LEFTIST CONTROL FREAKS IN AUSTRALIA TOO

This sort of thing has become chronic under Britain's Labour government but the Leftist NSW government has the same virus

When the Sydney Harbour Bridge opened in 1932, more than a million people turned up to celebrate. They came on foot and by old-style tram, and they danced all over the road. One boy, aged nine, rode a horse 1300km unaccompanied just to get there on time. But that was 1932, when people were robust, capable of crossing the road without a note from the Premier.

If you imagine the free-wheeling 1930s spirit will reign when the bridge opens to the public for its 75th birthday on Sunday, March 18, think again. At this year's walk, you won't be able to wake up, decide it's a lovely day, put on a pair of sandals and just go. You'll be told when and how and even with whom you can walk. You will have to register before the day, which means going to a website, giving your name and getting a ticket, which will in turn give you a time-slot - say 10am-11.30am - during which you'll be allowed to set off. If you're walking in a group, the organisers want to know how big it is. And you won't be allowed to add to the group once your number is approved. You can only walk one way, and you won't be allowed to stop. There will be no lunches on the bridge.

The organisers - it's the Premier's protocol department, apparently, although the event is sponsored by The Sydney Morning Herald - provide all manner of advice that adults were once thought not to to need: comfortable walking shoes are "critical" while sunscreen is "important", and there must be no rollerblades, no skateboards, no bicycles, no popping open the champagne, and - perhaps worst of all - no glorious golden retrievers straining at the lead. No pets at all.

There will be an Aboriginal smoking ceremony, but that has organisers in a spin. Children, the elderly, the asthmatic and the weak of heart, consider yourself warned. Organisers say: "Smoke may irritate eyes and throat so ALL bridge walkers are advised to stay upwind of the smoke drums".

Pedestrians on the bridge yesterday couldn't understand it. Jogger Ally Corbett said the bureaucracy could "ruin the fun". And Kieran Knox, walking hand-in-hand with Natalie Meredith, said: "I reckon they should block it off and have a festival".

The regulations come during a week in which a Sydney couple were told they couldn't smoke in their own apartment because it annoyed the neighbours. The week before, the Mexican wave was banned at the cricket. And Waverley Council in Sydney's east wanted to ban Australian flags on Bondi beach, air-conditioners and swimming pools.

There was a time when adults were able to pop outside without a hat -- and if they got sunburnt, well, bad luck, it was a lesson learnt, and one to pass on to the kids. Now the Government steps in to warn us even about the perils of getting blisters on the back of our feet. Scott Crebbin, a spokesman for the bridge walk, said: "It's about ensuring it's safe, comfortable and spread across the day."

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Leftist luminary shaky on the facts

How characteristic! Conservative commentator Gerard Henderson replies to an attack by wealthy Leftist columnist and broadcaster Phillip Adams

PHILLIP Adams must be running out of topics for his weekly missive in The Weekend Australian Magazine. Only this can explain his use of an entire column last Saturday devoted to me. He constantly referred to me as “Poor Gerard” or “PG”. Pretty funny, eh? Adams confuses ridicule with humour. It’s a standard put-down to cite an opponent by his or her first name, preceded by the adjective poor. It is also a substitute for argument.

However, there was some (unintended) wit in PA’s recent column.  Namely, the assertion that he is “un-insultable”. In fact, PA has one of the thinnest skins in Australian public life.

Last week Adams alleged that we fell out when he chaired an event at the 1999 Adelaide Festival of Ideas. The implication in the piece was that I objected to his introduction and compared it unfavourably with what he said about George Monbiot. In fact Monbiot was not on the platform – he appeared at the festival in 2003.

The leftist in question in 1999 was Beatrix Campbell, who has a regular spot on Adams’s ABC Radio National program. Their combined wit is on display with their constant reference to British Prime Minister Tony Blair as the “beau Blair”. How funny can you get?

In July 2003, Adams sent me a mocking letter. In response, I laughed at your man’s pompous “Phillip Adams AO” letterhead. It seemed ridiculous to me that an irreverent commentator, who regularly laughs at others, should feel the need to proclaim his gong on his personal letterhead. Ever sensitive to criticism, Adams accused me of envy. Shucks.

In conclusion, I should correct two howlers in Adams’s column last Saturday.

As I have repeatedly told Adams, I did not want to replace Jonathan Shier as ABC managing director in 2002. First, I am happy at The Sydney Institute. Second, I would not find any attraction in the task of heading down to Canberra to get a load of taxpayers funds to supplement the lifestyle of Adams and his fellow comrades at the ABC. I note that Adams now concedes that the only source for his rumour is an anonymous ABC board member who might have been telling him a fib. Really.

