Fat kids not schools' fault

Anita Quigley has some sharp words for the "obesity" whiners

OF all the middle-class, neurosis-inducing, guilt-ridden topics, the subject of children's eating habits takes the cake - low-fat of course. But it really is very simple: If you are the parent of a fat child and think his or her school canteen is to blame, then you are kidding yourself. Your child is pudgy, plump or obese - thanks to you.

And yesterday's uproar by parents over schools that aren't doing enough to stop students eating junk food - either in the canteen or by ordering in-- is ridiculous. The fact pupils are being delivered pizzas and sell bootlegged Coke at school just shows the ingenuity of today's mobile phone-equipped, pepperoni-craving children. More importantly it also shows that the war on childhood obesity won't be won in the classroom.

Parents are well within their rights to demand more influence over what their children eat at school. However, they also need to be reasonable and meet their end of the bargain. It is impossible to instil a habit of healthy eating if your children go home to soft drinks and takeout for dinner five nights a week. Equally, you may argue that schools providing foods high in fat and sugar undo all the good work done at home. However, School Canteens Association of NSW's Jo Gardner says of school kids aged five to 15, less than 3 per cent of their food consumption comes from the canteen.

Meanwhile, Duncan Irvine, head of Duncan's Catering, which operates canteens in 37 government high schools, says 75 per cent of all food consumed at school is brought in from home. Based on those figures, you cannot blame the school tuckshop for your child's weight problems. But what you can blame it on is what you pack into your children's lunchboxes. You can also blame the parents for the amount of money they give their kids to buy lunch.

Part of being a parent means making school lunches, and nourishing ones at that. Not a peanut butter sandwich every day with a bag of chips thrown in. However, like most parenting issues these days, "time-poor" mums and dads are outsourcing their responsibilities to schools. They demand schools be chiefly responsible for the exercise their children get, all the sex education their children need to know, and the discipline their children aren't getting at home. Now they are demanding that healthy eating be the school's obligation too.

Of course, most are only echoing our political leaders. For every time there is an issue in the community about the failings of young people, politicians want a remedy included in the curriculum. It was therefore refreshing to yesterday hear new Education Minister John Della Bosca say forcing students to eat healthy food is not the responsibility of schools. The pressure on schools today to turn out model citizens is absurd. When is there time anymore for teachers to do the basic teaching of core subjects?

Government and private schools began phasing in healthy food regimens at canteens nearly four years ago, amid rising evidence of a childhood obesity epidemic. This year all sugary soft drinks were banned. But as you can see students are taking alternative measures to acquire fast food.

In Britain, where government-supplied school lunches have just been turned upside-down by super cook Jamie Oliver to be more healthy, parents have been caught throwing junk food over school fences to their children. A friend, Emma, who does canteen duty at her children's primary school on the North Shore, says it is not unusual for pupils to produce $50 and $20 notes to buy their lunch - clearly with no budget attached. "In some cases, it's not even a matter of what they're eating, it's how much," she says. "You will see the same child twice at morning recess and at lunchtime they come back three times."

I appreciate that the older your kids get, when you kiss them goodbye at the school gate you also kiss goodbye to the ability to control their diets. However, it's parents who have a lesson to learn - stop passing the buck.

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The strange face of "moderate" Islam

By Andrew Bolt

MAYBE this time, I thought. Maybe this first Australian Islamic Conference would at last show us the moderate Muslim leaders we've searched for. God, we need them. Look at the latest doings of the hate-preachers we have now. Take the Mufti of Australia, Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilali, who has just given interviews in Iran demanding Muslims stand "in the trenches" with its hostage-taking regime, and is now being investigated for allegedly giving $12,000 to a Lebanese propagandist linked to terrorists. Meanwhile, the head of the Lebanese Muslim Association, which pays him to preach at Australia's biggest mosque, has had to seek police protection for suggesting this fool had best shut up.

Yet, even now, the Federation of Islamic Councils, which made Hilali mufti, refuses to sack him, though he's vilified Jews, praised suicide bombers as "heroes", called the September 11 terrorist attacks "God's work against oppressors", excused convicted pack rapist Bilal Skaf and said raped women should be "jailed for life".

The greatest pity is that Hilali isn't the only hate-preacher in our mosques. Other radical sheiks have been accused of telling followers not to pay taxes to this infidel Government. Worse, the Howard Government sidelined its Muslim Community Reference Group after finding a third of the 14 "moderates" it handpicked actually backed the Iranian-backed Hezbollah extremist group, notorious for its terrorist wing. So, after all this and more, we desperately need to hear from those moderate Muslim leaders we keep telling each other must surely exist. Must.

