are doing almost no exercise, compounding weight problems. As they grow older, girls become more body conscious, restricting meals or overeating and developing disorders. Girls fall into two dietary patterns, eating meat, fruit and vegetables - or snacks, no meat and vegetables. Those on the snack, no meat and vegetable diet eat smaller lighter meals, characterised by more cereals, chocolate, fried chips and soft drinks.
Professor Cobiac's findings, based on the 2007 National Children's Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey, reveal that at least 30 per cent of girls are overweight before they enter high school. "Part of the explanation is that they are pre-pubescent and that can sometimes increase weight," she said. "What we found is that they are having a high fat diet on weekends and in school holidays." In some cases, girls were starving themselves during the school day but then "demolishing a pack of Tim Tams" when they got home.
What is concerning experts is the drastic change in girls' attitudes towards sport in high school. Paediatric nutritionist at The Children's Hospital at Westmead Susie Burrell said this was an age group that had been neglected in the past.
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Traffic engineering stupidity
I must say that anyone who has driven in Los Angeles must wonder why left turns at red lights are not allowed in Australia. Such turns work well and do speed up traffic. It's just bureaucratic fear of change that obstructs reform
RED lights cost precious fuel. Yet Queenslanders are still not allowed to turn left on the red. Queenslanders have to cop another set of traffic lights for almost every new housing or shopping centre development dotted across the southeast. And stop at isolated intersections in the middle of the night when flashing amber lights could suffice.
Queenslanders still have to stop at pedestrian crossings where there is not a person in sight; when someone has pushed the button and scurried across before the walk signal.
How come Los Angeles' drivers are allowed - all by themselves - to work out a four-, even five-way intersection with just a set of stop signs? How come there, in one of the most motorised cities on Earth, drivers across six lanes will stop for simple flashing pedestrian lights - when there is a pedestrian?
Then, back here, there is the business (or not) of synchronisation of traffic lights. In all the discussions about saving fossil fuel, in all the mandates hurled at car manufacturers and drivers, there appears to be little talk about the role of traffic engineers and planners and common sense. As efficient as modern cars can be, stop-start traffic guzzles fuel. Decelerating, accelerating costs energy.
At least the state and Brisbane City Council are working towards a single system of traffic lights with some 1400 sets soon to be controlled by one management system, at an estimated cost of $6 million. A synchronised trial at a dozen lights in the Indooroopilly area found travel times down 13 per cent during weekday peak periods and 17 per cent on weekends. Hallelujah. Less travel time equates to less fuel used.
Anecdotal evidence suggests a two-litre fuel saving over 10km of commute in school holidays when Brisbane roads are less congested.
Still, too many traffic controls and too many rules are framed for the lowest common denominator. Rather than educating drivers, we dumb them down. Every K over is a killer? That's trite. And tripe. But that's veering off the subject.
If we are going to have motorised transport, even if it becomes all-electric (and to save the planet, that power must come from non-polluting sources), we need progress to be as smooth as possible down the road. This should mean less stop-start traffic. Why do we have 10 cars idling either side of a minor street while one or two cars dribble out of a shopping centre? It should mean cars turning left, with care, at red lights.
It should mean fewer traffic lights, less roadside signage screaming dire threats, more 7am-7pm clearways to stop wastage as motorists brake and swerve around parked cars.
Dutch civil engineer Hans Moderman had radical ideas about modern traffic. His view was to make drivers more responsible for their own actions by removing most traditional road markings and signs, creating spaces shared by all. Moderman's reasoning was that people became more civilised, more thoughtful about the right-of-way principle. Moderman, who died early last year, managed to engineer 100 of these shared spaces across his native country. Most saw accidents and incidents drop.
So, with less regulation, road users of all types can become a little more caring and sharing. More adult. And it would save fuel and frayed tempers as Queensland's summer of congestion approaches.
SOURCE
A truly heartening story
Doctor cures 'Baby Z' of molybdenum cofactor deficiency in medical world first. Pity about the bureaucratic hurdles, though. The baby would have done better if the drug could have been given immediately
A MELBOURNE baby given no chance of survival has amazed doctors after being saved with one of the biggest long shots in medical history. "Baby Z's" brain started virtually dissolving soon after she was born 18 months ago because she had too much toxic sulphite in her system.
But her parents and doctors refused to give in to the one-in-a-million genetic condition and stumbled on a highly experimental drug. The Herald Sun can reveal treatment began a month after she was born and within days Baby Z "woke up". "It was really like awakening - it was just bang, and she was switched on," pioneering neonatologist Dr Alex Veldman said.
Baby Z's overjoyed mother said she had grown into a happy and determined little girl. "She is absolutely delightful and as stubborn as anything - I don't know where she gets that from," she said. "She has just started saying a few words and is constantly moving around. "Every day just gets better and better. We look at her every day and just think, 'Wow'."
The first person to be cured of molybdenum cofactor deficiency - a condition that poisons the brain and kills within months of birth - Baby Z has made world medical and legal history for Monash Children's at Southern Health. The child and her parents cannot be named for legal reasons and to protect their privacy. But her relieved mother told the Herald Sun she refused to accept her daughter would die, even when told she had no chance. "(The procedure) was a tiny bit of hope but, when you have nothing, that is a lot of hope. She might have one bad gene but she has a lot of other good and strong genes."
Soon after she was born in 2008, Baby Z's toxic sulphite levels were almost 30 times higher than normal and were dissolving her brain. After three weeks looking for answers, biochemist Dr Rob Gianello found a research paper by German plant biologist Prof Gunther Schwarz describing how he had developed an experimental drug that was able to save mice with the disease in 2004. The drug had hardly been used in animals and nobody had more than an educated guess at what it would do in a human.
But Monash's Dr Alex Veldman contacted Prof Schwarz in Cologne and appealed to the hospital's ethics committee to use the drug on Baby Z. The long shot was backed because the only other option was a painful death.
The Office of the Public Advocate then called on special medical procedure powers - used just twice before - to convince the Family Court to allow the unique treatment to go ahead. Within an hour of the court's approval, Baby Z was given the drug.
Within hours of receiving her first daily dose of cPMP (cyclic pyranopterin monophosphate), tests showed Baby Z's sulphite levels immediately dropped from near 300 to below 100. Within three days they fell to the normal level of about 10.
Baby Z's neurological development is delayed due to some brain damage in the weeks it took to find the cure, but she is now improving. The full details of the treatment are now being analysed for a planned human trial of the medication at Southern Health. Victorian Public Advocate Colleen Pearce said she was thrilled everything had fallen into place for Baby Z and her family.
SOURCE
Wednesday, November 04, 2009
Seeing through the hoax of the century
Janet Albrechtsen
INCREASINGLY, the road to Copenhagen resembles a suburban street on Halloween with the number of climate change freak shows and stunts reaching a nadir in recent weeks. Nicholas Stern says we should turn vegetarian in order to combat climate change. If you must eat meat, eat kangaroos, says Ross Garnaut, because marsupials emit negligible amounts of methane. And that champagne you drank on Melbourne Cup day? Scientists scolded us with a report that a 750ml bottle of bubbly could produce 100 million bubbles, releasing five litres of carbon dioxide.
Yet far from rallying people to the cause of immediate action on climate change, every new cri de coeur may be turning people away. Could it be that those derided as the great unwashed are beginning to ask more questions than their smart political leaders or the bastions of intellectual curiosity in the media?
Late last month, activists gathered at Sydney Opera House to listen to Sydney mayor Clover Moore announce that “the time for talk is past”. “Already we know that this building, our Opera House, for decades a symbol of optimism and the human spirit, is under threat from global warming,” she says.
The Opera House under threat? That would be from rising sea levels, right? Just like the small island nation of Maldives where, last month, the president conducted a cabinet meeting underwater to remind the world that his country would be rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels. Kitted out in full scuba-diving outfits, Mohamed Nasheed and his ministers sat at a table underwater off the coast of the capital of Male. As planned, the president’s stunt made headlines across the globe. Send us money - and lots of it - is his message. The media love stunts. They are so easy to report.
Sadly, the media is not inquisitive enough to report those who question the circus acts of climate change. A week after the Maldives underwater show, Nils-Axel Morner - a leading world authority on sea levels - wrote an open letter to the president telling him that his stunt was “not founded in observational facts and true scientific judgments”.
Morner is a former professor who headed the department of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University and past president (1999-2003) of the International Union for Quaternary Research commission on sea level changes and coastal evolution. INQUA was founded in 1928 by scientists who aimed to improve the understanding of environmental change during the glacial ages through interdisciplinary research. In other words, the Swedish professor has gravitas when it comes to sea levels. Alas his letter did not make headlines. That is a shame. Morner says there is “no rational basis” for the hysterical claims that the people of Maldives - or the rest of the world - are threatened by rising sea levels. And he sets out some facts.
Fact number 1: During the past 2000 years, sea levels have fluctuated with 5 peaks reaching 0.6m to 1.2m above present sea level. Fact number 2: From 1790 to 1970 sea levels were about 20cm higher than today. Fact number 3: In the 1970s, the sea level fell by about 20cm to its present level. Fact number 4: Sea levels have remained constant for the past 30 years “implying that there are no traces of any alarming ongoing sea level rise”. Fact number 5 (and I am paraphrasing here): The notion presented by the President of the Maldives that his country will be flooded is bunkum.
Yet, last week a federal parliamentary report told Australians to make plans to evacuate if we live on the coast. Warning that the “time to act is now”, the bipartisan report said the 711,000 addresses within 3km of the Australian coast - and less than 6m above sea level - face threats from rising sea levels. The report called for an inquiry by the Productivity Commission to examine the need for bans on homes within these areas. Viewers of the 7pm News on ABC1 were told by a Richard Branson lookalike - complete with longish wavy grey hair, beard and crisp white shirt - that the township of Byron Bay would be completely flooded by rising sea levels. His expertise? He is a resident of Byron Bay.
Despite the headline grabbing rhetoric about climate change calamity, recent polls reveal that more and more people appear to be challenging the orthodoxy. The most recent Lowy Institute poll found that while 48 per cent of Australian believe that global warming is a serious and pressing problem, the numbers are down 12 points since 2008 and 20 points down since 2006. “This is also the first year that it has not had majority support,” said the Lowy Institute.
A poll by Ipso Reid in Canada in September found that global warming has dropped down the list of people’s concerns. Indeed, a full 41 per cent now say the threat has been overblown. In the US, Associated Press reported on a poll last month that found 57 per cent of people believe there is clear evidence that the world is heating up, down 20 points from three years ago. These are some trend lines worth watching.
Perhaps we are wising up to modern day millenarianism where end-of-the-world cults - those who have the most to gain from their fear mongering - preach calamity. Remember Y2K? The cult back then comprised computer experts. They predicted disaster. Planes would fall from the skies. People would be caught in halting elevators. Chaos would descend on anything that relied on a computer, from financial markets to utilities. Governments duly prepared for disaster with the BBC reporting that global preparations for the millennium bug were estimated to have cost more than $US300 billion. All for nought. Nothing happened. It was, as James Taranto wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the hoax of the century.
Maurice Newman, who was chairman of the federal government’s Y2K committee told The Australian last week that “in pressing the urgency for compliance, the committee members relied heavily on confirmatory bias. Most of this came from so-called experts who had much to gain from creating a sense of alarm. The consequence of widespread inaction was claimed to result in chaos and systemic failure. As there was no alternative authoritative voice, this became perceived wisdom and was certainly believed by the committee. As such the Y2K phenomenon took on a life of its own.”
Deja vu? Preparing for the deluge of rising sea levels, we were treated to footage last week from parliamentary question time starring Julia Gillard and her gumboots. Appropriately she was followed on ABC1 by Bananas in Pyjamas. Could man-made climate change turn out to be the greatest hoax of the present century? Certainly, ordinary people are beginning to ask questions.
SOURCE
Australians want a tougher stand on illegal immigrants
MOST voters believe Government weakness on border protection is to blame for the rising number of boats in Australian waters, according to a new poll. The Essential Media poll, reported on The Punch today, also finds more than half of voters believe there is a “real prospect” there are terrorists aboard the boats and say the Government is doing the right thing in trying to turn the boats away.
The findings coincide with the latest Newspoll showing a 7 point rise in primary vote support for the Coalition and a corresponding fall for the Rudd Government.
This spectacular swing comes amid a mounting sense of crisis surrounding the arrivals of asylum-seekers in Australian waters.
Only one in three respondents in the Essential poll said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was doing an “excellent or good” job on border protection. More than half rated his performance as “not so good” or poor.
But the Essential research finds a majority of voters also agrees that asylum seekers are coming from countries that have seen an escalation in violence and persecution.
Writing on The Punch, director of Essential Media and Communications Peter Lewis said the findings showed Mr Rudd’s “attempts to play tough cop are failing to translate into public approval for his handling of the issue.” Mr Lewis said the public understanding that asylum seekers were fleeing violent countries “suggests that if the public were presented with a story that humanised the plight of the asylum seekers they would be more likely to take a global view” and less likely to blame the Government for the current troubles.
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Liberal Party members have every right to feel vindicated
By Piers Akerman
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd's appointment of ex-treasurer Peter Costello to an $87,000-a-year job with the Future Fund is a huge endorsement of his former opponent's economic track record. The funny thing is, it's the same track record that Rudd and his ALP comrades have spent the past 13 years deriding.
Costello is unlikely to bend his tried-and-proven economic philosophy to accommodate Rudd's bizarre flights of fiscal fancy during his term on the Future Fund, which means that a future clash over economic theory is not unlikely.
There will be those on the Liberal side, also, who believe Costello has accepted the Rudd shilling far too soon and too eagerly, giving the Rudd Government a green card and the Future Fund a sanctuary from Opposition attack.
