That pesky global warming is making Australia's deserts green!

Unpredictable rainfall is normal in Australia but these days it is all due to "climate change"

If the rain is not falling in Sydney's catchments and throughout southern Australia, where has it gone? The answer, says the acting head of the Bureau of Meteorology's National Climate Centre, David Jones, is north-west and Central Australia, where residents are finding climate change may have a wetter flipside.

Most dramatic is the desert outpost of Giles, which sits on the edge of the Tanami Desert near the junction of South Australia, Western Australian and the Northern Territory. In 50 years the remote weather station, home to five people, has seen its rainfall double - from a yearly average of about 150 millimetres to around 300.

If current trends continue, ecological changes will begin to follow - greener for the desert and the Kimberley, but browner for southern Australia. Because Giles is one of the driest spots in the continent, a doubling of rainfall has not yet had a visible impact, says the officer in charge of the weather station there, Michael McIlvenny. But Dr Peter Kendrick, Pilbara-based regional ecologist with the West Australian Department of Environment and Conservation, said doubling rainfall has a "huge impact" in such an ecosystem, given that desert fauna and flora are tuned to respond rapidly to episodic rainfall. Dr Jones says he already believes the extra rainfall in some other less arid areas has given agriculture and grazing a valuable buffer against degradation.

But in southern Australia, the colour of climate change seems to be brown. Dr Michael Raupach, a scientist with the CSIRO Division of Marine and Atmospheric Research, and chairman of the Global Carbon Project, has recently made some frightening observations from satellite photography. He and his team have discovered large swathes of the continent are becoming visibly less green. "Depending on the area, we are finding parts of the continent that are more than 50 per cent less green," he said. "This means a browning of the continent. The trend started in the late 1990s and since then has been going on in a ratchet fashion, with jumps in browning occurring in drought years."

What makes this finding so alarming is that if the drought does not ease then the logical conclusion of the current trend is a massive death of vegetation, huge bushfires and the release of vast volumes of carbon, further feeding climate change. Normally, Dr Raupach said, forests have the chance to recover through flooding rains between droughts, but the low-rainfall conditions of the past decade have been relentless. While sporadic recovery of greenness occurred in places, nowhere has vegetation climbed back to what it normally would be between droughts. Worst affected seem to be south-west Western Australia and almost the entire Murray-Darling Basin, ecosystems, already fragile because of land degradation. "It's almost literally true that it keeps me awake at night," Dr Raupach said.

The weather bureau's Dr Jones says "superficially, the rainfall shift to the north-west of the continent doesn't make a lot of sense". This is because theoretically the entire nation has been in the grip of El Nino for much of the last decade. Perhaps the huge release of aerosols into the atmosphere by Asian nations could be a factor in the increased rain, he said. One thing that is certain is that the Australian climate has shifted dramatically in the past half century. In a vast band of the continent between the Nullarbor coast and the Kimberley there has been an average annual increase in rainfall of between 100 and 200 millimetres. "Around Broome and Wyndham, rainfall has increased by 300 millimetres - particularly in summer and autumn," Dr Jones said.

On the other hand, Sydney's annual rainfall has decreased by between 100 and 200 millimetres a year and in Mackay by as much as 300 millimetres a year compared to the 1950s. Weather systems known as north-west cloud bands used to travel across the continent from monsoonal troughs in the Kimberley, bringing the kind of rain to southern Australia which filled dams and caused floods. "In the last few years to a decade these north-west cloud bands have almost disappeared. The linkage to the tropics has broken down," Dr Jones said. "Since 1950, since global temperatures have increased along with aerosols and ozone, all of a sudden we have seen rainfall trends that are very distinct. "One would be naive to put these trends down to natural variations. They're very large and a number are consistent with what we see from climate change computer models."

The drying of southern Australia has attracted the most attention until now, he said. "What we are seeing in the rest of Australia is just as dramatic, it's just that it's positive. People don't seem to notice climate change when it's beneficial to humans." Dr Kendrick said with greater rainfall, vegetation would increase in arid areas. There would be changes in fauna. The desert mouse had extended its range from the central deserts to the west Pilbara, and camel numbers were increasing.

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The long march back to honesty in the schools

No ideological agenda? Just who are the education unions kidding

Education Minister Julie Bishop's call for a national curriculum and her criticism of ideologues in the education bureaucracies met a predictable wave of outrage. "How dare she", cried the teachers unions and their friends. Concerns about curriculum being politically correct, the argument goes, are simply a ploy used by conservative governments to maintain power. Pat Byrne, the head of the Australian Education Union, reflected this view when she argued last year: "The challenge for us is to frame our position in a way that can successfully counter the culture war that is currently being fought ... This is not a good time to be progressive in Australia; or for that matter anywhere else in the world!"

Never mind students being made to deconstruct the classics in terms of "theory". Never mind Australian history being taught from a black-armband view. And never mind geography being redefined in terms of deep environmentalism and multiculturalism. The late 1960s and early '70s was not only about Woodstock and moratoriums. That period was also about the Left's decision, drawing on the works of Marxists Antonio Gramsci and Pierre Bourdieu, to take control of society by taking "the long march through the institutions".

Bourdieu argues that education is a powerful tool used by those more privileged in society to consolidate their position. Based on the concept of cultural capital, the argument is that there is nothing inherently worthwhile about academic studies or the Western tradition. The Left's belief that the education system is simply a tool used by the capitalist class to reproduce itself explains much of what has happened since the early '70s. The much-criticised Victorian Certificate of Education developed during the '80s was based on premier Joan Kirner's belief that schools must be transformed as "part of the socialist struggle for equality, participation and social change, rather than an instrument of the capitalist system".