Finally, Adams’s claim last week that James McClelland was perhaps John Kerr’s closest friend is ridiculous. I knew both men. They did not even talk to one another during the final 15 years of the former governor-general’s life. Before he died in 1991, Kerr attempted a reconciliation with McClelland but the latter rejected the approach.

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Taking ownership of black housing

Realistic black leader Noel Pearson explains why privatising welfare housing for blacks can lessen the problem of passive welfare in black settlements

Is inadequate housing and overcrowding the cause of the social chaos and abuse in my home town, Hope Vale, that I described in Inquirer two weeks ago? I may placate my critics if I said yes, but there is no necessary causal connection between overcrowded housing, under-investment in infrastructure and abuse. There are many places in the developing world where large extended families live cheek by jowl in miserably poor housing, and there is no violence, incest and chaos. Many of the world's poorest people are strong in family life and socially rich, even if they are materially poor.

Poor, overcrowded housing does relate to health issues and many social tensions and problems. But it is to engage in denial to say sexual and other violence against one's own people is the consequence of government neglect of housing and infrastructure needs. The honest answer as to the source of the abuse I described last week is grog and drugs. It is the epidemic of grog and drugs, and the chaos and breakdown of social and cultural norms that they have occasioned, that have resulted in people abusing their own kith and kin.

Abuse is not a question of bricks, mortar and money. It is a question of collapsed social and cultural norms and the breakdown of moral codes within families and communities. The problem with the prevailing norms today is that there is too much tolerance of abuse. The great majority of people in dysfunctional communities are not engaged in pathological behaviour and they are opposed to the abuse. The problem is that they are passive and there is a social paralysis in the face of horrific problems.

Most Hope Vale people hate the abuse. But they won't stand up to the abusers. And they won't insist that the behaviour of the abusers must be confronted. Many of them deny the connection between the grog and drugs and the noise and abuse. Yes, they will admit the connection when pressed, but then they will say; "Oh, but it's the irresponsible drinkers who make it bad for the responsible ones." Or they will say: "It's not the grog that's the problem, it's the boredom", or the lack of jobs, or government neglect, or the lack of recreational facilities, or the overcrowded housing.

This is what is known as the symptom theory of substance abuse. This theory argues that addictions to grog and drugs are not the primary problems; their abuse is only a symptom of other problems. The symptom theory is an ideology of social denial of addiction. The denial that the individual addict needs to avoid facing up to their addiction as the cause of their misfortunes, and that of their kin, is furnished by the progressive ideology of the symptom theory. Therefore the editor of the National Indigenous Times newspaper, Chris Graham, argued last week that the main cause of violence in indigenous communities is government under-spending on Aboriginal programs and infrastructure. Both the addicts engaged in abuse and the majority of Hope Vale community members, who would love nothing better than for the abuse to stop, are misled by people such as Graham who put forward the so-called "bleeding obvious" explanation of overcrowding and under-investment in bricks and mortar as the reasons for social problems.

I would say most indigenous people and leaders across the country would concur with Graham's view. It is a measure of the extent to which we are unable as a people to face up squarely to the devil of substance abuse and the perverse ideology it generates. Does this mean overcrowding and insufficient investment in housing and infrastructure are not substantial problems? Of course not. But if we invested the $2.3 billion that has been estimated as the shortfall in indigenous housing provision tomorrow, we would make little progress with social problems. This investment would be wasted without fundamental policy changes.

The policy changes we propose as part of our reform agenda for Cape York Peninsula proceed from an analysis of housing that differs from that of people such as Graham and Social Justice Commissioner Tom Calma, who see overcrowding and under-funding as the principle problems. While we agree these and other issues such as poor construction and inappropriate design are relevant factors, we believe the poor state of housing is also attributable to the behaviour of householders. Good houses are too rapidly turned into bad houses. The life expectancy of houses on Aboriginal land is ridiculously low, from 10 to 20 years, compared with 50 years for public housing in the mainstream.

Under-funding is not the only cause of overcrowding. The short lifespan of houses worsens the situation as it reduces the number of habitable dwellings. When construction costs of housing in remote areas range from $250,000 to $400,000 a unit, then patently we have to confront the problem. The causes of the destruction of indigenous homes include passivity (people don't value what has been delivered as passive welfare) and the collapse of responsibility. No matter how strong our analysis is on dispossession, government responsibility and indigenous rights, we cannot avoid speaking the truth about passivity and lack of responsibility.