Rudd claims that he wants to "harvest" the best talent the nation has to offer, regardless of political background, but his appointments reflect a greater desire to make appointments which will embarrass the Opposition and defuse their attacks.
The first of Rudd's Opposition opponents to be given a significant office last year was Bruce Baird, a notorious soft-liner on refugee policy. The former Liberal member for the southern Sydney seat of Cook was appointed chairman of the Refugee Resettlement Advisory Committee, one of Labor's most influential committees on immigration issues. Baird, of course, had been one of the harshest critics of his party's successful refugee policies, along with West Australian MP Judi Moylan and Victorian Petro Georgiou.
Now Baird is spruiking the Labor line that the ALP's softening of policy in August last year has nothing whatsoever to do with the current surge in boat arrivals. This position is demolished by Immigration Department statistics, which show the number of asylum seekers using people smugglers increased immediately after Labor watered down the Howard government's tough stance on illegal boat arrivals.
Next, former Nationals leader Tim Fischer was appointed Australia's first resident ambassador to the Holy See. The universally liked Fischer heads a new diplomatic mission within the Vatican City, costing taxpayers more than $1 million a year. Fischer is furthering the Rudd Government's vainglorious campaign for an appointment to the UN Security Council in the 2013-2014 session.
Rudd's recent appointment of former Howard defence minister and former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson to the European Union should be viewed as similar to those other placements. While Nelson is to be commended for taking the poisoned chalice of Liberal leadership in the aftermath of the party's 2007 election loss, his acceptance of the Labor Government's appointment blunts Opposition attacks on Rudd's fawning approach to the EU. At this time, with Euro-bureaucrats planning to install a new world government under the guise of the Copenhagen summit on global warming, precise and thorough criticism is crucial. Not that the Opposition leadership has shown inclination to illuminate the electorate on the EU's plans.
The tactic of keeping one's friends close, and one's enemies closer is an old one but Labor has made the play an art form. While Baird, Fischer and Nelson were not seen as major impediments to Labor during the ALP's years in opposition, Costello was without doubt the Liberal Party's most effective parliamentary weapon.
Rudd may embrace him now as a tool to use against the Liberals but there are many in Labor's ranks who will not forget and forgive so easily. Among them are such staunch attack dogs as the current Defence Minister John Faulkner, long renowned for his ability to carry on the fight against former opponents. Even former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, another good hater from the ALP's ranks, said at the weekend: "The Prime Minister's goodie-two-shoes approach of appointing former opponents to the Labor Party to important public jobs is no substitute for thoughtful and mature reflection as to the public requirements of those jobs. It is also disloyal to those members of the Labor caucus in the Keating government and Labor members of the Beazley, Crean and Latham oppositions who stood and fought Costello."
Proof, if necessary, that it is difficult to spend a dozen years in opposition screaming invective across the Chamber and then be expected to cosy-up to the Liberal's best performer and Labor's greatest tormenter.
Rudd may think it is smart to have Keating criticising him over this appointment from one corner and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull criticising him from another - though in fact Turnbull has welcomed the appointment - but he cannot dodge the claim that he is a monstrous hypocrite. In embracing Costello, he has embraced the Howard government's economic reforms, including the introduction of the GST, which he railed against. The Opposition has every right to feel vindicated.
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Extraordinary stupidity
And despite the evidence staring them in the face, they are not admitting any error. Mother to sue for second-degree sunburn after hot day at childcare centre. Sunburn like that could well lead to skin cancer in later life. The child obviously had very fair skin but there is plenty of that about in Australia (principally from our extensive Irish heritage) and failing to allow for it is just thick
A YOUNG Queensland mum is planning legal action after her toddler suffered second-degree burns from being exposed to a day of blazing sunshine at her local childcare centre. Sixteen-month-old Ozzy Buisson sustained badly sunburnt arms which burst into deep, weeping blisters the morning after his stay at the Jumping Beans Children's Community Child Care in Kingaroy just over a week ago.
His mother, Michelle Murton said she was horrified to find the fair-skinned Ozzy "as red as a beetroot" when she picked him up about 4pm on Friday, October 23, The Courier-Mail reports. "I've never seen sunburn like it before," she said yesterday as a still red-armed Ozzy played. "He was so red it was almost purple. For him to be burnt this bad, he must have been outside in the sun most of the day."
Ms Murton said she questioned Ozzy's centre group leader and the woman replied that the toddler had been playing in water and his sunscreen must have washed off.
She was told centre staff had applied sunscreen in the morning and when they noticed Ozzy's skin looked red after his noon nap, they reapplied cream but still let him play outside.
Ms Murton said she bought after-sun gel for Ozzy's arms that night but when huge blisters appeared the next day she rushed him to the Kingaroy Hospital emergency ward where he was treated with an antibacterial burns cream and strong painkillers. "Everyone at the hospital was amazed at his burns," she said. "They all came to look at him."
Ms Murton said it was clear the centre's sun safety policies needed an overhaul and she had contacted solicitors about instigating legal action for her son's pain and suffering. Ozzy was immediately withdrawn from the centre. "I just want them to recognise that they are responsible instead of denying they did anything wrong," she said.
Jumping Beans owner and manager Bevan Pearson said all sun safety procedures had been followed on the day, which had been a special playground fun day to farewell two of the centre's long-term youngsters as well as a business partner. He said the top temperature on the day was 29C and all children had sunscreen applied, wore hats and spent their rest and meal times in the shade.
Mr Pearson said the centre usually suggested to parents that children also wear long-sleeve shirts. "All the children played in the water and of 39 children on the day he (Ozzy) was the only one who had sunburn," he said. Mr Pearson said while he was "sympathetic and apologetic" over the incident he was not admitting any liability.
SOURCE
QANTAS near-disaster again
Qantas pilots forgot to lower wheels. Qantas is going to run out of luck soon
QANTAS has stood down two pilots after a Boeing 767 landing in Sydney came within 700ft of the ground before the flight crew realised they had not lowered the plane's undercarriage. The airline and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau have launched investigations into the October 26 incident. The pilots are due to be interviewed by authorities on Friday.
The crew on the Melbourne-Sydney CityFlyer service apparently recognised the problem and had started go-around procedures when they received a "gear too low" aural warning from the aircraft's enhanced ground proximity warning system.
It is understood investigators are looking at possible human error and a communication breakdown between the first officer and captain about who was lowering the landing gear.
According to a former Boeing 767 pilot, a crew on an instrument approach would normally start lowering the undercarriage when the plane was between 2000ft and 1500ft in order to ensure that it met requirements that the aircraft was stable and configured to land at 1000ft. In visual conditions, the aircraft needed to be stable by 500ft, but lowering the gear at 700ft or even at 1000ft was still far too late, the pilot said. Landing gear problems or gear-up situations were involved in 15 per cent of airline hull-loss accidents last year, according to an analysis by the International Air Transport Association.
But Qantas said yesterday that a crew failing to lower the undercarriage was extremely rare and it was taking the incident seriously. "The flight crew knew all required procedures but there was a brief communications breakdown," a spokeswoman said. "They responded quickly to the situation and instigated a go-around. The cockpit alert coincided with their actions. There was no flight safety issue. "The incident was reported to the ATSB and the pilots were stood down. We are supporting the ATSB's investigation and our own investigations will determine what further action might be warranted."
SOURCE
Janet Albrechtsen
INCREASINGLY, the road to Copenhagen resembles a suburban street on Halloween with the number of climate change freak shows and stunts reaching a nadir in recent weeks. Nicholas Stern says we should turn vegetarian in order to combat climate change. If you must eat meat, eat kangaroos, says Ross Garnaut, because marsupials emit negligible amounts of methane. And that champagne you drank on Melbourne Cup day? Scientists scolded us with a report that a 750ml bottle of bubbly could produce 100 million bubbles, releasing five litres of carbon dioxide.
Yet far from rallying people to the cause of immediate action on climate change, every new cri de coeur may be turning people away. Could it be that those derided as the great unwashed are beginning to ask more questions than their smart political leaders or the bastions of intellectual curiosity in the media?
Late last month, activists gathered at Sydney Opera House to listen to Sydney mayor Clover Moore announce that “the time for talk is past”. “Already we know that this building, our Opera House, for decades a symbol of optimism and the human spirit, is under threat from global warming,” she says.
The Opera House under threat? That would be from rising sea levels, right? Just like the small island nation of Maldives where, last month, the president conducted a cabinet meeting underwater to remind the world that his country would be rendered uninhabitable by rising sea levels. Kitted out in full scuba-diving outfits, Mohamed Nasheed and his ministers sat at a table underwater off the coast of the capital of Male. As planned, the president’s stunt made headlines across the globe. Send us money - and lots of it - is his message. The media love stunts. They are so easy to report.
Sadly, the media is not inquisitive enough to report those who question the circus acts of climate change. A week after the Maldives underwater show, Nils-Axel Morner - a leading world authority on sea levels - wrote an open letter to the president telling him that his stunt was “not founded in observational facts and true scientific judgments”.
Morner is a former professor who headed the department of paleogeophysics and geodynamics at Stockholm University and past president (1999-2003) of the International Union for Quaternary Research commission on sea level changes and coastal evolution. INQUA was founded in 1928 by scientists who aimed to improve the understanding of environmental change during the glacial ages through interdisciplinary research. In other words, the Swedish professor has gravitas when it comes to sea levels. Alas his letter did not make headlines. That is a shame. Morner says there is “no rational basis” for the hysterical claims that the people of Maldives - or the rest of the world - are threatened by rising sea levels. And he sets out some facts.
Fact number 1: During the past 2000 years, sea levels have fluctuated with 5 peaks reaching 0.6m to 1.2m above present sea level. Fact number 2: From 1790 to 1970 sea levels were about 20cm higher than today. Fact number 3: In the 1970s, the sea level fell by about 20cm to its present level. Fact number 4: Sea levels have remained constant for the past 30 years “implying that there are no traces of any alarming ongoing sea level rise”. Fact number 5 (and I am paraphrasing here): The notion presented by the President of the Maldives that his country will be flooded is bunkum.
Yet, last week a federal parliamentary report told Australians to make plans to evacuate if we live on the coast. Warning that the “time to act is now”, the bipartisan report said the 711,000 addresses within 3km of the Australian coast - and less than 6m above sea level - face threats from rising sea levels. The report called for an inquiry by the Productivity Commission to examine the need for bans on homes within these areas. Viewers of the 7pm News on ABC1 were told by a Richard Branson lookalike - complete with longish wavy grey hair, beard and crisp white shirt - that the township of Byron Bay would be completely flooded by rising sea levels. His expertise? He is a resident of Byron Bay.
Despite the headline grabbing rhetoric about climate change calamity, recent polls reveal that more and more people appear to be challenging the orthodoxy. The most recent Lowy Institute poll found that while 48 per cent of Australian believe that global warming is a serious and pressing problem, the numbers are down 12 points since 2008 and 20 points down since 2006. “This is also the first year that it has not had majority support,” said the Lowy Institute.
A poll by Ipso Reid in Canada in September found that global warming has dropped down the list of people’s concerns. Indeed, a full 41 per cent now say the threat has been overblown. In the US, Associated Press reported on a poll last month that found 57 per cent of people believe there is clear evidence that the world is heating up, down 20 points from three years ago. These are some trend lines worth watching.
Perhaps we are wising up to modern day millenarianism where end-of-the-world cults - those who have the most to gain from their fear mongering - preach calamity. Remember Y2K? The cult back then comprised computer experts. They predicted disaster. Planes would fall from the skies. People would be caught in halting elevators. Chaos would descend on anything that relied on a computer, from financial markets to utilities. Governments duly prepared for disaster with the BBC reporting that global preparations for the millennium bug were estimated to have cost more than $US300 billion. All for nought. Nothing happened. It was, as James Taranto wrote in The Wall Street Journal, the hoax of the century.
Maurice Newman, who was chairman of the federal government’s Y2K committee told The Australian last week that “in pressing the urgency for compliance, the committee members relied heavily on confirmatory bias. Most of this came from so-called experts who had much to gain from creating a sense of alarm. The consequence of widespread inaction was claimed to result in chaos and systemic failure. As there was no alternative authoritative voice, this became perceived wisdom and was certainly believed by the committee. As such the Y2K phenomenon took on a life of its own.”
Deja vu? Preparing for the deluge of rising sea levels, we were treated to footage last week from parliamentary question time starring Julia Gillard and her gumboots. Appropriately she was followed on ABC1 by Bananas in Pyjamas. Could man-made climate change turn out to be the greatest hoax of the present century? Certainly, ordinary people are beginning to ask questions.
SOURCE
Australians want a tougher stand on illegal immigrants
MOST voters believe Government weakness on border protection is to blame for the rising number of boats in Australian waters, according to a new poll. The Essential Media poll, reported on The Punch today, also finds more than half of voters believe there is a “real prospect” there are terrorists aboard the boats and say the Government is doing the right thing in trying to turn the boats away.
The findings coincide with the latest Newspoll showing a 7 point rise in primary vote support for the Coalition and a corresponding fall for the Rudd Government.
This spectacular swing comes amid a mounting sense of crisis surrounding the arrivals of asylum-seekers in Australian waters.
Only one in three respondents in the Essential poll said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was doing an “excellent or good” job on border protection. More than half rated his performance as “not so good” or poor.
But the Essential research finds a majority of voters also agrees that asylum seekers are coming from countries that have seen an escalation in violence and persecution.
Writing on The Punch, director of Essential Media and Communications Peter Lewis said the findings showed Mr Rudd’s “attempts to play tough cop are failing to translate into public approval for his handling of the issue.” Mr Lewis said the public understanding that asylum seekers were fleeing violent countries “suggests that if the public were presented with a story that humanised the plight of the asylum seekers they would be more likely to take a global view” and less likely to blame the Government for the current troubles.
