AUSTRALIA WILL NOT SIGN KYOTO PROTOCOL: HOWARD

Even as environmentalists and leaders pressed Australia to sign the Kyoto protocol in the wake of the latest UN report on global warming, the country's Prime Minister on Saturday maintained his stand to not sign the protocol as it excludes world's major polluters. "Signing Kyoto is not going to solve the problem because Kyoto does not include the world's major polluters. We've moved on from that and in any event, we are going to meet our target under Kyoto, many of our critics who have signed Kyoto will not do so," Prime Minister John Howard said in a statement on Saturday. "Australia has already undertaken number of measures to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere. It will continue with those measures, but we will do it in a sensible, practical way which will make a contribution to solving the problem but will not do disproportionate and unfair damage to the Australian economy," he said.

The UN report that paints a bleak picture of higher sea levels and temperatures this century has urged the world to take action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions but Howard said looking to solar and wind energy is not the solution. Calling for the use of nuclear energy as an alternative, he said, "There is no point in the face of such comprehensive challenge of ruling out a consideration that may over time provide part of the solution." "Let's be realistic - you can only run on fossil fuel or in time, nuclear power," he said. Federal Opposition environment spokesman, Peter Garrett said the Government should establish a national carbon emissions trading scheme and sign the Kyoto Protocol immediately.

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More power to principals plan

Under-performing teachers could be sacked under a radical proposal to give school principals the power to "hire and fire" their staff

Setting up education as a key election battleground, Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop yesterday launched a full-frontal attack on what she dubbed the "all-powerful teachers' unions". Rejecting Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd's notion of an "education revolution", Ms Bishop said teaching appointments should be in the hands of individual principals and not state education departments.

She put forward higher standards as the issue on which the education agenda should be fought. The higher standards would be created by greater autonomy for principals, performance incentives for teachers and improved literacy and numeracy skills, she said. "Many school principals across Australia cite as their biggest frustration the fact that centralised education bureaucracies parachute teachers into schools or summarily remove valued teachers," Ms Bishop said. "Giving the power to principals will fix the problem of state governments, captive of the unions, unable to deal with under-performing teachers."

The proposal is expected to be formally raised with state governments at the next Ministerial Council on Education scheduled for April. Labor education spokesman Stephen Smith offered in-principle support, saying he believed principals should have a greater say in who was teaching in their classrooms. "I'm happy to have a conversation with my state ministers about it," he said. [A conversation! How radical! Will they talk about football too?]

State Education Minister Jane Lomax-Smith said South Australian schools already had the ability to choose the best teacher for the job. Ms Bishop said she would work co-operatively with the states but warned the Federal Government could use funding as a "leverage". "Education is a national priority and it is too important to be left at the mercy of state parochialism and union self-interest," she said.

Australian Education Union state president Andrew Gohl rejected Ms Bishop's assertions, saying her plan for principal autonomy was "out of touch". "If you extend Julie Bishop's plan to its logical conclusion, it would mean that the most highly experienced, highly skilled teachers end up in small clusters of already highly advantaged schools," he said. "An education system has a responsibility to all students, regardless of where they live, to provide access to quality teachers."

During her speech, Ms Bishop also said: SHE would be putting a proposal to the states to offer rewards and incentive payments to well-performing teachers; THE Government would explore alternative pathways for teacher registration; STATES should provide further details about individual schools' performance; INCREASES in public spending had to improve standards; REITERATED her criticism of literacy and numeracy standards around the nation.

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Questions not even a doctor should answer

Politics invade medical schools

You might think that medicine is the one field that prides itself on making decisions based on objective evidence. Wrong prognosis. When it comes to selecting medical students, our finest universities are in the subjective business of social engineering. And that experiment appears to be failing dismally.

According to a study published on Monday in the Medical Journal of Australia, the present method of choosing medical students - a combination of written tests and interviews aimed at finding the best critical thinkers and problem solvers - is a poor predictor of how students will perform during their medical course. The gurus running the medical schools like to describe the process of turning a fresh-faced 18-year-old student into a fully fledged doctor as a complicated business. It is also an expensive business. Given that our tax dollars go into producing most of those doctors, that makes the method behind choosing who makes the cut our business.