Was it so dumb to think Mercy Mission would at last provide them - Muslim leaders who would demonstrate (in the mission's own words) that they "benefit the communities in which they live"? You may have dared to hope, given this new group's leaders include the highly educated Tawfique Chowdhury, a Bangladeshi-born and Australian-raised IT project manager, and Adel Salman, who so impressed his employers at Cadbury Schweppes that he was selected for the prestigious Asialink leaders program. It was Salman, so polished, who organised for Mercy Mission its first annual Australian Islamic Conference at Melbourne University over the Easter weekend. The odd timing was surely just an innocent coincidence, because the conference had a noble aim: to "present a true picture of 'Islam in action' to the wider community" and convince Australians that "Islamic values are universal values".

So who, among all the Muslims in the world, did Mercy Mission choose to fly in to give us this "true picture" of a moderate Islam? Of the six international speakers it advertised, let me introduce you to two.

The first is Bilal Philips, a Jamaican-born Canadian who was a communist and worker for the Black Panther terrorist group before converting to Islam and becoming a preacher. His message is uncompromising: "Western culture led by the United States is an enemy of Islam." Which makes him an odd choice as speaker at a conference to reassure us that "Islamic values are universal values". But the choice of Philips is even odder given the United States named him as an "unindicted co-conspirator" over the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Centre, and our own security agencies judged him such a threat he was banned from coming here. Philips insists he rejects terrorism and considers al-Qaeda a "deviate" group. But from his own website and interviews you'd see why some might not take him at his word. He freely admits he was hired by the Saudi air force during the first Gulf War to preach to American soldiers stationed in Saudi Arabia and convert them to Islam. He says he succeeded, and "registered the names and addresses of over 3000 male and female US soldiers".

Philips didn't just take down their names; he also visited them back in America. "My role was confined to encouraging them to train Muslim-American volunteers and go to Bosnia to help the mujahidin and take part in the war (against Serbia)," he boasted. That worked, too. Philips says his name was dragged into the investigation of the first World Trade Centre bombing, in which six people were killed, because some African-American soldiers he'd converted were offered by someone else to Sheik Abdel Rahmen, spiritual head of the terrorists behind the attack. These ex-soldiers would be great for domestic sabotage, the sheik was told.

But Clement Rodney Hampton-El, an al-Qaeda-trained American bombmaker now serving a 35-year sentence for the World Trade Centre bombings, claimed Philips also gave him the names of soldiers who were about to leave the military and who might help the Bosnian jihadists. To repeat: Philips denies any links to al-Qaeda, and swears he is opposed to terrorism, although he does say Muslims are entitled to defend their faith by force. But given his support for jihadists, his past contacts with jailed terrorists and the allegations against him, why on earth did Mercy Mission choose him to preach here?

To invite one such extremist speaker might seem like bad luck, but to invite two might make you think Mercy Mission wouldn't know a moderate Muslim if he blew up in their face. I say that because also high on Mercy Mission's guest list was another convert, British journalist Yvonne Ridley, with a much nastier line in preaching. Ridley didn't just marry a colonel in one terror group - Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Liberation Organisation - but has been busy since defending others like it. Some highlights: Soon after the September 11 terrorist attacks Ridley actually accused Islamic sheiks of going soft. "Muslims have lost confidence since September 11," she complained. "Something as simple as suicide bombers being martyrs is being denied by prominent sheiks."

That's one of her mantras. At a Belfast meeting of Islamic students, she insisted there were no innocent Israeli victims in suicide bombings. Not even children. "There are no innocents in this war," she reportedly raged, because Israeli children could grow up to become Israeli soldiers. She even hailed as a "martyr" the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basayev, who planned the attack on the Beslan school in which 333 hostages - many of them children - were killed. An "admirable struggle", she called his life's work. Ridley has never called on Muslims to boycott such terrorists, but instead demanded British Muslims "boycott the police and refuse to co-operate with them in any way, shape or form".

And when relatives of al-Qaeda's then leader in Iraq, the head-hacker Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, denounced his bomb attacks on three hotels in Jordan, she was livid. "While the killing of innocent people is to be condemned without question, there is something rather repugnant about some of those who rush to renounce acts of terrorism," she sneered. True, among the 61 dead were many members of a wedding party, she conceded, but some of them "were part of Jordan's upper echelons of society", and "others had flown in from America". What's more, the "bars (were) serving alcohol", and the evil Jordanian regime "provides backing, support and intelligence to the American military". Having proved to her satisfaction the guilt of the dead civilians, she asked: "I wonder if you see that attack on the Jordanian hotels in a different light now?" And she concluded: "I'd rather put up with a brother like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi any day than have a traitor or a sell-out for a father, son or grandfather."