SOURCE
Liberal Party members have every right to feel vindicated
By Piers Akerman
PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd's appointment of ex-treasurer Peter Costello to an $87,000-a-year job with the Future Fund is a huge endorsement of his former opponent's economic track record. The funny thing is, it's the same track record that Rudd and his ALP comrades have spent the past 13 years deriding.
Costello is unlikely to bend his tried-and-proven economic philosophy to accommodate Rudd's bizarre flights of fiscal fancy during his term on the Future Fund, which means that a future clash over economic theory is not unlikely.
There will be those on the Liberal side, also, who believe Costello has accepted the Rudd shilling far too soon and too eagerly, giving the Rudd Government a green card and the Future Fund a sanctuary from Opposition attack.
Rudd claims that he wants to "harvest" the best talent the nation has to offer, regardless of political background, but his appointments reflect a greater desire to make appointments which will embarrass the Opposition and defuse their attacks.
The first of Rudd's Opposition opponents to be given a significant office last year was Bruce Baird, a notorious soft-liner on refugee policy. The former Liberal member for the southern Sydney seat of Cook was appointed chairman of the Refugee Resettlement Advisory Committee, one of Labor's most influential committees on immigration issues. Baird, of course, had been one of the harshest critics of his party's successful refugee policies, along with West Australian MP Judi Moylan and Victorian Petro Georgiou.
Now Baird is spruiking the Labor line that the ALP's softening of policy in August last year has nothing whatsoever to do with the current surge in boat arrivals. This position is demolished by Immigration Department statistics, which show the number of asylum seekers using people smugglers increased immediately after Labor watered down the Howard government's tough stance on illegal boat arrivals.
Next, former Nationals leader Tim Fischer was appointed Australia's first resident ambassador to the Holy See. The universally liked Fischer heads a new diplomatic mission within the Vatican City, costing taxpayers more than $1 million a year. Fischer is furthering the Rudd Government's vainglorious campaign for an appointment to the UN Security Council in the 2013-2014 session.
Rudd's recent appointment of former Howard defence minister and former Opposition leader Brendan Nelson to the European Union should be viewed as similar to those other placements. While Nelson is to be commended for taking the poisoned chalice of Liberal leadership in the aftermath of the party's 2007 election loss, his acceptance of the Labor Government's appointment blunts Opposition attacks on Rudd's fawning approach to the EU. At this time, with Euro-bureaucrats planning to install a new world government under the guise of the Copenhagen summit on global warming, precise and thorough criticism is crucial. Not that the Opposition leadership has shown inclination to illuminate the electorate on the EU's plans.
The tactic of keeping one's friends close, and one's enemies closer is an old one but Labor has made the play an art form. While Baird, Fischer and Nelson were not seen as major impediments to Labor during the ALP's years in opposition, Costello was without doubt the Liberal Party's most effective parliamentary weapon.
Rudd may embrace him now as a tool to use against the Liberals but there are many in Labor's ranks who will not forget and forgive so easily. Among them are such staunch attack dogs as the current Defence Minister John Faulkner, long renowned for his ability to carry on the fight against former opponents. Even former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, another good hater from the ALP's ranks, said at the weekend: "The Prime Minister's goodie-two-shoes approach of appointing former opponents to the Labor Party to important public jobs is no substitute for thoughtful and mature reflection as to the public requirements of those jobs. It is also disloyal to those members of the Labor caucus in the Keating government and Labor members of the Beazley, Crean and Latham oppositions who stood and fought Costello."
Proof, if necessary, that it is difficult to spend a dozen years in opposition screaming invective across the Chamber and then be expected to cosy-up to the Liberal's best performer and Labor's greatest tormenter.
Rudd may think it is smart to have Keating criticising him over this appointment from one corner and Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull criticising him from another - though in fact Turnbull has welcomed the appointment - but he cannot dodge the claim that he is a monstrous hypocrite. In embracing Costello, he has embraced the Howard government's economic reforms, including the introduction of the GST, which he railed against. The Opposition has every right to feel vindicated.
SOURCE
Extraordinary stupidity
And despite the evidence staring them in the face, they are not admitting any error. Mother to sue for second-degree sunburn after hot day at childcare centre. Sunburn like that could well lead to skin cancer in later life. The child obviously had very fair skin but there is plenty of that about in Australia (principally from our extensive Irish heritage) and failing to allow for it is just thick
A YOUNG Queensland mum is planning legal action after her toddler suffered second-degree burns from being exposed to a day of blazing sunshine at her local childcare centre. Sixteen-month-old Ozzy Buisson sustained badly sunburnt arms which burst into deep, weeping blisters the morning after his stay at the Jumping Beans Children's Community Child Care in Kingaroy just over a week ago.
His mother, Michelle Murton said she was horrified to find the fair-skinned Ozzy "as red as a beetroot" when she picked him up about 4pm on Friday, October 23, The Courier-Mail reports. "I've never seen sunburn like it before," she said yesterday as a still red-armed Ozzy played. "He was so red it was almost purple. For him to be burnt this bad, he must have been outside in the sun most of the day."
Ms Murton said she questioned Ozzy's centre group leader and the woman replied that the toddler had been playing in water and his sunscreen must have washed off.
She was told centre staff had applied sunscreen in the morning and when they noticed Ozzy's skin looked red after his noon nap, they reapplied cream but still let him play outside.
Ms Murton said she bought after-sun gel for Ozzy's arms that night but when huge blisters appeared the next day she rushed him to the Kingaroy Hospital emergency ward where he was treated with an antibacterial burns cream and strong painkillers. "Everyone at the hospital was amazed at his burns," she said. "They all came to look at him."
Ms Murton said it was clear the centre's sun safety policies needed an overhaul and she had contacted solicitors about instigating legal action for her son's pain and suffering. Ozzy was immediately withdrawn from the centre. "I just want them to recognise that they are responsible instead of denying they did anything wrong," she said.
Jumping Beans owner and manager Bevan Pearson said all sun safety procedures had been followed on the day, which had been a special playground fun day to farewell two of the centre's long-term youngsters as well as a business partner. He said the top temperature on the day was 29C and all children had sunscreen applied, wore hats and spent their rest and meal times in the shade.
Mr Pearson said the centre usually suggested to parents that children also wear long-sleeve shirts. "All the children played in the water and of 39 children on the day he (Ozzy) was the only one who had sunburn," he said. Mr Pearson said while he was "sympathetic and apologetic" over the incident he was not admitting any liability.
SOURCE
QANTAS near-disaster again
Qantas pilots forgot to lower wheels. Qantas is going to run out of luck soon
QANTAS has stood down two pilots after a Boeing 767 landing in Sydney came within 700ft of the ground before the flight crew realised they had not lowered the plane's undercarriage. The airline and the Australian Transport Safety Bureau have launched investigations into the October 26 incident. The pilots are due to be interviewed by authorities on Friday.
The crew on the Melbourne-Sydney CityFlyer service apparently recognised the problem and had started go-around procedures when they received a "gear too low" aural warning from the aircraft's enhanced ground proximity warning system.
It is understood investigators are looking at possible human error and a communication breakdown between the first officer and captain about who was lowering the landing gear.
According to a former Boeing 767 pilot, a crew on an instrument approach would normally start lowering the undercarriage when the plane was between 2000ft and 1500ft in order to ensure that it met requirements that the aircraft was stable and configured to land at 1000ft. In visual conditions, the aircraft needed to be stable by 500ft, but lowering the gear at 700ft or even at 1000ft was still far too late, the pilot said. Landing gear problems or gear-up situations were involved in 15 per cent of airline hull-loss accidents last year, according to an analysis by the International Air Transport Association.
But Qantas said yesterday that a crew failing to lower the undercarriage was extremely rare and it was taking the incident seriously. "The flight crew knew all required procedures but there was a brief communications breakdown," a spokeswoman said. "They responded quickly to the situation and instigated a go-around. The cockpit alert coincided with their actions. There was no flight safety issue. "The incident was reported to the ATSB and the pilots were stood down. We are supporting the ATSB's investigation and our own investigations will determine what further action might be warranted."
SOURCE
Tuesday, November 03, 2009
THE BIG DAY!
Racegoers pouring in to Flemington Racecourse for the Melbourne Cup
RACEGOERS have already started arriving at Flemington as Australians gear up for the race that stops a nation. With the Melbourne Cup still hours away, the gates are open at the track as organisers make last-minute preparations. It is expected the race will draw a massive betting plunge today, with punters shelling out $88 million last year with the TAB in Victoria and NSW alone.
The Melbourne Cup carnival will see gamblers bet much more. In 2008, a whopping $171.1 million was bet on Cup Day in NSW and Victoria with a grateful Tabcorp, not including the busy boomakers at the track.
Bart Cummings, the sentimental favourite, is seeking his 13th Melbourne Cup win, with last year's winner and favourite Viewed, which is backed at $4.80.
The South Australian gelding Alcopop is backed at $5.50 to win.
The Victorian Racing Club is expecting a crowd of more than 100,000. Melbourne streets are quiet for the Cup holiday, apart from punters headed to morning functions in their racing finery. Taxis are gearing up for a huge day and operators of the city’s trains and trams are under pressure to avoid any problems.
Melbourne’s plastic surgeons have reportedly been busy in recent days as women – and a few men – go under the needle to look their best.
Following overnight showers, the weather has cleared and forecasters say blue skies can be expected for much of the day. A top of 20C is tipped. Weather bureau senior forecaster Scott Williams said there had only been a small amount of rain at about 5am today and it would dry out quickly. "It will not affect the racetrack, and there won't be much for the remainder of the day at Flemington,'' he said. "There will be a cool blustery west to south-west breeze throughout the day. "It will average 35-40km/h gusting to 60km/h.
"It will be blustery for the ladies and their attire at the track, including those large brim hats they might regret wearing.''
The eldest granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, 28-year-old Zara Phillips [left above] will attend the event and present the winning jockey with a trophy. Ms Phillips is a world champion equestrian competitor.
SOURCE
Carbon tax will light a slow fuse
A FORM of carbon tax such as the emissions trading scheme cannot reduce global emissions unless there is agreement for a similar level of tax across all economies. That aside, the government's immediate issues are how to spend the money the tax raises, including how to avoid compensating the privatised brown coal generators for losses the tax causes.
Naturally, to ensure re-election, the Rudd government wants as much of the revenue as possible to go to voters. But the government is constrained because the tax would cripple firms that are unable to pass on all its costs. Twenty-five per cent to 35 per cent of the revenues raised are, therefore, to flow to the emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries. This has kept those firms quiet by cushioning the effects of the carbon tax on their existing assets.
That the carbon tax means nobody will again build an aluminium smelter, a steelworks or any other facility that makes use of Australian low-cost energy is not their worry. Nor, apparently, is it a concern of governments, all of which seem to envisage a dreamy, new low-energy economy that jettisons domestic consumption of our coal reserves and, eventually, our gas reserves.
Other business users also will be losers from the higher priced electricity brought about by the ETS tax. Higher energy costs will undermine the profits of all firms and even destroy some businesses. But the damage to relatively low energy users will be less easily traced to the government imposition.
The other major loser industry comprises carbon-based electricity producers. These provide 85 per cent of Australia's electricity. The ETS tax hits the brown coal generators hardest, followed by black coal generators. Notwithstanding the government's fantasy about new low-cost power generation technologies emerging, there is no alternative to the present supply profile, so it's more than likely we will see few generator departures.
Indeed, the compensation offered to the coal power stations is contingent on them remaining online when the only way the government can meet its stated carbon reduction goals is if they close down.
That aside, as with energy-intensive industries, the government has made it impossible for any firm to again build a base load power station in Australia without giving it a cast-iron carbon tax indemnification. As with the energy-intensive industries, the proposed tax will impose substantial costs on the existing generators. The most vulnerable are Victoria's privately owned brown coal generators.
Though Canberra refuses to publish its own estimates of the cost to the generators' shareholders, these are unlikely to differ from the $8billion to $10bn estimated by commissioned studies for the Victorian government and for the generators themselves.
Canberra is keen to avoid paying these costs to businesses it has already demonised as producing dirty energy. Its process has been to play the tough cop, soft cop game. The tough cop, Labor's consultant Ross Garnaut, argued that the generators should get no compensation on the (incorrect) basis that there was no tradition for such provision in Australia. Uncharacteristically, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong played the soft cop and offered $3.5bn in compensation.
The Coalition is arguing for $10bn in compensation, though an unknown amount of that is to go to the state-owned black coal generators in NSW and Queensland.
The issues are perceptions of "sovereign risk" on all future foreign investment and whether a hardline approach will mean distress sales and low maintenance causing power outages. The latter is an open question but has belatedly become a concern of the Brumby government since brown coal provides 96 per cent of Victoria's supplies.
With regard to sovereign risk, it is argued that the investors bought these facilities more than five years after the 1990 Kyoto Protocol writing was on the wall, and any business risk of expropriation by regulatory taxation should have been built into their decision frameworks. The generators would maintain that the state government sales documents contained no indication that a future government would impose a new discriminatory tax on the assets being sold, thereby reducing their value. Nor did the opposition at the time indicate such likelihood.
If the sale was by a private enterprise that withheld information about the imposition of post-sale measures, that would significantly devalue the assets and the buyers would have legal recourse.
In fact, the generators have a better case to be compensated than emission-intensive industries, at least those built or bought in the past 15 years, since the emission-intensive industries were not bought from the government, a related branch of which is now imposing a discriminatory tax on them.
This haggling over compensation is vital to present investors and of concern also to the government, which could see some depletion of its election-buying pot of new taxes.