Families must have skin in the game if indigenous housing is to move from passivity to responsibility. This means ownership. The welfare housing model introduced into Aboriginal communities 30 years ago was a poor, inappropriate model characterised by: perpetual tenancy; a mixed record of tenancy management by community council landlords who lose nothing because there is always the next government grant; insufficient rental rates; poor rental collection; and poor maintenance of stock. This model has shaken down to the situation we see today: houses that cost a bomb to repair; houses that have a short life; families expecting to be given a replacement house when the old one disintegrates.

Before we turn to housing on Aboriginal land, we should first acknowledge that home ownership off Aboriginal land - in the mainstream - is an outstanding success. The indigenous home loans program administered by Indigenous Business Australia has resulted in more than 12,000 homes being owned by indigenous families across the country. You compare these privately owned homes with the houses rented by families, black and white, from welfare housing organisations. The contrast is profound. They are well maintained, the owners do not allow over-crowding problems, there is pride and all of the benefits that flow from owning a home.

Home ownership off Aboriginal land is outstandingly successful policy, while welfare housing on Aboriginal land is an irrational disaster. Federal Indigenous Affairs Minister Mal Brough should be working with Aboriginal housing organisations to privatise their housing stock and to vastly increase the funds available through the home loans program administered by the IBA. There should not be waiting lists for loans. Instead of simply cutting off welfare housing allocations to urban areas, the Government should be building on success and pushing the revolution forward. By all means, get away from welfare housing and move people into home ownership, but don't be mean about funding.

As for housing on Aboriginal land, I want to get two issues clear about my views. First, community members should obtain long-term leases, for example 99 years, from communal land trusts, on which they can own their own homes. There is no question of holes appearing on Aboriginal land as a result of foreclosure because the land would remain inalienable outside of the community. Second, this limitation on alienation outside of the community would mean that no real property market can be created in relation to housing on Aboriginal land. Houses will be largely unrealisable assets, more valuable as homes than real estate.

A home ownership program must take into account, therefore, the following issues: first, the affordability of homes in a situation where construction costs are high and incomes are low; second, the undesirability of promoting economically irrational decisions by families as to where they invest their capital (they may be better off investing in realisable assets elsewhere), while understanding the decision to live on Aboriginal land does have its costs.

The Government is talking about 99-year leases, not freehold alienation of title. Why is loss of land therefore being raised as the fear against home ownership? The fact the Government made legislative changes last year that have gone beyond the facilitation of private ownership of leases to community members, and eroded land rights, partially explains the paranoia. But the other source of objection is the failure of people who own their own homes to imagine that the rest of our mob would like the same thing, too.

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The decline of Australia's schools

Julie Bishop, the federal Education Minister, was quite matter-of-fact on The 7.30 Report on Wednesday night. "About a third of our 15-year-olds are functionally illiterate." Left unspoken were two other obvious conclusions:

First, these were kids their teachers had given up on. Second, their parents lacked the ability or inclination to rectify the problem at home. For the first time since the mid-19th century, reading has become a chore adults quite commonly delegated to other people and inter-generational illiteracy is becoming an entrenched dimension of disadvantage.

It's with this grim view of the present and the foreseeable future in mind that we should take on board last week's report from the Productivity Commission. As usual, it beat the drum on the benefits of reforming energy markets, transport and infrastructure; unfinished business that can further enhance national prosperity. But it stressed the need for a new agenda: human capital reform. Partly this was a matter of reducing chronic disease and injury to ensure fewer people are excluded from the work force. Partly it was a matter of reforming tax and welfare systems to increase incentives to work. Mostly it was about education.

If ever there were a time for a back-to-basics approach, the Productivity Commission says it is now. The agenda takes in improving early childhood education, literacy and numeracy, better school completion rates and skills training. It estimates substantial reform could add 9 per cent to economic output during the next 25 years, increase household incomes by an average $1800 and lift workforce participation by nearly 5 per cent. It also calculates that during that time it could boost state and federal revenues by up to $25 billion.

The Productivity Commission's brief is to imagine how much better off we'd all be in a more rationally ordered world. Sceptics tend to share Kant's intuition that "out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made". But even so, within living memory, before 1970, we know that ordinary state school students were regularly achieving much higher levels of literacy and numeracy than their present counterparts. Is it too much to ask the current crop of schoolteachers to replicate these results?

According to the annual Schools Australia report, released on Monday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, an increasing number of parents think it is. They are giving up on public education in hordes and droves. In the past decade, private schools have grown at nearly 20 times the rate of government schools. The number of state school students has risen by just 1.2 per cent since 1996, compared with 21.5 per cent for Catholic and independent schools, to say nothing of the more radical option of home schooling, for which reliable statistics are hard to find. In Victoria, where dissatisfaction with public education has long been an issue and nearly 40 per cent of senior secondary students are educated privately, overall enrolments remained relatively steady. In South Australia during the decade, government school enrolments fell by 7.7 per cent and in the ACT by 12.3 per cent.