Meanwhile, teacher education became controlled by activists such as Doug White, Bill Hannan, Bob Connell, Dean Ashenden, Simon Marginson and Allan Luke. In a textbook widely set for education courses entitled Making the Difference, the argument is put: "In the most basic sense, the process of education and the process of liberation are the same. At the beginning of the 1980s it is plain that the forces opposed to that growth (have) become increasingly militant. In such circumstances, education becomes a risky enterprise. Teachers, too, have to decide whose side they are on."

Many of those students radicalised during the '60s and '70s went on to become teachers and bureaucrats and they identify education as a key instrument in overturning the status quo. For many, such as the AEU, the Australian Association for the Teaching of English and the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, education was, and continues to be, a key instrument to change society. In 1998, ACSA published Going Public: Education Policy and Public Education in Australia, described by Alan Reid as a manifesto outlining the "political strategies that might be employed to protect and enhance the social democratic values that lie at the heart of progressive aspirations about public education".

The impact of the cultural Left on education has been profound. Competition and failure are banned. Feminists attack traditional texts such as Romeo and Juliet as enforcing gender stereotypes. In history teaching, instead of focusing on significant historical events and figures and celebrating past milestones, the focus is on victim groups, such as women, migrants and Aborigines. Over the past 30 or so years schools have been pressured to adopt a leftist stance on issues as diverse as multiculturalism, the environment, the class war, peace studies, feminism and gender studies. Worse, the idea that education can be disinterested and that teachers should be impartial has given way to the argument that everything is ideological. Meanwhile, the teachers unions deny any agenda.

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Fat chance of solving obesity

As a species, you know you are riding high when the biggest threat to your health comes from some informed overindulgence. You also know you're more selfish than smart when you blame others for voluntary and informed mistakes that you choose to make. Welcome to Australia 2006.

It is time that as a community we stopped whingeing about the obesity epidemic and started accepting a few home-cooked truths about ourselves. We should be rejoicing in the fact that our insatiable appetite for fast food is becoming the biggest heath epidemic of our time. It could be a tad worse. As we are piling on the kilos, more than 30,000 people are dying of starvation or readily preventable illness each day in Africa. This is despite the fact that there is enough grain alone produced to make every person in the world fat. Better our way than theirs.

Despite this, hardly a week goes by when medical, social science or economic gurus don't roll out some alarmist statistic about how fat we are getting. The most recent anti-contribution to the "crisis'' came this week from Access Economics, which said the health costs of obesity last year were $3.8 billion and the costs associated with lost productivity and wellbeing were a further $17.2 billion.

Good for us - that's what we've chosen. The obesity epidemic has been big news for over a decade now. Diet books have dominated the bestseller list and the weight loss industry has grown exponentially during this time. During the same period we have continued to get progressively fatter. We're gluttons. We prefer short-term pleasures to long-term health benefits. We prefer to a live a slightly shorter, indulgent lifestyle than a robotic, disciplined constant grind.

This is a perspective that is lost on the do-gooder, paternalistic, self-proclaimed lifestyle gurus who keep trying to stuff obesity statistics down our throats. The expanding nature of our waistline is one health problem that we don't need to be constantly lectured about. One difference between obesity ill-health and other forms of self-indulgent health problems is that it is a problem for which we assume almost total responsibility.

So does this mean no interventions are appropriate in response to our fat binge? Not quite, but they should be measured. There are certain foods that are significantly richer in calories than others. This is not always self-evident. The appropriate regulatory response is to require fast-food companies to provide nutritional information on their products. Once reforms like this are introduced, we have ourselves to blame if our waistlines continue to bulge.

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City council bans taking photos in public

This should be great for the tourism industry. Waverley Council controls Australia's most famous beach -- Bondi

A Sydney council has decreed the act of taking a photograph in a public place is a hazard to public safety. Waverley Council rangers have been given orders to move people on who have not sought its permission to take photographs in a public area because shoppers are "running the gauntlet". The Saturday Daily Telegraph was alerted to the draconian measures - normally associated with totalitarian dictatorships - while conducting a news poll and taking pictures of obliging shoppers in Spring St, Bondi Junction, on Thursday evening.

The ranger issued orders to leave the public area, outside the Eastgate shopping centre, after a security guard notified rangers of our survey - unrelated to the council or the shopping centre. Ranger Nikki Taylor said permission was required to take the photos because it was a "safety issue" to stop people in the street. Waverley Council's Bondi Junction manager Linda McDonald confirmed the measures, saying she believed her rangers had legal grounds to ask people to leave public areas if they were talking to members of the public without permission. "Anyone conducting any act [Even the Soviets did not go that far] on public space is obliged to apply for a permit," Ms McDonald said. "It's a policy of Waverley Council as caretakers of public space." "It's part of our policies and procedures, it basically came about by people saying 'we don't want to run the gauntlet'."

Ms McDonald said this policy was the same as "every other Sydney council". But councils contacted yesterday had not heard of the extreme policies and lambasted them as an attack on free speech. Manly Mayor Peter McDonald was stunned by the ranger's orders. "There's no way Manly Council would support that," he said. "I think that makes Waverley Council look a little silly." A Manly Council spokesman called the policies "extraordinary". "It's Waverley, not North Korea," he said.

Randwick Council said it would only give move-along directions to people disrupting the public if a complaint was made, but did not require anyone to make a formal request to use their public space.

Edwina Stratton, 35, Randwick, who was interviewed on Spring St for the poll, said she had not felt endangered or agitated when approached by The Saturday Daily Telegraph. "People asking for money is more of an imposition than people doing surveys," the mother of three said. "They have a lot more of them in that area and they haven't cracked down on them." The newly-elected mayor of Waverley,George Newhouse, could not be reached for comment.

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