For the Australian economy the stakes are far greater. The planned carbon tax regime (and opposition to nuclear generation) makes significant new power plant investment impossible. This lights a slow fuse under the economy's growth potential.
SOURCE
Hard decisions on "refugees" must be made by the Australian government
An editorial from the Sydney "Daily Telegraph" below, referring particularly to the recent capsize and sinking of an illegal immigrant boat
THE current refugee crisis - and that often-overused word is sadly justified, with at least 16 people presently unaccounted for in the waters off the Cocos Islands - has effectively paralysed Australian politics.
Decisions are difficult to make in circumstances where so many lives are at stake. An error could lead to a further massive increase in the number of deaths of those seeking unauthorised entry. Yet decisions must be made. An absence of authority on this issue guarantees yet more attempted arrivals, and with them the attendant deadly risks.
The decision-making process would be far easier if the atmosphere were not so charged with allegations of racism. These accusations ought to be put aside. Australians, including those who argue for strong border protection, are not - in the overwhelmingly majority - racist. It is not racist to insist on orderly procedures for immigration, be it formal or through requests for asylum.
Nor is it racist to make Australia a difficult target for people-smugglers and others who would exploit both this country's welcoming nature and the desperation of those who wish to come here. In fact, a case can be made that deterring people-smugglers is a humanitarian act, in that it exposes fewer people to the dangers of rogue sea travel. By some counts, more than 50 have perished since the recent upsurge in attempted arrivals.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has faced criticism over his claim to be both tough and kind over refugee issues, as though it is impossible to be both. This is not the case. By maintaining the toughness of our approach - for example, by not caving in to those who threaten self-harm unless their immigration demands are met - Australia is extending a kindness to others who might be inspired to attempt the same thing.
In response to the current situation, Rudd must add steel to Australia's border protection policies. It matters little that some opponents may make capital from this. Lives are in the balance. Some issues are more important than politics.
SOURCE
Stupid home ownership scheme
By Terry McCrann
THERE is only one thing dumber than the First Homeowner's Grant and that is the ceiling that politicians around the country have now put on it. Talk about designing something specifically to hurt desperate home-seekers, especially the very ones that most need real help, this is it. This is an all-too classic example of the politics of envy over-riding good policy and even just some basic thinking.
Thinking, you know, the sort of thing that we used to rely on public servants doing, and then hauling politicians back a little way from their tendency to utter populism and stupidity; when we used to have public servants.
Controversial economist and property market soothsayer, Steve Keen, says it should better be called the 'first home vendor's grant' and on this, he is dead right. That its primary achievement is to push up the price of property - and not just of 'used' property but new homes as well. Even when 'generous' builders 'give it and more' to buyers.
Yes, it might 'help' someone into a property. But at huge and largely unrecognised cost to both the 'beneficiary' and even more to all the other desperate home-seekers. The ones that don't succeed, and see the 'affordable home' disappearing out of sight.
So you have a dreadful policy and you now make it exquisitely worse. With what is at best a 'good idea at the time.' To stop 'rich people' buying expensive homes and getting the grant, by placing a cap on the property price. Over the weekend, the federal housing minister, Tanya Pilbersek announced that state governments would be allowed to set a price cap on the grant. She twittered (in the old fashioned way) they could set it at the level they thought "most sensible."
Almost all of them were ready to go Three, NSW, WA and the NT, opted for $750,000. Our premier John 'chip on my shoulder' Brumby, showed again his tendency to slip towards envy politics by going for $600,000, Queensland confirmed itself as the home of white shoes by opting for $1 million. Terrific. So if you stop the children of rich parents getting the grant if they buy a house/property that costs more than those sums, what is the single most obvious thing they are likely to do?
Buy a house under the limit. That works just great for Joe and Joanna average trying to buy the average home. Now they've got somebody extra bidding against them. Somebody with much deeper pockets. Before the weekend they might have worried that competition amongst similar stressed home-seekers to them could have forced that $500,000 house up to, say $550-560,000. Now they can rest 'assured' that the pollies have guaranteed it will go to the rich kid at say $595,000. Indeed if push really came to shove and he or she wanted the property, the rich kid might be happy to go to $601,000 and lose the grant (in Victoria); whereas they the average home-seeker couldn't.
This just adds further pressure to a broader trend so damaging to first home-buyers. As they get priced increasingly out of 'used' property in the inner city, they go looking for cheaper houses in the new estates in the outer and now very outer suburbs.
Thanks to the 'wisdom' of the pollies, more will be doing so. The developers will certainly be happy - they get to lift their prices at the margin. And what do the buyers get? To put it bluntly, a very bad investment. You buy a house in the inner suburbs for $500,000. You might be able to sell it for $900,000 (tax-free) in ten years time. You buy a cheaper house in the sticks for $250,000. In ten years time you will be selling an even cheaper (in relative terms) house, for say $350,000. Do the math.
Thank you prime minister, thank you premier. You pretend to whack the rich, the only people you hurt are the very ones you should be helping and who rely on you not to wilfully hurt them.
Quite apart from the way it also stupidly hurts the state itself. The cap stops a rich kid buying a $1.5 million house and paying $82,500 in stamp duty. Instead our premier has insisted that the rich kid shouldn't pay more than $31,000. That's wonderfully 'clever' budgeting, 'chip'.
The really clever thing would be to actually persuade rich kids to buy $1 million-plus houses. The extra tax wouldn't only pay for their first home grant but a few other ones as well! Or more preferably a more sensible form of assistance. But then public servants would have to think and politicians forego pompous preening.
SOURCE
Racegoers pouring in to Flemington Racecourse for the Melbourne Cup
RACEGOERS have already started arriving at Flemington as Australians gear up for the race that stops a nation. With the Melbourne Cup still hours away, the gates are open at the track as organisers make last-minute preparations. It is expected the race will draw a massive betting plunge today, with punters shelling out $88 million last year with the TAB in Victoria and NSW alone.
The Melbourne Cup carnival will see gamblers bet much more. In 2008, a whopping $171.1 million was bet on Cup Day in NSW and Victoria with a grateful Tabcorp, not including the busy boomakers at the track.
Bart Cummings, the sentimental favourite, is seeking his 13th Melbourne Cup win, with last year's winner and favourite Viewed, which is backed at $4.80.
The South Australian gelding Alcopop is backed at $5.50 to win.
The Victorian Racing Club is expecting a crowd of more than 100,000. Melbourne streets are quiet for the Cup holiday, apart from punters headed to morning functions in their racing finery. Taxis are gearing up for a huge day and operators of the city’s trains and trams are under pressure to avoid any problems.
Melbourne’s plastic surgeons have reportedly been busy in recent days as women – and a few men – go under the needle to look their best.
Following overnight showers, the weather has cleared and forecasters say blue skies can be expected for much of the day. A top of 20C is tipped. Weather bureau senior forecaster Scott Williams said there had only been a small amount of rain at about 5am today and it would dry out quickly. "It will not affect the racetrack, and there won't be much for the remainder of the day at Flemington,'' he said. "There will be a cool blustery west to south-west breeze throughout the day. "It will average 35-40km/h gusting to 60km/h.
"It will be blustery for the ladies and their attire at the track, including those large brim hats they might regret wearing.''
The eldest granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth II, 28-year-old Zara Phillips [left above] will attend the event and present the winning jockey with a trophy. Ms Phillips is a world champion equestrian competitor.
SOURCE
Carbon tax will light a slow fuse
A FORM of carbon tax such as the emissions trading scheme cannot reduce global emissions unless there is agreement for a similar level of tax across all economies. That aside, the government's immediate issues are how to spend the money the tax raises, including how to avoid compensating the privatised brown coal generators for losses the tax causes.
Naturally, to ensure re-election, the Rudd government wants as much of the revenue as possible to go to voters. But the government is constrained because the tax would cripple firms that are unable to pass on all its costs. Twenty-five per cent to 35 per cent of the revenues raised are, therefore, to flow to the emissions-intensive, trade-exposed industries. This has kept those firms quiet by cushioning the effects of the carbon tax on their existing assets.
That the carbon tax means nobody will again build an aluminium smelter, a steelworks or any other facility that makes use of Australian low-cost energy is not their worry. Nor, apparently, is it a concern of governments, all of which seem to envisage a dreamy, new low-energy economy that jettisons domestic consumption of our coal reserves and, eventually, our gas reserves.
Other business users also will be losers from the higher priced electricity brought about by the ETS tax. Higher energy costs will undermine the profits of all firms and even destroy some businesses. But the damage to relatively low energy users will be less easily traced to the government imposition.
The other major loser industry comprises carbon-based electricity producers. These provide 85 per cent of Australia's electricity. The ETS tax hits the brown coal generators hardest, followed by black coal generators. Notwithstanding the government's fantasy about new low-cost power generation technologies emerging, there is no alternative to the present supply profile, so it's more than likely we will see few generator departures.
Indeed, the compensation offered to the coal power stations is contingent on them remaining online when the only way the government can meet its stated carbon reduction goals is if they close down.
That aside, as with energy-intensive industries, the government has made it impossible for any firm to again build a base load power station in Australia without giving it a cast-iron carbon tax indemnification. As with the energy-intensive industries, the proposed tax will impose substantial costs on the existing generators. The most vulnerable are Victoria's privately owned brown coal generators.
Though Canberra refuses to publish its own estimates of the cost to the generators' shareholders, these are unlikely to differ from the $8billion to $10bn estimated by commissioned studies for the Victorian government and for the generators themselves.
Canberra is keen to avoid paying these costs to businesses it has already demonised as producing dirty energy. Its process has been to play the tough cop, soft cop game. The tough cop, Labor's consultant Ross Garnaut, argued that the generators should get no compensation on the (incorrect) basis that there was no tradition for such provision in Australia. Uncharacteristically, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong played the soft cop and offered $3.5bn in compensation.
The Coalition is arguing for $10bn in compensation, though an unknown amount of that is to go to the state-owned black coal generators in NSW and Queensland.
The issues are perceptions of "sovereign risk" on all future foreign investment and whether a hardline approach will mean distress sales and low maintenance causing power outages. The latter is an open question but has belatedly become a concern of the Brumby government since brown coal provides 96 per cent of Victoria's supplies.
With regard to sovereign risk, it is argued that the investors bought these facilities more than five years after the 1990 Kyoto Protocol writing was on the wall, and any business risk of expropriation by regulatory taxation should have been built into their decision frameworks. The generators would maintain that the state government sales documents contained no indication that a future government would impose a new discriminatory tax on the assets being sold, thereby reducing their value. Nor did the opposition at the time indicate such likelihood.
If the sale was by a private enterprise that withheld information about the imposition of post-sale measures, that would significantly devalue the assets and the buyers would have legal recourse.
In fact, the generators have a better case to be compensated than emission-intensive industries, at least those built or bought in the past 15 years, since the emission-intensive industries were not bought from the government, a related branch of which is now imposing a discriminatory tax on them.
This haggling over compensation is vital to present investors and of concern also to the government, which could see some depletion of its election-buying pot of new taxes.
For the Australian economy the stakes are far greater. The planned carbon tax regime (and opposition to nuclear generation) makes significant new power plant investment impossible. This lights a slow fuse under the economy's growth potential.
SOURCE
Hard decisions on "refugees" must be made by the Australian government
An editorial from the Sydney "Daily Telegraph" below, referring particularly to the recent capsize and sinking of an illegal immigrant boat
THE current refugee crisis - and that often-overused word is sadly justified, with at least 16 people presently unaccounted for in the waters off the Cocos Islands - has effectively paralysed Australian politics.
Decisions are difficult to make in circumstances where so many lives are at stake. An error could lead to a further massive increase in the number of deaths of those seeking unauthorised entry. Yet decisions must be made. An absence of authority on this issue guarantees yet more attempted arrivals, and with them the attendant deadly risks.
The decision-making process would be far easier if the atmosphere were not so charged with allegations of racism. These accusations ought to be put aside. Australians, including those who argue for strong border protection, are not - in the overwhelmingly majority - racist. It is not racist to insist on orderly procedures for immigration, be it formal or through requests for asylum.
Nor is it racist to make Australia a difficult target for people-smugglers and others who would exploit both this country's welcoming nature and the desperation of those who wish to come here. In fact, a case can be made that deterring people-smugglers is a humanitarian act, in that it exposes fewer people to the dangers of rogue sea travel. By some counts, more than 50 have perished since the recent upsurge in attempted arrivals.
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has faced criticism over his claim to be both tough and kind over refugee issues, as though it is impossible to be both. This is not the case. By maintaining the toughness of our approach - for example, by not caving in to those who threaten self-harm unless their immigration demands are met - Australia is extending a kindness to others who might be inspired to attempt the same thing.
In response to the current situation, Rudd must add steel to Australia's border protection policies. It matters little that some opponents may make capital from this. Lives are in the balance. Some issues are more important than politics.
SOURCE
Stupid home ownership scheme
By Terry McCrann
THERE is only one thing dumber than the First Homeowner's Grant and that is the ceiling that politicians around the country have now put on it. Talk about designing something specifically to hurt desperate home-seekers, especially the very ones that most need real help, this is it. This is an all-too classic example of the politics of envy over-riding good policy and even just some basic thinking.
Thinking, you know, the sort of thing that we used to rely on public servants doing, and then hauling politicians back a little way from their tendency to utter populism and stupidity; when we used to have public servants.
Controversial economist and property market soothsayer, Steve Keen, says it should better be called the 'first home vendor's grant' and on this, he is dead right. That its primary achievement is to push up the price of property - and not just of 'used' property but new homes as well. Even when 'generous' builders 'give it and more' to buyers.
Yes, it might 'help' someone into a property. But at huge and largely unrecognised cost to both the 'beneficiary' and even more to all the other desperate home-seekers. The ones that don't succeed, and see the 'affordable home' disappearing out of sight.