This latest study appears to confirm concerns raised in The Australian last year from some inside the profession that good old-fashioned class envy and its twin sister, social engineering, are behind an interview process that pushes some of the most academically gifted students away from medicine. Being a son or daughter of a medico is now a handicap.

So too is going to a private school, said former deputy chancellor of The University of Adelaide, Harry Medlin. “I personally believe that to select medical students predominantly on their skills in an interview is a horrendous thing to do,” added John Horowitz, director of cardiology at two Adelaide hospitals.

Others voiced similar concerns. Like all pendulum swings, the move away from academic merit is turning out to be plain dumb, no matter how good the intentions pushing the pendulum. In trying to refute the claim, Lindon Wing, chairman of the Committee of Deans of Australian Medical Schools ended up confirming the bias.

In a letter to this newspaper last year, Wing defended the selection processes by pointing out “that medical doctors are among the most represented profession among parents of medical students in Australian universities. In some institutions, students whose parents are medical doctors number close to 20 per cent.” There. We have enough of the progeny of the bourgeoisie - 20 per cent is plenty. For Wing, it would be irrelevant if the age-old drive of human nature for children to follow their parents’ footsteps into a calling meant that 50 per cent of the qualified candidate pool were doctors’ children. Instead, the deans of the nation’s medical faculties centrally plan what they think is the best demographic make-up of medical students. And once they fill their pseudo-quota for doctors’ offspring, it wouldn’t matter how smart or well suited to medicine a doctor’s child was. When the quota is full it’s time to start engineering some results more to the planners’ liking.

And working out just who they like seems to involve asking the young students questions about gay marriage and the Iraq war. Many in the medical schools busily tried to defend the status quo, arguing they carefully train interviewers so that bias is not an issue. Reading some of the experiences on a website that provides feedback from those who sat through interviews suggests bias is indeed an issue.

One student from the 2003 intake in Queensland advised other interviewees: “Don’t expect medically orientated questions. Mine were about reconciliation, forest clearing, stem cell research, war in Iraq etc.” Other students were asked about their views on capital punishment and IVF for gay people. Students are a canny lot. The smarter ones know what interviewers want to hear. Here’s a sample. One student who secured a place in medicine in 2005 advises that a question about hobbies is a “disguised volunteer-work question”. Not wanting to look coached, the student says: “I did not list volunteer work first. I mentioned that I play soccer, guitar and working with kids.” Another student remarked that the interviewers “particularly delved into my volunteer work”.

It’s all being done, say medical schools, in the name of finding a cohort of future doctors able to reason and communicate. But as one leading Sydney specialist told The Australian: “If I had been asked, as an 18-year-old, whether I thought Australia should go to war in Iraq, I might have answered, Well, is the beer any good in Iraq?” This distinguished doctor says he may not have made it through the interview process. For the record, he is a dab hand at heart and lung transplants, is a top-notch communicator and his views on Iraq are now more advanced.

Now, as far as cartels go, you’d be hard pressed to find one more tightly knit than the medical fraternity. So, when doctors start criticising their own, you know something is awry in the nation’s medical schools.

Reinforcing the PC madness, it’s all about diversity, say those running medical schools. But what’s to stop interviewers, deliberately chosen for their diversity, imposing their own diversity filters on the interview outcomes?

Of course, raising questions about the interview is immediately sniffed at by those supporting the status quo as nothing more than nostalgia for old-fashioned elitism. It’s true that relying on objective academic results to allocate scarce resources is not the perfect solution. But it’s better than leaving the decision of who will make a good doctor up to the whims of two or three people on the basis of a 45-minute interview.

Refreshingly, even before this latest study, some medical administrators admitted the lack of evidence to suggest that interviews are producing a better calibre of students.

Ken Donald, former head of the University of Queensland’s medical school, told The Australian that introducing interviews was an “interesting experiment” but it was time to rethink the admission process because “people who perform poorly in the interview sometimes turn out to be the best in the class”. The corollary is also true: those who score highly in the interview are not necessarily the best performers down the track.

“I have a bit of sympathy with the assertion that unless the interviewers are well trained and the interview is well structured, there is the potential to misjudge liars, cheats, psychopaths etc,” adds Donald. “There is no good evidence anywhere in the literature, even in the published papers on this, that the interview, at least the one we have been using, is reliable as a predictor of performance,” he said.

