Idiotic political posturing

We have been down this road before with the Ord river boondoggle in Western Australia: Lots of water was flowing out to sea in a remote area so huge dams were built at great expense to conserve the water for irrigation. Problem: There was almost nothing you could grow there that was commercially viable. Nobody seemed to notice then that the world is chronically plagued by unsellable food surpluses (owing to equally idiotic interventions by other governments) and nothing has changed since. Growing stuff does not mean you can sell it at a sustainable price. Government efforts to pick business winners are almost invariably laughable and this is no exception. If dams are to be built they should be built where there is already a demand for them. I live in a large Australian population centre that is allegedly drought stricken yet it rains here several times a week. There is NO shortage of water -- just a failure to dam it.

North Queensland could become the "food bowl of the world" under a proposal to catch thousands of gigalitres of water and irrigate vast tracts of the desolate Gulf of Carpentaria and Cape York. Prime Minister John Howard yesterday appointed Liberal Senator Bill Heffernan to head a taskforce to investigate water and agriculture development in the north as part of his $10 billion national water plan. The vision is to turn the region into a garden of Eden by harnessing some of the estimated 88,000 gigalitres of water lost in run-off in north Australia each year.

With one gigalitre equal to 1000 megalitres the options are immense, Senator Heffernan told The Courier-Mail yesterday. He said the inquiry would look at harnessing the 60 per cent of Australia's total run-off that flowed through three major catchments. "This is. . . about opening up new opportunity," he said.

Peter Kenny, president of the nation's peak farmers group AgForce, said the north had the potential to become the "food bowl of the world". "There is assumption by climatologists that most of the rainfall in the future will be in the northern part of Australia," Mr Kenny said. Wilderness Society spokeswoman Larissa Cordner said: "Moving irrigated agricultural development into northern Australia will be an unmitigated disaster both for the environment and economically."

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PM uses Greenie language to support Federal takeover of big river systems



Prime Minister John Howard yesterday labelled himself a "climate change realist", saying Australians could never return to a relaxed attitude towards water. "I regard myself as a climate change realist," he said while announcing his $10 billion water plan. "That means looking at the evidence as it emerges and responding with policies."

Mr Howard said the evidence pointed to a contraction in weather systems that traditionally brought southern Australia winter and spring rains. "Our rainfall has always been highly variable," he said. "The deviation around average rainfall is enormous and it seems to be getting bigger."

However, Mr Howard said the Australian continent was by its very nature a dry place. Australian water management systems had to be resilient and sustainable regardless of the truth or otherwise of climate change. "They must be geared not to a world of steady averages that rarely materialise but to the variability that has been part of Australia's climate since time immemorial," Mr Howard said.

He said Australians could never return to the days "when you could hose down the car". "We need to make every drop count - on our farms, in our factories and in our homes," Mr Howard said.

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Phonics still being ignored by teacher-training colleges

Education faculties will have to abandon their unscientific ideology of reading if children across the nation are to be guaranteed basic literacy. This claim is made by Max Coltheart, a leading member of the group of 26 academics, mostly psychologists, whose open letter to former education minister Brendan Nelson inspired a national inquiry into how reading is taught. In his first assessment of the outcome of the inquiry, which reported in 2005, Professor Coltheart of Macquarie University has warned that unless Dr Nelson's successor, Julie Bishop, takes on the education academics he holds ultimately responsible for poor literacy, the inquiry will have been wasted.

Professor Coltheart, an advocate of the phonics method of teaching reading, said as far as he could tell not a single education faculty had shown any sign of heeding the reformist recommendations of the inquiry. The faculties were wedded to the failed whole-language method, he said. "They're so defensive, they won't do it unless they're compelled to," he told the HES. "Most of them are of a very unscientific frame of mind. They hate the idea that you can even measure reading. Is (Ms Bishop) going to compel them to (reform) or is she going to shelve (the report)?"

Ms Bishop said the commonwealth did not have the power to force education faculties to adopt the report's recommendations. But she pointed to the requirement that states submit from May next year to annual national literacy and numeracy testing for students in years three, five, seven and nine as a condition of the federal funding agreement. "This testing will place significant pressure on university education faculties to produce teachers with the skills to more effectively teach reading, grammar, mathematics and other key skills," she said. It was up to the states, as employers of most teachers, to insist that education faculties turn out graduates with the right skills to teach literacy.