So you have a dreadful policy and you now make it exquisitely worse. With what is at best a 'good idea at the time.' To stop 'rich people' buying expensive homes and getting the grant, by placing a cap on the property price. Over the weekend, the federal housing minister, Tanya Pilbersek announced that state governments would be allowed to set a price cap on the grant. She twittered (in the old fashioned way) they could set it at the level they thought "most sensible."
Almost all of them were ready to go Three, NSW, WA and the NT, opted for $750,000. Our premier John 'chip on my shoulder' Brumby, showed again his tendency to slip towards envy politics by going for $600,000, Queensland confirmed itself as the home of white shoes by opting for $1 million. Terrific. So if you stop the children of rich parents getting the grant if they buy a house/property that costs more than those sums, what is the single most obvious thing they are likely to do?
Buy a house under the limit. That works just great for Joe and Joanna average trying to buy the average home. Now they've got somebody extra bidding against them. Somebody with much deeper pockets. Before the weekend they might have worried that competition amongst similar stressed home-seekers to them could have forced that $500,000 house up to, say $550-560,000. Now they can rest 'assured' that the pollies have guaranteed it will go to the rich kid at say $595,000. Indeed if push really came to shove and he or she wanted the property, the rich kid might be happy to go to $601,000 and lose the grant (in Victoria); whereas they the average home-seeker couldn't.
This just adds further pressure to a broader trend so damaging to first home-buyers. As they get priced increasingly out of 'used' property in the inner city, they go looking for cheaper houses in the new estates in the outer and now very outer suburbs.
Thanks to the 'wisdom' of the pollies, more will be doing so. The developers will certainly be happy - they get to lift their prices at the margin. And what do the buyers get? To put it bluntly, a very bad investment. You buy a house in the inner suburbs for $500,000. You might be able to sell it for $900,000 (tax-free) in ten years time. You buy a cheaper house in the sticks for $250,000. In ten years time you will be selling an even cheaper (in relative terms) house, for say $350,000. Do the math.
Thank you prime minister, thank you premier. You pretend to whack the rich, the only people you hurt are the very ones you should be helping and who rely on you not to wilfully hurt them.
Quite apart from the way it also stupidly hurts the state itself. The cap stops a rich kid buying a $1.5 million house and paying $82,500 in stamp duty. Instead our premier has insisted that the rich kid shouldn't pay more than $31,000. That's wonderfully 'clever' budgeting, 'chip'.
The really clever thing would be to actually persuade rich kids to buy $1 million-plus houses. The extra tax wouldn't only pay for their first home grant but a few other ones as well! Or more preferably a more sensible form of assistance. But then public servants would have to think and politicians forego pompous preening.
SOURCE
Monday, November 02, 2009
ZEG
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG thinks that people are beginning to wake up to Kevin Rudd's "global warming" scam
NSW churches generously allowed to follow their faith
CHARITIES and religious groups could discriminate against gay people or anyone else who might offend their values after a landmark decision quashed a finding in favour of a gay couple who wanted to become foster parents. Both the Catholic and Anglican churches have praised the ruling and Cardinal George Pell said anti-discrimination cases threatened churches' ability to do charity work.
The couple were refused access to the Wesley Mission's foster care agency because they are homosexual. They took their case to the Administrative Decisions Tribunal and were awarded $10,000 and the Wesley Mission told to change its practices so it didn't discriminate. The charity appealed and a highly critical appeal panel overturned the decision and ordered the original tribunal to hear the case again.
The panel headed by Magistrate Nancy Hennessy even instructed the tribunal to this time take into consideration whether monogamous heterosexual couples are the norm for "Wesleyanism" and whether they might have had to reject the couple in order to preserve their beliefs and not offend people in their religion.
Wesley Mission and the couple both declined to comment, as the case must now be reheard, however Cardinal Pell [above] hailed the move as a great win for freedom of religion. "The decision is very helpful, a step in the right direction," he said. "It is important to protect people from unjust discrimination but it is ridiculous to claim discrimination every time we show a preference for some people over others. "Anti-discrimination laws should not be used to change how church agencies organise themselves."
SOURCE
Bid to gag scientific attack on Australia's proposed Warmist laws
Censorship of disagreement is a kneejerk reaction among Leftists but it is sad to see it from a major science organization. The CSIRO is obviously putting politics before science
THE nation's peak science agency has tried to gag the publication of a paper by one of its senior environmental economists attacking the Rudd government's climate change policies. The paper, by the CSIRO's Clive Spash, argues the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is an ineffective way to cut emissions, and instead direct legislation or a tax on carbon is needed. The paper was accepted for publication by the journal New Political Economy after being internationally peer-reviewed.
But Dr Spash told the Australia New Zealand Society for Ecological Economics conference that the CSIRO had since June tried to block its publication.
In the paper, Dr Spash argues the economic theory underpinning emissions trading schemes is "far removed" from the reality of permit markets. "While carbon trading and offset schemes seem set to spread, they so far appear ineffective in terms of actually reducing GHGs (greenhouse gases)," he says. "Despite this apparent failure, ETS remain politically popular amongst the industrialised polluters. "The public appearance is that action is being undertaken. The reality is that GHGs are increasing and society is avoiding the need for substantive proposals to address the problem of behavioural and structural change."
Dr Spash said trading schemes did not efficiently allocate emission cuts because their design was manipulated by vested interests. For example, in Australia, large polluters would be compensated with free permits while smaller, more competitive firms would have to buy theirs at auction. The schemes were also flawed because: global warming was caused by gases other than carbon; emissions were difficult to measure; carbon offsets bought from other countries were of dubious value; and the schemes "crowded out" voluntary action by individuals. He concludes that more direct measures, such as a carbon tax, regulations or new infrastructure would be simpler, more effective and less open to manipulation.
Dr Spash could not be contacted by The Australian. However, his presentation to the ANZSEE conference in Darwin last Wednesday stated: "The CSIRO is currently maintaining they have the right to ban the written version of this paper from publication by myself as a representative of the organisation and by myself as a private citizen." Dr Spash said CSIRO managers had written to the journal's editor demanding the paper not be published.
CSIRO spokesman Huw Morgan said the publication of Dr Spash's paper was an internal matter and was being reviewed by the chief executive's office. However, he said that under the agency's charter scientists were forbidden from commenting on matters of government or opposition policy.
The CSIRO charter, introduced last year, was trumpeted by Science Minister Kim Carr as a way to guarantee freedom of expression for scientists. Senator Carr said he was seeking a briefing from the CSIRO. Opposition science spokesman Eric Abetz accused the government of empty spin.
Julian Cribb, adjunct professor of science communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, said gagging scientists deprived the public of scientific knowledge they had funded. ANZSEE president Wendy Proctor said if Dr Spash's research questioned current orthodoxy, it should be made public to inform debate.
SOURCE
World Bank says Australia is model economy
A legacy of many years of conservative management -- now put at risk by a spendthrift Leftist government
WORLD Bank managing director Juan Jose Daboub says Australia can be a model for developing nations struggling to recover from the global financial crisis. Australia's success with macro-economic reform over the past 20 years should be an example to the world's poorest countries, which received $US59 billion ($64.4 billion) in aid in 2009, Dr Daboub said during a visit to Australia.
"The many reforms that you have taken on in the last 20 years have paid off," he told the Sky Business Channel yesterday. These included macro-economic stability, flexible labour markets and nurturing an open economy, he said. He also praised the "persistence and the consistency" of the reforms. "I look at Australia as a model that others can follow," he said.
The World Bank expects GDP of all developing nations except China and India to grow by 2.5 per cent in 2010 after falling by 2.2 per cent this year. "This is a recovery but there are still frailties and there is still (the) risk of unemployment (growing) at dimensions that we need to be very concerned about," Dr Daboub said.
The World Bank expects the combined GDP of high-income developed nations including Australia will grow by just 1.3 per cent in 2010 after this year's 4.2 per cent drop.
SOURCE
Migration to Australia: the true story
By Paul Sheehan
I begin this column as someone who has been accused of being a ''shameful'' person, ''a nasty piece of work'', an ''ungrateful, unkind maggot'', because I recently wrote about refugee policy in a column that was described as ''bollocks'', ''biased'', ''poorly researched'', ''sensationalist drivel'', ''crap'', ''rubbish'', ''unworthy tabloid rubbish'' and ''playing the race card''.
These insults are useful. They are irrational, immature, febrile. They are also consistent with a slightly more subtle orthodoxy that argues that anyone who supports the detention of asylum seekers on Christmas Island is not merely on the wrong side of a moral and legal argument, but is of cruel and deficient character.
A predictable orgy of blame-throwing has accompanied the latest influx of boat people, an influx that followed changes in the policy and rhetoric of the Rudd Government, which announced it would use mandatory detention as a last resort.
The term xenophobia has immediately been thrown about by the usual suspects, the refugee lobby, the human rights lobby, the utopian left and a predictable section of the media. The policy of detention has been portrayed as self-evidently cruel and discriminatory, and the bipartisan political support for a regime that acts as a deterrent to unauthorised arrivals has been presented as proof of this country's latent xenophobia. Australia is not a xenophobic nation. The argument is nonsense. Let me count the ways:
1. The number of refugees or humanitarian cases admitted by the Howard government was the highest of any government in Australian history, other than a brief spike after World War II. This legal intake did not generate significant public opposition or partisan division in Canberra. The number of humanitarian arrivals admitted during the Howard years was more than 128,000, says the field's leading expert, Dr Katherine Betts.
2. The number of Muslims admitted to permanent residence was far higher during the Howard years than during any other government. The Muslim population rose from 200,000, in 1996, to 340,000 in 2006, a 65 per cent surge in 10 years. (Figures again supplied by Betts.) This surge took place during a time of rising violence by militant Islamists, and the murder of scores of Australians by Islamic fundamentalists. Yet the historic increase in Muslim numbers via legal channels generated no meaningful political opposition.
3. Australia has the highest number of foreign-born residents of any large, advanced Western democracy. The proportion is almost one in four. For years Australia has maintained one of the world's largest per capita immigrants intakes, and the majority of arrivals have been non-European. Debate over immigration has flared only when the immigration stream has been abused by widespread fraud. The most sustained opposition has come from environmentalists concerned with sustainable growth.
4. People who arrive by boat present a more confronting challenge to legal, security and health screening than those who arrive by air and overstay their visas. Arrivals by air must present valid documentation before travelling. It is common practice for those who arrive by boat to destroy their travel documents, and engage people smugglers, measures designed to create a fait accompli, and make it more difficult to send them back to their nations of origin. This makes a far more difficult and expensive process of checking arrivals' legal, security and health status.
5. The rigorous deterrence and screening of unauthorised arrivals is integral to national security. Some of those who have settled in Australia and later engaged in criminal behaviour or welfare fraud have arrived via the refugee or humanitarian programs. The screening process for such programs is more problematic. So, too, is the absorption process. A recent spate of convictions for terrorist activity within Australia has largely involved people who came as immigrants.
6. The Tamil Tigers, whose campaign for independence from the central government in Sri Lanka led to a long and bloody civil war, have received considerable support from within the Tamil community in Australia. In April more than 1000 ethnic Tamils blockaded the gates of Kirribilli House, the Prime Minister's Sydney residence, calling for a ceasefire in the Sri Lankan Government's military offensive against the Tigers. The Sri Lankan high commissioner to Australia, Senaka Walgampaya, said the Tamil Tigers had received significant support from Australia, a view shared by Australian intelligence.
7. The number of refugees or displaced persons in the world, more than 20 million, is roughly the same as the population of Australia, 22 million. Advanced economies could only accept all these people by incurring domestic social and economic costs, which they are not prepared to make. Immigration policies have ripple-on effects, hence the need for quotas.
8. The Rudd Government deploys a zero-sum refugee policy. Although it increased immigration and temporary-working visa intakes, it maintained the annual intake of refugee/humanitarian at 13,500. Government policy thus dictates that those who arrive by boat and are given asylum status have displaced people who have registered with the United Nations or the government. The 13,500 annual refugee quota is a real waiting line of people with real needs. It is a queue that cannot simply be rendered invisible or irrelevant.
9. UN laws and conventions pertaining to the treatment of asylum seekers have no override authority over Australian law. The concept of ''the international community'' is no more than a rhetorical device. In reality the phrase refers to other like-minded human-rights activists overseas. Most democracies punish governments that fail the test of border security.
10. The 78 ethnic Tamils who have illegally occupied the Australian customs vessel Oceanic Viking are demanding rights that do not exist under international law. Most have been in Indonesia for some time. They want to settle in Australia, or another wealthy country, but that decision is not theirs to make.
The Oceanic Viking needs to be reclaimed, secured, prepared for sea, then sail for Sri Lanka with the 78 recalcitrants on board. They have rejected Indonesia. Anything less is a capitulation to moral blackmail, where children have been used as props and pawns. The impasse is not a test of rights but a test of wills. The prolonging of the Oceanic Viking saga has shown Rudd to be a man who seeks to be all things to all people.
SOURCE
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG thinks that people are beginning to wake up to Kevin Rudd's "global warming" scam
NSW churches generously allowed to follow their faith
CHARITIES and religious groups could discriminate against gay people or anyone else who might offend their values after a landmark decision quashed a finding in favour of a gay couple who wanted to become foster parents. Both the Catholic and Anglican churches have praised the ruling and Cardinal George Pell said anti-discrimination cases threatened churches' ability to do charity work.
The couple were refused access to the Wesley Mission's foster care agency because they are homosexual. They took their case to the Administrative Decisions Tribunal and were awarded $10,000 and the Wesley Mission told to change its practices so it didn't discriminate. The charity appealed and a highly critical appeal panel overturned the decision and ordered the original tribunal to hear the case again.