Now, Queensland University’s medical school is reviewing the interview process. Abandoning interviews will restore fairness. No longer will talented young students be denied opportunities because the interviewers didn’t like their politics, or their parents’ background. But there is another more fundamental reason to dump interviews. They don’t work. Central planning never does. Would someone please tell the doctors.

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"Healthy" food a hard sell for school canteens

School canteens are struggling to break even after banning the sale of high-fat and pre-packaged foods in order to comply with state government guidelines on healthy eating. A study backed by the Australian Research Council has found that many canteens could be forced to close unless federal and state governments provide extra funding to help carry through healthy eating guidelines.

Researcher Claire Drummond, who is undertaking a national study on canteen food services and healthy eating, said government schools that had introduced healthier foods were finding it difficult to make a profit by selling salads, baguettes and fruit. "A lot of the canteens need to make a profit just to survive," Ms Drummond said. "Something is going to have to give and the Goverment is going to have to provide a lot more support or funding, otherwise they're going to fail."

Healthy eating guidelines have been introduced to schools in NSW and Queensland and will be mandated in South Australia by the end of the year. While the guidelines are working well, Ms Drummond said some government high schools were struggling because they lacked volunteer support. Without volunteers, schools have been forced to pay for additional staff or outsource services. A lack of volunteers means there is little time to prepare healthy meals. "The high schools are completely worried about that because they can't get volunteers and primary schools are going that way as well," she said. "(And many) canteen managers have basically come from being a parent to a manager and a lot of them don't have the skills, the dietary background."

The University of South Australia PhD candidate said some high schools were struggling to replace vending machines, chocolate drives and barbecue fundraisers. "They're everywhere in high schools, they're a great source of revenue when the school canteen is closed," she said.

Ms Drummond called for a national approach to provide additional funding. The federal Government last year provided one-off $1500 grants to schools to buy ovens and establish vegetable patches to help them implement the strategies, but Ms Drummond said that had not been offered this year.

At St Peter's Woodlands Grammar School at Glenelg, in Adelaide's west, canteen manager Wendy Manning has introduced low-fat alternatives to pies and pasties. But many children would rather buy high-fat foods than salad rolls. "Lollies are cheaper than fruit at the moment," Ms Manning said.

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Another government computer stuff-up

At least it seems that they did get this one to work -- eventually. A contrast with the Collins submarine program that had to be thrown out after about $300 million was spent on it

An audit of Customs' disastrous $205 million cargo processing system upgrade program has blasted the organisation's amateurish planning and execution of the now infamous project, which had at least $30 million in spending totally undocumented. Problems with the new import systems introduced by Customs two-and-a-half years late in October 2005 saw ships queuing at sea off ports in New South Wales and Victoria while they waited for cargo already unloaded to be processed.

A report into the Cargo Management Re-engineering project published by the Australian National Audit Office found a litany of failures, saying Customs did not adequately plan or cost the project, and moved ahead without sufficient "buy-in" from the shipping and freight industries. Management of the project was so bad that Customs could not provide auditors with any documentation for expenditure in 39 separate instances worth a total of $29.9 million.

"Customs was poorly placed to determine whether the project was both affordable and achievable," the report says. "The management framework that Customs had in place to support this project lacked many of the basic fundamentals necessary to successfully implement a large ICT project," the report says.

While noting the introduction of a new exports processing system was relatively painless, auditors reported the botched implementation of the imports system had "a significant impact on Australia's supply chain and international trading environment".

The initial project cost estimate of $30 million in 1999 ballooned to $205 million by the time total cost was reported in February 2006, auditors found. The project's expected outcomes were never properly defined, and the project lacked a financial management plan, project budget and an adequate assessment of the risks it faced, auditors reported. The assessment of the project's financial management was particularly scathing, with both the agency's initial business case for the project and a subsequent revision found to be totally inadequate. "Neither business case adequately identified costs, benefits, risks, deliverables or timelines. No consolidated financial business case or detailed cost estimates were prepared and signed off at the commencement of the CMR project," auditors found. "There was no identified source of funding in either business case and no strategy for determining whether the project had achieved its overall objectives or outcomes."

In its response to the audit findings, Customs officials said: "Customs acknowledges that there are some things that could have been done to make the implementation smoother".

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