Terry Lovat, from the Australian Council of Deans of Education, disputed Professor Coltheart's image of education academics as captive to the whole-language method and hostile to phonics and the Nelson inquiry. "I think that if the whole-language approach ever dominated, it has not done so for 15 years: it's a straw man," Professor Lovat said. He said the inquiry, on which he sat, had been influenced by the education deans in finding that classrooms needed a balance between direct instruction phonics and indirect "literacy saturation". Education faculties, including his own at the University of Newcastle, were well aware of the report's recommendations and were taking them into account in regular internal reviews.

The debate about teacher training is expected to reach a new pitch this year. A federal parliamentary inquiry into teacher education is expected to report before March. Labor's education spokesman Stephen Smith has unsettled teacher unions by endorsing "a rigorous assessment" of teacher performance in the classroom.

Professor Coltheart said the public debate about reading tended to assign blame to teachers but they themselves were victims of the unscientific culture of education faculties. "Somebody's got to be blamed for (poor literacy) and it looks to me it's the faculties, and if Julie Bishop does nothing she can be blamed, too," he said. He said surveys suggested that up to 20 per cent of children and adolescents emerged with very poor literacy.

With Melbourne University's Margot Prior, Professor Coltheart has written a 5000-word analysis of the Nelson inquiry and its aftermath. It is expected to be published soon by the Australian Academy of the Social Sciences. "(The inquiry found that) the whole-language approach to the teaching of reading, currently the most widely used approach to the teaching of reading in Australian schools ... is not in the best interests of students, especially those students who are having difficulty learning to read," they write.

They say this method disapproves of direct instruction in rules for translating letters of the alphabet into sounds. They say the method holds that children learn to read and interact with texts to create meaning for themselves, just as they learn to talk without any explicit teaching. They say that any successful reading program has to begin with so-called synthetic phonics, in which children are taught to read by matching letters with sounds and putting them together into syllables. They say a thorough overhaul of teacher training is necessary. "(But) we know of no plans for the universities to improve the training of teachers in the science of reading, and in evidence-based methods for teaching reading and assisting children with difficulties in learning to read. "This is despite the fact, noted in the Nelson report, that it is currently possible for Australia's future teachers to complete a bachelor of education course with less than 2 per cent of total credit points devoted to instruction in the teaching of reading."

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Abbott [Catholic] to tackle Rudd [Leftist alleged Christian] on political faith

Australia's involvement in the Iraq war and the Howard Government's WorkChoices industrial relations laws can be justified by Christians, according to Health Minister Tony Abbott. And Mr Abbott, a staunch Catholic, also believes it is far-fetched to claim a drive for social justice should be a necessary starting point for Christians. He will advance his arguments in a speech to the Young Liberal national conference in Melbourne today as he seeks to broaden the debate about the place of religion in politics.

In his speech, he will savage Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd, who has accused the right wing of the Howard Government of attempting to hijack religion for political purposes and to demonise Labor as somehow godless. According to notes prepared for his speech and obtained by The Weekend Australian, Mr Abbott will accuse Mr Rudd of seeking to commandeer God and demand he cease attempting to "shame" Christians into voting Labor. The former student priest will argue Christians are called upon to seek good in all people but not to ignore human weakness or assume evil has ceased to exist.

"That's why there is no single, authoritative Christian position on the Iraq war, climate change or border protection," he will say. "On these issues, what mostly matters is what's likely to work out for the best in an imperfect world. Reluctantly perhaps, a Christian could conclude that sending extra troops to Iraq, for instance, might make more sense than leaving the sectarians to their own murderous devices."

While Mr Abbott does not argue that the war should be seen as a clash between Christianity and Islam, he uses the example to demonstrate his point that both sides of politics can illustrate their political arguments in line with religion. He also rejects Mr Rudd's view that Christian tenets of social justice accord with Labor philosophies such as fairness in the workplace. "I respect Rudd's faith," he says in the speech notes. "I just wish he would stop feeding the myth of the Christian right without some evidence. "Governments, unlike individuals, cannot act on the basis of faith, only reason. The difference between the Government and many of its critics is that its senior members think that the values of the Ten Commandments are as much common sense as religious dogma."

Mr Abbott will also respond to challenges from Mr Rudd that he justify, in Christian terms, the WorkChoices laws, which encourage greater use of workplace contracts. "From a Christian perspective, indeed, from a commonsense one, the test of fairness should not be whether workplace conditions are set by unions, industrial commissions or contract, but whether they produce more jobs, higher pay and fewer strikes," the speech notes say. "Some employers' hard bargains threaten people's income growth, but some unions' hard bargains threaten their jobs."

He will call on Mr Rudd to deliver policies, not rhetoric, to show he is interested in the values of Christians, not just their votes. "The depth of a politician's convictions is usually measured by how far he's prepared to take them when they work against his immediate political advantage."

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