The panel headed by Magistrate Nancy Hennessy even instructed the tribunal to this time take into consideration whether monogamous heterosexual couples are the norm for "Wesleyanism" and whether they might have had to reject the couple in order to preserve their beliefs and not offend people in their religion.
Wesley Mission and the couple both declined to comment, as the case must now be reheard, however Cardinal Pell [above] hailed the move as a great win for freedom of religion. "The decision is very helpful, a step in the right direction," he said. "It is important to protect people from unjust discrimination but it is ridiculous to claim discrimination every time we show a preference for some people over others. "Anti-discrimination laws should not be used to change how church agencies organise themselves."
SOURCE
Bid to gag scientific attack on Australia's proposed Warmist laws
Censorship of disagreement is a kneejerk reaction among Leftists but it is sad to see it from a major science organization. The CSIRO is obviously putting politics before science
THE nation's peak science agency has tried to gag the publication of a paper by one of its senior environmental economists attacking the Rudd government's climate change policies. The paper, by the CSIRO's Clive Spash, argues the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is an ineffective way to cut emissions, and instead direct legislation or a tax on carbon is needed. The paper was accepted for publication by the journal New Political Economy after being internationally peer-reviewed.
But Dr Spash told the Australia New Zealand Society for Ecological Economics conference that the CSIRO had since June tried to block its publication.
In the paper, Dr Spash argues the economic theory underpinning emissions trading schemes is "far removed" from the reality of permit markets. "While carbon trading and offset schemes seem set to spread, they so far appear ineffective in terms of actually reducing GHGs (greenhouse gases)," he says. "Despite this apparent failure, ETS remain politically popular amongst the industrialised polluters. "The public appearance is that action is being undertaken. The reality is that GHGs are increasing and society is avoiding the need for substantive proposals to address the problem of behavioural and structural change."
Dr Spash said trading schemes did not efficiently allocate emission cuts because their design was manipulated by vested interests. For example, in Australia, large polluters would be compensated with free permits while smaller, more competitive firms would have to buy theirs at auction. The schemes were also flawed because: global warming was caused by gases other than carbon; emissions were difficult to measure; carbon offsets bought from other countries were of dubious value; and the schemes "crowded out" voluntary action by individuals. He concludes that more direct measures, such as a carbon tax, regulations or new infrastructure would be simpler, more effective and less open to manipulation.
Dr Spash could not be contacted by The Australian. However, his presentation to the ANZSEE conference in Darwin last Wednesday stated: "The CSIRO is currently maintaining they have the right to ban the written version of this paper from publication by myself as a representative of the organisation and by myself as a private citizen." Dr Spash said CSIRO managers had written to the journal's editor demanding the paper not be published.
CSIRO spokesman Huw Morgan said the publication of Dr Spash's paper was an internal matter and was being reviewed by the chief executive's office. However, he said that under the agency's charter scientists were forbidden from commenting on matters of government or opposition policy.
The CSIRO charter, introduced last year, was trumpeted by Science Minister Kim Carr as a way to guarantee freedom of expression for scientists. Senator Carr said he was seeking a briefing from the CSIRO. Opposition science spokesman Eric Abetz accused the government of empty spin.
Julian Cribb, adjunct professor of science communication at the University of Technology, Sydney, said gagging scientists deprived the public of scientific knowledge they had funded. ANZSEE president Wendy Proctor said if Dr Spash's research questioned current orthodoxy, it should be made public to inform debate.
SOURCE
World Bank says Australia is model economy
A legacy of many years of conservative management -- now put at risk by a spendthrift Leftist government
WORLD Bank managing director Juan Jose Daboub says Australia can be a model for developing nations struggling to recover from the global financial crisis. Australia's success with macro-economic reform over the past 20 years should be an example to the world's poorest countries, which received $US59 billion ($64.4 billion) in aid in 2009, Dr Daboub said during a visit to Australia.
"The many reforms that you have taken on in the last 20 years have paid off," he told the Sky Business Channel yesterday. These included macro-economic stability, flexible labour markets and nurturing an open economy, he said. He also praised the "persistence and the consistency" of the reforms. "I look at Australia as a model that others can follow," he said.
The World Bank expects GDP of all developing nations except China and India to grow by 2.5 per cent in 2010 after falling by 2.2 per cent this year. "This is a recovery but there are still frailties and there is still (the) risk of unemployment (growing) at dimensions that we need to be very concerned about," Dr Daboub said.
The World Bank expects the combined GDP of high-income developed nations including Australia will grow by just 1.3 per cent in 2010 after this year's 4.2 per cent drop.
SOURCE
Migration to Australia: the true story
By Paul Sheehan
I begin this column as someone who has been accused of being a ''shameful'' person, ''a nasty piece of work'', an ''ungrateful, unkind maggot'', because I recently wrote about refugee policy in a column that was described as ''bollocks'', ''biased'', ''poorly researched'', ''sensationalist drivel'', ''crap'', ''rubbish'', ''unworthy tabloid rubbish'' and ''playing the race card''.
These insults are useful. They are irrational, immature, febrile. They are also consistent with a slightly more subtle orthodoxy that argues that anyone who supports the detention of asylum seekers on Christmas Island is not merely on the wrong side of a moral and legal argument, but is of cruel and deficient character.
A predictable orgy of blame-throwing has accompanied the latest influx of boat people, an influx that followed changes in the policy and rhetoric of the Rudd Government, which announced it would use mandatory detention as a last resort.
The term xenophobia has immediately been thrown about by the usual suspects, the refugee lobby, the human rights lobby, the utopian left and a predictable section of the media. The policy of detention has been portrayed as self-evidently cruel and discriminatory, and the bipartisan political support for a regime that acts as a deterrent to unauthorised arrivals has been presented as proof of this country's latent xenophobia. Australia is not a xenophobic nation. The argument is nonsense. Let me count the ways:
1. The number of refugees or humanitarian cases admitted by the Howard government was the highest of any government in Australian history, other than a brief spike after World War II. This legal intake did not generate significant public opposition or partisan division in Canberra. The number of humanitarian arrivals admitted during the Howard years was more than 128,000, says the field's leading expert, Dr Katherine Betts.
2. The number of Muslims admitted to permanent residence was far higher during the Howard years than during any other government. The Muslim population rose from 200,000, in 1996, to 340,000 in 2006, a 65 per cent surge in 10 years. (Figures again supplied by Betts.) This surge took place during a time of rising violence by militant Islamists, and the murder of scores of Australians by Islamic fundamentalists. Yet the historic increase in Muslim numbers via legal channels generated no meaningful political opposition.
3. Australia has the highest number of foreign-born residents of any large, advanced Western democracy. The proportion is almost one in four. For years Australia has maintained one of the world's largest per capita immigrants intakes, and the majority of arrivals have been non-European. Debate over immigration has flared only when the immigration stream has been abused by widespread fraud. The most sustained opposition has come from environmentalists concerned with sustainable growth.
4. People who arrive by boat present a more confronting challenge to legal, security and health screening than those who arrive by air and overstay their visas. Arrivals by air must present valid documentation before travelling. It is common practice for those who arrive by boat to destroy their travel documents, and engage people smugglers, measures designed to create a fait accompli, and make it more difficult to send them back to their nations of origin. This makes a far more difficult and expensive process of checking arrivals' legal, security and health status.
5. The rigorous deterrence and screening of unauthorised arrivals is integral to national security. Some of those who have settled in Australia and later engaged in criminal behaviour or welfare fraud have arrived via the refugee or humanitarian programs. The screening process for such programs is more problematic. So, too, is the absorption process. A recent spate of convictions for terrorist activity within Australia has largely involved people who came as immigrants.
6. The Tamil Tigers, whose campaign for independence from the central government in Sri Lanka led to a long and bloody civil war, have received considerable support from within the Tamil community in Australia. In April more than 1000 ethnic Tamils blockaded the gates of Kirribilli House, the Prime Minister's Sydney residence, calling for a ceasefire in the Sri Lankan Government's military offensive against the Tigers. The Sri Lankan high commissioner to Australia, Senaka Walgampaya, said the Tamil Tigers had received significant support from Australia, a view shared by Australian intelligence.
7. The number of refugees or displaced persons in the world, more than 20 million, is roughly the same as the population of Australia, 22 million. Advanced economies could only accept all these people by incurring domestic social and economic costs, which they are not prepared to make. Immigration policies have ripple-on effects, hence the need for quotas.
8. The Rudd Government deploys a zero-sum refugee policy. Although it increased immigration and temporary-working visa intakes, it maintained the annual intake of refugee/humanitarian at 13,500. Government policy thus dictates that those who arrive by boat and are given asylum status have displaced people who have registered with the United Nations or the government. The 13,500 annual refugee quota is a real waiting line of people with real needs. It is a queue that cannot simply be rendered invisible or irrelevant.
9. UN laws and conventions pertaining to the treatment of asylum seekers have no override authority over Australian law. The concept of ''the international community'' is no more than a rhetorical device. In reality the phrase refers to other like-minded human-rights activists overseas. Most democracies punish governments that fail the test of border security.
10. The 78 ethnic Tamils who have illegally occupied the Australian customs vessel Oceanic Viking are demanding rights that do not exist under international law. Most have been in Indonesia for some time. They want to settle in Australia, or another wealthy country, but that decision is not theirs to make.
The Oceanic Viking needs to be reclaimed, secured, prepared for sea, then sail for Sri Lanka with the 78 recalcitrants on board. They have rejected Indonesia. Anything less is a capitulation to moral blackmail, where children have been used as props and pawns. The impasse is not a test of rights but a test of wills. The prolonging of the Oceanic Viking saga has shown Rudd to be a man who seeks to be all things to all people.
SOURCE
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Weapons maker funds new school curriculum
Leftists are fuming. Nobel peace-prize nominee Adolf Hitler condemned the "armaments madness of the world" too. See the actual prewar German election posters here
An Adelaide public school has come under fire for reaching a deal with the world's largest manufacturer of guided missiles to fund a new curriculum. The principal of Aberfoyle Park High School says the program will get students more interested in maths and science and encourage them to consider engineering as a career.
But critics argue it is helping US-based contractor Raytheon poach students into the defence industry.
Principal Allan Phelps says the $500,000 deal to co-develop the curriculum with Raytheon provides students with the best real-life learning examples possible. "The focus is on learning and teaching in maths and science," he said. The deal also funds about 250 new laptops.
It does not have the support of the education union's president, Coreena Haythorpe. "I think the question the community would be asking is whether you want a company that has been involved in global conflicts and developing missiles, working in education with our children," she said. Ms Haythorpe says schools should not have to resort to business deals and wants the Government to increase education funding.
South Australian Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith and Raytheon would not comment.
SOURCE
National Party at war with wishy-washy conservatives over Warmist laws
Australia's rural-based National Party is one of the few in the world to reject outright the global warming theory
Nationals Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce says he is frustrated by personal criticism from within the Liberal Party and has threatened to quit the Coalition. Senator Joyce's strong stance against an emission trading scheme has angered some Liberal Party MPs.
Senator Joyce told Channel Seven his critics should have the courage to state their views in public. "If after about four years you continually deal with unnamed sources in the paper and those unnamed sources say that the source of all their problems in life is you, then you say if you want to make yourself public and you are at the appropriate level, I'll leave," he said.
The Coalition is in negotiations on an emissions trading scheme with the Federal Government. However, talks have been stalling over Government claims the Coalition is not negotiating in good faith. Several Coalition members have made comments about the emissions trading scheme that seem to be at odds with Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull's stance.
On Friday, Senate Leader Nick Minchin said the Coalition would not necessarily vote for an emissions trading scheme even if the Federal Government accepted the Coalition's amendments. Senator Minchin's comments came amid a report in The Australian newspaper that Liberal frontbenchers were getting cold feet about supporting a scheme because the party's research shows voters are becoming hesitant about the idea.
Mr Turnbull has said he will recommend supporting an emissions trading scheme if the Opposition's amendments are accepted. Senator Joyce has been outspoken in his opposition to an emissions trading scheme and has said he would vote such a scheme down.
SOURCE
Obesity study to measure hospital visits
This sounds perilously like obesity skepticism. Fancy looking for evidence of what "everyone knows"!
Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) have started a long-range study on people who are overweight or obese and the number of times they need to visit hospitals. The study is following 265,000 people aged over 45 years, their weight and the number of hospital admissions.
ANU Associate Professor Emily Banks says very little is known about whether being overweight can increase your risk of going to hospital. "To look at if there are any points where we can intervene, actually to make people who are overweight or obese less at risk of hospital [visits]," she said. "So we are not only going to describe the relationship between being overweight or obese and going to hospital, we're also going to be able to look and see if there are points where we can make a difference and we can actually prevent it."
Professor Banks says the team will collect data which could be used to help develop future health policy. "The group's going to be investigating the effect of obesity and overweight on the risk of going to hospital and I think a lot of people would be quite surprised to find we don't know very much about that," she said. "We don't know what the risks are. We also don't know what the ideal weight is in terms of whether or not people are at risk of going to hospital."
SOURCE
"Asylum-seekers" admit living in Indonesia
A rather gross example of "asylum-seekers" being anything but
Family First senator Steve Fielding has questioned whether 78 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers, who have "hijacked" an Australian customs boat, are real refugees. It has been revealed that most of the ethnic Tamil group, who are refusing to leave the Oceanic Viking moored off Indonesia's coast, have been living in the country for years. In written messages thrown off the boat, Fairfax newspapers reported the asylum seekers as saying they'd been living in Indonesia for as long as five years and had been accepted by the United Nations office in Jakarta as genuine refugees.