These regional collapses of confidence in public education are certainly spectacular but they need to be seen against the backdrop of long-term change. Since the Karmel report in 1975 and the era of substantial public funding of non-government schools, there has been a fairly steady drift to the private sector. Jack Keating, an educationist at the University of Melbourne, reckons it at about 0.4 per cent a year. Last year 66.8 per cent of Australian children were in government schools and 33.2per cent in the private sector. If, as seems inevitable, the rest of the country follows Victoria's example, the ratio will soon be 64.6per cent to 35.4 per cent.

The question everyone in the political class is tiptoeing around is this. At what point do most public schools simply become sinks of disadvantage, places where a residue of kids with average or below average IQs and more than their fair share of other problems confound everyone's efforts to teach them life's basic survival skills? You could re-formulate the question by asking: at what stage does the abandonment of public-sector education by what used to be called the lower middle classes reach a tipping point?

Some compare the presence of parents who work in the professions to the proverbial "leaven in the lump" of a school community; the dads who are likeliest to coach the soccer team and the mums who volunteer to teach remedial reading. Others, less sentimentally, say that petit bourgeois parents are good at getting grants and zebra crossings out of local MPs because they're more effective at making formal complaints and marketing grievances to the media. Those parents and their children are gravitating towards the larger, academically successful and selective public schools, which are likely to stay that way while most of the smaller, academically weaker schools will stay small and become weaker still. That means average students are probably going to be increasingly short-changed, as the burden of looking after the overall educational needs of communities in non-selective schools becomes a more thankless task, entrusted to an increasingly demoralised bunch of teachers.

There was a time when I would have greeted any decline in public-sector education as a cause for celebration. I still think that a great many state teachers and their appalling unions have preyed like parasites on the long-suffering proletariat. The trouble is that the private sector often employs the same kinds of teachers, is politically correct and third rate in much the same ways and is infected with many of the same fads and questionable methods.

The Catholic parochial system, for example, is almost beyond parody. The values and formation it purports to instil in its pupils is anything but Catholic. Father O'Bubblegum, Auberon Waugh's comic creation, can still be found strumming his guitar and singing the lyrics of John Lennon's Imagine, with no sense of incongruity, at school masses. Vatican II-era nuns can still be heard pushing the feminist pieties and Marxist Sociology 101 they learned as mature-age entrants in diploma courses 30 years ago. Lay teachers who are often neither Catholic nor discernibly Christian are entrusted with religious instruction.

It is scarcely surprising that so few of the kids passing through the system should still be going to church even one Sunday a month by the time they're 20. Apart from the Archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, few Australian Catholic bishops have attempted any sort of reform or reined in their education bureaucracies. Some profess themselves powerless to do so. Accordingly, there has been a marked trend in recent years for traditionally minded Catholic parents to send their children to Anglican or Lutheran schools where, whatever else is lacking, at least the biblical catechesis is adequate.

While the Catholic schools are more aggressively ordinary and anti-intellectual, there's no shortage of paid-up philistines in the independent schools. And let's not forget the genteel ideologues. The social justice wing of the Uniting Church is over-represented, as are the deep greens, people who won't teach phonics and the social studies teachers who fancy themselves in "Sorry" T-shirts. It's gratifying to see how many of the young survive their ministrations with critical faculties intact and a sceptical, often explicitly conservative attitude to all the codswallop they've been taught.

A great deal more could and no doubt should be said about the shortcomings of Australia's Catholic and independent schools. But, whatever private education's failings, if what we conceive as the public sector is to remain viable it is going to have to become much more like its private competition. Whether along the lines of charter schools or various hybrids, public schools urgently need to be rebadged and given a new remit. The less they operate like government agencies, the more confidence they're likely to inspire in parents. The more power parents and principals have, at the expense of head office and the unions, the better the chance of shifting demoralised or incompetent staff and boosting morale. Performance-linked pay is another overdue development.

In the rebadge exercise, there should be a rethink of the ownership and control of schools that aims to capture the benefits that come when an enterprise is owned (and loved) by the people who work there, or even by an individual, rather than by the state. For example, short of outright sale, there's a case to be made for leasing existing public school premises at peppercorn rentals to the entrepreneurial heads of the low-fee colleges that are burgeoning on the outskirts of most of the capital cities. Some, I'm sure, would leap at the chance to take over deadbeat schools, lock, stock and barrel and run them more or less non-selectively on a state subsidy, which would in all likelihood be a fraction of the present cost. In a market system, as Keating argued in The Age last week, they should be rewarded for taking on the most challenging and disadvantaged pupils.

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