Senator Fielding said on Sunday it was the first he'd heard of the development but questioned whether the group, whose spokesman is a man called Alex, really were legitimate asylum seekers. "I remember the first phone call we took from, I think Alex, his English wasn't so good," he told Network Ten. "Within two weeks his English is better than mine, so I'm not so sure how genuine some of these people are."
The group were meant to be offloaded from the ship under a deal struck between Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. But they haven't budged for two weeks and Senator Fielding said the situation was bamboozling the federal government. "This is our boat, it's been hijacked by the refugees, and the Rudd government hasn't got a clue what to do," he said.
Senator Fielding said Labor's border protection policies were attracting more asylum seekers to Australia. "People smugglers are using these laws to send more people our way," he said. "That is a huge concern, something needs to be done. "The Rudd government has a band-aid solution, the Indonesian solution is an Indonesian fiasco and it's clearly not working."
Senator Fielding said every time one asylum seeker was granted an Australian visa, another who had been waiting their turn in a refugee camp missed out. "Those people trying to jump the queue should go to the back of the queue," he said.
SOURCE
Leftists are fuming. Nobel peace-prize nominee Adolf Hitler condemned the "armaments madness of the world" too. See the actual prewar German election posters here
An Adelaide public school has come under fire for reaching a deal with the world's largest manufacturer of guided missiles to fund a new curriculum. The principal of Aberfoyle Park High School says the program will get students more interested in maths and science and encourage them to consider engineering as a career.
But critics argue it is helping US-based contractor Raytheon poach students into the defence industry.
Principal Allan Phelps says the $500,000 deal to co-develop the curriculum with Raytheon provides students with the best real-life learning examples possible. "The focus is on learning and teaching in maths and science," he said. The deal also funds about 250 new laptops.
It does not have the support of the education union's president, Coreena Haythorpe. "I think the question the community would be asking is whether you want a company that has been involved in global conflicts and developing missiles, working in education with our children," she said. Ms Haythorpe says schools should not have to resort to business deals and wants the Government to increase education funding.
South Australian Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith and Raytheon would not comment.
SOURCE
National Party at war with wishy-washy conservatives over Warmist laws
Australia's rural-based National Party is one of the few in the world to reject outright the global warming theory
Nationals Senate Leader Barnaby Joyce says he is frustrated by personal criticism from within the Liberal Party and has threatened to quit the Coalition. Senator Joyce's strong stance against an emission trading scheme has angered some Liberal Party MPs.
Senator Joyce told Channel Seven his critics should have the courage to state their views in public. "If after about four years you continually deal with unnamed sources in the paper and those unnamed sources say that the source of all their problems in life is you, then you say if you want to make yourself public and you are at the appropriate level, I'll leave," he said.
The Coalition is in negotiations on an emissions trading scheme with the Federal Government. However, talks have been stalling over Government claims the Coalition is not negotiating in good faith. Several Coalition members have made comments about the emissions trading scheme that seem to be at odds with Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull's stance.
On Friday, Senate Leader Nick Minchin said the Coalition would not necessarily vote for an emissions trading scheme even if the Federal Government accepted the Coalition's amendments. Senator Minchin's comments came amid a report in The Australian newspaper that Liberal frontbenchers were getting cold feet about supporting a scheme because the party's research shows voters are becoming hesitant about the idea.
Mr Turnbull has said he will recommend supporting an emissions trading scheme if the Opposition's amendments are accepted. Senator Joyce has been outspoken in his opposition to an emissions trading scheme and has said he would vote such a scheme down.
SOURCE
Obesity study to measure hospital visits
This sounds perilously like obesity skepticism. Fancy looking for evidence of what "everyone knows"!
Researchers at the Australian National University (ANU) have started a long-range study on people who are overweight or obese and the number of times they need to visit hospitals. The study is following 265,000 people aged over 45 years, their weight and the number of hospital admissions.
ANU Associate Professor Emily Banks says very little is known about whether being overweight can increase your risk of going to hospital. "To look at if there are any points where we can intervene, actually to make people who are overweight or obese less at risk of hospital [visits]," she said. "So we are not only going to describe the relationship between being overweight or obese and going to hospital, we're also going to be able to look and see if there are points where we can make a difference and we can actually prevent it."
Professor Banks says the team will collect data which could be used to help develop future health policy. "The group's going to be investigating the effect of obesity and overweight on the risk of going to hospital and I think a lot of people would be quite surprised to find we don't know very much about that," she said. "We don't know what the risks are. We also don't know what the ideal weight is in terms of whether or not people are at risk of going to hospital."
SOURCE
"Asylum-seekers" admit living in Indonesia
A rather gross example of "asylum-seekers" being anything but
Family First senator Steve Fielding has questioned whether 78 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers, who have "hijacked" an Australian customs boat, are real refugees. It has been revealed that most of the ethnic Tamil group, who are refusing to leave the Oceanic Viking moored off Indonesia's coast, have been living in the country for years. In written messages thrown off the boat, Fairfax newspapers reported the asylum seekers as saying they'd been living in Indonesia for as long as five years and had been accepted by the United Nations office in Jakarta as genuine refugees.
Senator Fielding said on Sunday it was the first he'd heard of the development but questioned whether the group, whose spokesman is a man called Alex, really were legitimate asylum seekers. "I remember the first phone call we took from, I think Alex, his English wasn't so good," he told Network Ten. "Within two weeks his English is better than mine, so I'm not so sure how genuine some of these people are."
The group were meant to be offloaded from the ship under a deal struck between Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. But they haven't budged for two weeks and Senator Fielding said the situation was bamboozling the federal government. "This is our boat, it's been hijacked by the refugees, and the Rudd government hasn't got a clue what to do," he said.
Senator Fielding said Labor's border protection policies were attracting more asylum seekers to Australia. "People smugglers are using these laws to send more people our way," he said. "That is a huge concern, something needs to be done. "The Rudd government has a band-aid solution, the Indonesian solution is an Indonesian fiasco and it's clearly not working."
Senator Fielding said every time one asylum seeker was granted an Australian visa, another who had been waiting their turn in a refugee camp missed out. "Those people trying to jump the queue should go to the back of the queue," he said.
SOURCE
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Australia's Prosperity Index result down because of poor public healthcare
By Greg Lindsay and Roger Bate. Greg Lindsay is the Executive Director of The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. Roger Bate is the Legatum Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. The 2009 Legatum Prosperity Index is now available. A majority of Australians rely on "free" government hospitals, where low standards and long waits are common
The 2009 Legatum Prosperity Index rates Australia an impressive sixth out of 104 countries surveyed – the top five are all small Northern European countries with populations of less than 10 million.
However, inefficiencies in public hospitals are hurting Australia’s prosperity. While Australia is very strong on the economic fundamentals required for long-term growth, the nation’s ailing health care system is keeping Australia from reaching its full potential, in terms of both economic progress and quality of life. Legatum ranks Australia a lowly 21st in health care, behind countries like Singapore, Spain, and the Czech Republic; 28th in infant mortality; 47th for number of doctors per capita; and behind Slovakia and Hungary on available beds.
The Australian Medical Association recently found that waiting times far exceed acceptable levels. The median wait for hip surgery in Australian public hospitals is nearly three months. For cataract surgery, it’s more than two months. Major public hospitals throughout Australia are bursting at the seams with bed occupancy rates of well over 100% a daily occurrence.
Overcrowding and inefficiency have compromised patient safety. According to the Queensland University of Technology, $1 billion annually is lost in bed days because of hospital-acquired infections. Medical errors cost an estimated $1 billion–$2 billion annually, with half of these errors classified as ‘potentially preventable.’
These health care problems are draining billions from the Australian economy, both directly by taking money away from players in the health sector and indirectly by compromising worker health and undermining productivity.
Australians are among the most prosperous populations on the planet. But the country’s health sector is in need of significant improvement. Cutting away waste and improving quality in health care would go a long way toward making Australia even stronger.
The above is part of a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated October 30. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590. Telephone ph: +61 2 9438 4377 or fax: +61 2 9439 7310
Rudd on the horns of a dilemma over illegal immigrants
Talking about a big Australia and waging a desperate struggle to salvage a tough border protection strategy may appear a contradiction, yet as Rudd knows and John Howard proved, border protection and Australia's high immigration program have always gone together. This compact, pivotal to Australia's progress, is at risk. An unpredictable mix of events on the water, in Indonesia, and worry about Rudd's hard line from within his own constituency has created a diabolical dilemma for Rudd and Stephen Smith. Faced with a limited array of unpalatable options the government's tough border protection stance is at risk. The political centre, it seems, may not hold with Rudd under aggressive assault from opposite positions on the Right and Left.
There are two boats in Indonesia with Sri Lankan asylum-seekers refusing to disembark, the first intercepted by the Indonesians within their own waters with 250 people aboard and the Oceanic Viking, an Australian boat that rescued 78 asylum-seekers at Indonesia's request in Indonesia's rescue zone.
Rudd and his Foreign Minister are standing firm. The plight of the Oceanic Viking has become the most difficult test of Rudd's resolution. The claim that he cannot take a hard decision offensive to his own side will now be determined. Does Rudd have the nerve and patience to prevail or will he crack before the political blackmail of the asylum-seekers and reluctance of local Indonesian authorities?
This week the Australian media seemed unable or unwilling to describe what was happening before its eyes: the Oceanic Viking asylum-seekers, by refusing to disembark in Indonesia, exploited their moral plight as a device to intimidate the Rudd government into a retreat and re-direction of the boat to Christmas Island where they could be processed.
As Smith signalled, this is a case of asylum-seekers trying to decide what country will process their claims and what country will become their new home if those claims are upheld. Asylum-seekers have no such rights under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The situation is exactly the reverse of the interpretation given wide currency this week. Far from Australia ignoring its obligations under the convention, the asylum-seekers are insisting on rights they do not possess under the convention. It is obvious what should happen: if the Sri Lankans are serious about being refugees they should leave the boat immediately and claim refugee status from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Their real purpose, however, is different. It is to self-select Australia and to resist any effort to have the UNHCR process their claims outside Australia. "It's not their choice," Smith told the AM ABC radio program. "It's not a matter for the Sri Lankans on board to choose where they make their application for refugee status. We absolutely defend their right to make that application."
The spectre of an ignominious retreat now overhangs Rudd and Smith that would see them forced to bring the asylum-seekers to this country. Such a move would destroy Rudd's credibility on border protection and represent an Australian submission to the campaign by boatpeople to self-select Australia as their home.
The government has no legal obligation to bring these people to Australia. As Rudd said, Australia took two decisions in relation to the Oceanic Viking asylum-seekers: it engaged in rescue when a vessel was in distress and, having collected the people and in consultation with Indonesian authorities, it decided to take the people for processing in Indonesia.
There is no credible case that Australia should have done otherwise. Rudd and Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono agreed that the people be processed in Indonesia. The problem is that Yudhoyono is struggling to enforce the agreement in the teeth of provincial hostility and resentment against Australia seems to be rising.
On Wednesday Smith was unequivocal about the result. "The President has already made that decision," he insisted. "Now that (going to Indonesia) is what will occur." He was confident the Rudd-Yudhoyono agreement would be honoured. On Thursday, Smith told radio station 2UE that Australia wasn't setting any timetable. "These things always take time," he said. Asked if the government would back down and bring them to Australia, Smith said: "We don't have that in contemplation."
Indonesia's Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa told ABC1's Lateline on Wednesday that Indonesia would not use force to remove the asylum-seekers and said: "We have an abundance of patience". Yet he intensified the pressure, saying if the people won't budge then the Rudd government must take that into account. The next day Rudd followed by saying that Australia also had an abundance of patience. It is a polite way of describing a stalemate in which Rudd and Smith hope they can prevail but have limited leverage and only marginal control over a situation vital to their policy.
It is a game of political poker for high stakes. The more the Sri Lankans believe that Rudd may retreat, the more they will stay the course. In the meantime, Rudd will be under growing criticism at home for his inhumanity and hypocrisy.
The deadlock highlights the agonising nature of asylum-seeker policy. There is little doubt the Sri Lankans are genuine refugees yet the Indonesian and Australian authorities have met their obligations and are fully entitled to insist the boatpeople disembark.
Rudd and Smith know they must ensure the one-off Oceanic Viking event does not disrupt the substantial and permanent regional co-operation they seek with Indonesia that will be canvassed at the next Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting. In this sense the resilience of the Rudd-Yudhoyono concord is being tested. It must survive that test for Rudd to have any prospect of salvaging his asylum-seeker policy.
More HERE
Law to save Australian meat pies drafted by politicians
Meat pies are Australia's national religion. Even people who don't follow the neddies still like a meat pie. And most people have a "church" (pieshop) that they mostly go to for their pies. So we don't need politicians to tell us what is a good pie
A LAW to save the Aussie meat pie has been written by three politicians who argue that consumers are being dudded by misleading food standards. Current standards allow manufacturers to claim a meat pie is Australian-made, even if the meat is sourced from overseas - which will eventually include countries with mad cow disease after the easing of meat restrictions. As long as some of the packaging, pastry and gravy is made locally, products can carry the green and gold "Australian Made" logo.
Outraged federal Senators independent Nick Xenophon, Nationals' Barnaby Joyce, and Greens' Bob Brown said the Rudd Government needed to get fair dinkum with consumers. "This is pathetic. You can have a meat pie that says 'Australian Made' but contains 100 per cent foreign meat," Senator Xenophon said. Senator Joyce said labels should carry a pie graph to show what percentage of the product was actually from Australia.
The Trades Practices Act says products can claim to be made in Australia if they have been "substantially transformed" and have 50 per cent or more of the cost of producing or manufacturing in Australia. The Food Standards Amendment (Truth in Labelling Laws) Bill 2009, was yesterday scrutinised in a Senate inquiry. The senators want greater detail about the content of food products, including imported ingredients. It would mean the word "Australian" would only apply in relation to food that is 100 per cent produced in Australia from Australian products.
But the Australian Made, Australian Grown Campaign, Dick Smith Foods and the Australian National Retailers Association have argued there could be unintended consequences. "Cheese ... made in Australia today is made with imported rennet (a substance that curdles milk). Under this proposal cheese made in Australia from 100 per cent Australian milk could not be labelled Australian cheddar," said the Australian Made, Australian Grown Campaign in a submission to the inquiry.
SOURCE
Queensland becoming as authoritarian as Britain
Both have for some years been run by Leftist governments
With the government recently waging war on everyone from smokers to skateboarders, bikies to binge drinkers, civil libertarians warn Queensland is on the verge of becoming a nanny state.
Queensland Council for Civil Liberties president Michael Cope said the passing of state laws yesterday banning smoking in cars with children recalled the classic Mark Twain cry, "No one's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." "You can see the justification for [non-smoking laws], but where does it stop?" Mr Cope said.
Further legislation, tabled by Attorney-General Cameron Dick yesterday, designed to dismantle outlaw gangs by tearing down clubhouses and banning members from associating with each other drew more ire from the long-term campaigner for civil rights.
"These days politicians have this great urge to be seen to be fixing everybody's social ills ... inevitably the minute you do that you reduce people's liberty," he said. "Every time a problem arises a politician passes a law to fix it - that is why we are creeping towards a nanny state. [The government] is slowly chipping away at people's freedoms; there is no doubt about that."
He said the State Government was ignoring the follies of outright bans. "The problem with any law is that it may cover problems B, C and D but it does more harm to people's liberty than what's intended."
Civil libertarians have widely opposed greater paternalism of "health and safety", but a spokesman for Premier Anna Bligh today maintained the government had introduced new legislation to "protect people".
In August this year the State Government banned skateboarders and rollerbladers riding after dark. The government cited safety reasons for the crackdown on riders of "wheeled recreation devices", claiming they became almost invisible to motorists after sundown.
Less than one month later Premier Anna Bligh announced the use of regular glass would be banned in bars deemed high risk by the end of the year. The government cited safety and health reasons, saying the glass ban would strip people of the "weapon of choice" in pubs and clubs. Glass is expected to be banned in at least 74 late-night watering holes throughout Queensland as the Government fine-tunes its list of high risk venues. Forty-one venues have until the new year to justify why they should not be made to serve drinks in plastic cups.
The Government's legislative reach may be further extended as a parliamentary inquiry seeks to curb the increasing incidents of alcohol-related violence in entertainment precincts in Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The Queensland Police Union this week proposed shutting down Brisbane's entertainment precincts at 2am and suburban hotels at 12pm. Fortitude Valley venues were quick to slam the ambitious proposal arguing the call signalled a return to the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era. "We're dangerously heading down the path of becoming a nanny state," chairman of the Valley Liquor Accord Danny Blair said.
SOURCE
By Greg Lindsay and Roger Bate. Greg Lindsay is the Executive Director of The Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney. Roger Bate is the Legatum Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. The 2009 Legatum Prosperity Index is now available. A majority of Australians rely on "free" government hospitals, where low standards and long waits are common
The 2009 Legatum Prosperity Index rates Australia an impressive sixth out of 104 countries surveyed – the top five are all small Northern European countries with populations of less than 10 million.
However, inefficiencies in public hospitals are hurting Australia’s prosperity. While Australia is very strong on the economic fundamentals required for long-term growth, the nation’s ailing health care system is keeping Australia from reaching its full potential, in terms of both economic progress and quality of life. Legatum ranks Australia a lowly 21st in health care, behind countries like Singapore, Spain, and the Czech Republic; 28th in infant mortality; 47th for number of doctors per capita; and behind Slovakia and Hungary on available beds.
The Australian Medical Association recently found that waiting times far exceed acceptable levels. The median wait for hip surgery in Australian public hospitals is nearly three months. For cataract surgery, it’s more than two months. Major public hospitals throughout Australia are bursting at the seams with bed occupancy rates of well over 100% a daily occurrence.
Overcrowding and inefficiency have compromised patient safety. According to the Queensland University of Technology, $1 billion annually is lost in bed days because of hospital-acquired infections. Medical errors cost an estimated $1 billion–$2 billion annually, with half of these errors classified as ‘potentially preventable.’
These health care problems are draining billions from the Australian economy, both directly by taking money away from players in the health sector and indirectly by compromising worker health and undermining productivity.
Australians are among the most prosperous populations on the planet. But the country’s health sector is in need of significant improvement. Cutting away waste and improving quality in health care would go a long way toward making Australia even stronger.
The above is part of a press release from the Centre for Independent Studies, dated October 30. Enquiries to cis@cis.org.au. Snail mail: PO Box 92, St Leonards, NSW, Australia 1590. Telephone ph: +61 2 9438 4377 or fax: +61 2 9439 7310
Rudd on the horns of a dilemma over illegal immigrants
Talking about a big Australia and waging a desperate struggle to salvage a tough border protection strategy may appear a contradiction, yet as Rudd knows and John Howard proved, border protection and Australia's high immigration program have always gone together. This compact, pivotal to Australia's progress, is at risk. An unpredictable mix of events on the water, in Indonesia, and worry about Rudd's hard line from within his own constituency has created a diabolical dilemma for Rudd and Stephen Smith. Faced with a limited array of unpalatable options the government's tough border protection stance is at risk. The political centre, it seems, may not hold with Rudd under aggressive assault from opposite positions on the Right and Left.
There are two boats in Indonesia with Sri Lankan asylum-seekers refusing to disembark, the first intercepted by the Indonesians within their own waters with 250 people aboard and the Oceanic Viking, an Australian boat that rescued 78 asylum-seekers at Indonesia's request in Indonesia's rescue zone.
Rudd and his Foreign Minister are standing firm. The plight of the Oceanic Viking has become the most difficult test of Rudd's resolution. The claim that he cannot take a hard decision offensive to his own side will now be determined. Does Rudd have the nerve and patience to prevail or will he crack before the political blackmail of the asylum-seekers and reluctance of local Indonesian authorities?
This week the Australian media seemed unable or unwilling to describe what was happening before its eyes: the Oceanic Viking asylum-seekers, by refusing to disembark in Indonesia, exploited their moral plight as a device to intimidate the Rudd government into a retreat and re-direction of the boat to Christmas Island where they could be processed.
As Smith signalled, this is a case of asylum-seekers trying to decide what country will process their claims and what country will become their new home if those claims are upheld. Asylum-seekers have no such rights under the 1951 Refugee Convention. The situation is exactly the reverse of the interpretation given wide currency this week. Far from Australia ignoring its obligations under the convention, the asylum-seekers are insisting on rights they do not possess under the convention. It is obvious what should happen: if the Sri Lankans are serious about being refugees they should leave the boat immediately and claim refugee status from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.
Their real purpose, however, is different. It is to self-select Australia and to resist any effort to have the UNHCR process their claims outside Australia. "It's not their choice," Smith told the AM ABC radio program. "It's not a matter for the Sri Lankans on board to choose where they make their application for refugee status. We absolutely defend their right to make that application."
The spectre of an ignominious retreat now overhangs Rudd and Smith that would see them forced to bring the asylum-seekers to this country. Such a move would destroy Rudd's credibility on border protection and represent an Australian submission to the campaign by boatpeople to self-select Australia as their home.
The government has no legal obligation to bring these people to Australia. As Rudd said, Australia took two decisions in relation to the Oceanic Viking asylum-seekers: it engaged in rescue when a vessel was in distress and, having collected the people and in consultation with Indonesian authorities, it decided to take the people for processing in Indonesia.
There is no credible case that Australia should have done otherwise. Rudd and Indonesia's President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono agreed that the people be processed in Indonesia. The problem is that Yudhoyono is struggling to enforce the agreement in the teeth of provincial hostility and resentment against Australia seems to be rising.
On Wednesday Smith was unequivocal about the result. "The President has already made that decision," he insisted. "Now that (going to Indonesia) is what will occur." He was confident the Rudd-Yudhoyono agreement would be honoured. On Thursday, Smith told radio station 2UE that Australia wasn't setting any timetable. "These things always take time," he said. Asked if the government would back down and bring them to Australia, Smith said: "We don't have that in contemplation."
Indonesia's Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa told ABC1's Lateline on Wednesday that Indonesia would not use force to remove the asylum-seekers and said: "We have an abundance of patience". Yet he intensified the pressure, saying if the people won't budge then the Rudd government must take that into account. The next day Rudd followed by saying that Australia also had an abundance of patience. It is a polite way of describing a stalemate in which Rudd and Smith hope they can prevail but have limited leverage and only marginal control over a situation vital to their policy.
It is a game of political poker for high stakes. The more the Sri Lankans believe that Rudd may retreat, the more they will stay the course. In the meantime, Rudd will be under growing criticism at home for his inhumanity and hypocrisy.
The deadlock highlights the agonising nature of asylum-seeker policy. There is little doubt the Sri Lankans are genuine refugees yet the Indonesian and Australian authorities have met their obligations and are fully entitled to insist the boatpeople disembark.
Rudd and Smith know they must ensure the one-off Oceanic Viking event does not disrupt the substantial and permanent regional co-operation they seek with Indonesia that will be canvassed at the next Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation meeting. In this sense the resilience of the Rudd-Yudhoyono concord is being tested. It must survive that test for Rudd to have any prospect of salvaging his asylum-seeker policy.
More HERE
Law to save Australian meat pies drafted by politicians
Meat pies are Australia's national religion. Even people who don't follow the neddies still like a meat pie. And most people have a "church" (pieshop) that they mostly go to for their pies. So we don't need politicians to tell us what is a good pie
A LAW to save the Aussie meat pie has been written by three politicians who argue that consumers are being dudded by misleading food standards. Current standards allow manufacturers to claim a meat pie is Australian-made, even if the meat is sourced from overseas - which will eventually include countries with mad cow disease after the easing of meat restrictions. As long as some of the packaging, pastry and gravy is made locally, products can carry the green and gold "Australian Made" logo.
Outraged federal Senators independent Nick Xenophon, Nationals' Barnaby Joyce, and Greens' Bob Brown said the Rudd Government needed to get fair dinkum with consumers. "This is pathetic. You can have a meat pie that says 'Australian Made' but contains 100 per cent foreign meat," Senator Xenophon said. Senator Joyce said labels should carry a pie graph to show what percentage of the product was actually from Australia.
The Trades Practices Act says products can claim to be made in Australia if they have been "substantially transformed" and have 50 per cent or more of the cost of producing or manufacturing in Australia. The Food Standards Amendment (Truth in Labelling Laws) Bill 2009, was yesterday scrutinised in a Senate inquiry. The senators want greater detail about the content of food products, including imported ingredients. It would mean the word "Australian" would only apply in relation to food that is 100 per cent produced in Australia from Australian products.
But the Australian Made, Australian Grown Campaign, Dick Smith Foods and the Australian National Retailers Association have argued there could be unintended consequences. "Cheese ... made in Australia today is made with imported rennet (a substance that curdles milk). Under this proposal cheese made in Australia from 100 per cent Australian milk could not be labelled Australian cheddar," said the Australian Made, Australian Grown Campaign in a submission to the inquiry.
SOURCE
Queensland becoming as authoritarian as Britain
Both have for some years been run by Leftist governments
With the government recently waging war on everyone from smokers to skateboarders, bikies to binge drinkers, civil libertarians warn Queensland is on the verge of becoming a nanny state.
Queensland Council for Civil Liberties president Michael Cope said the passing of state laws yesterday banning smoking in cars with children recalled the classic Mark Twain cry, "No one's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session." "You can see the justification for [non-smoking laws], but where does it stop?" Mr Cope said.
Further legislation, tabled by Attorney-General Cameron Dick yesterday, designed to dismantle outlaw gangs by tearing down clubhouses and banning members from associating with each other drew more ire from the long-term campaigner for civil rights.
"These days politicians have this great urge to be seen to be fixing everybody's social ills ... inevitably the minute you do that you reduce people's liberty," he said. "Every time a problem arises a politician passes a law to fix it - that is why we are creeping towards a nanny state. [The government] is slowly chipping away at people's freedoms; there is no doubt about that."
He said the State Government was ignoring the follies of outright bans. "The problem with any law is that it may cover problems B, C and D but it does more harm to people's liberty than what's intended."
Civil libertarians have widely opposed greater paternalism of "health and safety", but a spokesman for Premier Anna Bligh today maintained the government had introduced new legislation to "protect people".
In August this year the State Government banned skateboarders and rollerbladers riding after dark. The government cited safety reasons for the crackdown on riders of "wheeled recreation devices", claiming they became almost invisible to motorists after sundown.
Less than one month later Premier Anna Bligh announced the use of regular glass would be banned in bars deemed high risk by the end of the year. The government cited safety and health reasons, saying the glass ban would strip people of the "weapon of choice" in pubs and clubs. Glass is expected to be banned in at least 74 late-night watering holes throughout Queensland as the Government fine-tunes its list of high risk venues. Forty-one venues have until the new year to justify why they should not be made to serve drinks in plastic cups.
The Government's legislative reach may be further extended as a parliamentary inquiry seeks to curb the increasing incidents of alcohol-related violence in entertainment precincts in Brisbane and the Gold Coast. The Queensland Police Union this week proposed shutting down Brisbane's entertainment precincts at 2am and suburban hotels at 12pm. Fortitude Valley venues were quick to slam the ambitious proposal arguing the call signalled a return to the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era. "We're dangerously heading down the path of becoming a nanny state," chairman of the Valley Liquor Accord Danny Blair said.
SOURCE