What, in Ridley's foul incantations of hatred and her defence of child-killers and wedding bombers, makes her the kind of Muslim who would "benefit the communities in which they live"? What does it say about Mercy Mission that Ridley - and Philips - were hired as speakers to tell us "Islamic values are universal values" and we have nothing to fear?

Oh, and about that fear. It was this same Ridley - happy to "put up with a brother" like Zarqawi, once filmed cutting off the head of American hostage Nick Berg - who last week accused Australians of being among the worst haters of Muslims. How like her to condemn the fear her own words rightly provoke. And how disturbing that Mercy Mission holds her up as the kind of Muslim who does us good. Or - I hesitate to ask - is this really the best our Muslim leaders can offer? Is this really their "true picture" of Islam? I beg of them. Prove it isn't. Until you do, I'm afraid I shall take you at your grim word.

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Arrogant government ambulance service

The Victorian ambulance service has been the target of frequent complaints but, despite government huffing and puffing, it never seems to improve

PARAMEDICS have been accused of refusing to take a woman with a life-threatening brain aneurism to hospital because they believed she was drug-affected. The Metropolitan Ambulance Service is now examining a number of allegations that seriously ill patients have been refused transport. Premier Steve Bracks has called for an investigation. Others complaints involve a teenager with bile leaking behind her liver, a man with a burst stomach ulcer and a cancer patient who died. The MAS said human error or a failure to follow proper processes were probably the cause of any problems.

On November 26 last year, a 6mm aneurism burst in the front of Greensborough mother Melinda Fort's brain. Paramedics allegedly diagnosed her as drug-affected and refused to transport her. Her terrified 14-year-old daughter called a second ambulance five hours later. Ms Fort spent five weeks in intensive care. "All I want is those two drivers to come to my house, look me in the eye and apologise," Ms Fort said. "Even if I was a druggie I still wasn't well, so why wasn't I taken?"

Jade Olsen, 18, of Wantirna said she was denied an ambulance last Saturday when a paramedic told her by phone that the pain she was suffering after a gall bladder operation was not life-threatening. Her mother drove her to Knox Private Hospital, where she had emergency surgery to remove 500ml of toxic bile that had leaked behind her liver. "I'm pretty angry about it. It could have been somebody else with a much more serious matter that could have led to death," Ms Olsen said.

On March 20, Greta Galley called an ambulance for her terminally ill husband John, 72. But she said she was told his pain had to be assessed by a triage nurse first. She drove him to Frankston Hospital, where he died five days later. "It's not as if you call an ambulance for nothing," she said.

Mr Bracks urged the MAS to examine the cases, saying its resources were adequate. "If there are instances where triaging has not worked effectively . . . that will be investigated, and I have urged the MAS to (do so)," he said. MAS general manager of operations Keith Young said an investigation of Ms Olsen's complaint had begun and the others would be examined. "We certainly take these matters seriously. . . but . . . we receive a very small number of complaints. Many times, it is often a misunderstanding or not substantiated," he said.

Liberal health spokeswoman Helen Shardey said she'd be shocked if paramedics were trying to perform triage by phone rather than in person

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Conservative radio host hits out at unjudicial regulator

Complaints a setup by an antagonistic public broadcaster -- one well-known for Leftist bias

SYDNEY radio personality Alan Jones has blasted the radio regulator over a ruling that comments made on his program incited violence and vilified people of Middle Eastern descent. Jones went on the offensive today during his program on 2GB Radio, saying findings by the Australian Communication and Media Authority (ACMA) were biased and based on complaints of people who do not listen to his show.

ACMA said Harbour Broadcasting Pty Ltd, licensee of commercial Sydney radio station 2GB, had twice breached Australia's broadcasting code in the days before the December 2005 Cronulla race riot. The regulator found the Commercial Radio Code of Practice 2004 was breached by comments aired on Jones' top-rating breakfast program during December 5 and 9, 2005. Those comments contravened the code by being "likely to encourage violence or brutality" and "likely to vilify people of Lebanese background and of Middle Eastern background on the basis of their ethnicity."

But Jones attacked ACMA, saying it had "little radio experience or knowledge of talkback radio" and said he had never incited violence on his program. "Anyone who knows me knows I've never encouraged violence or brutality in anything ... and I did the exact opposite but our defences counted for nothing." One excerpt Jones read from a listener on December 7 recommended that bikie gangs confront "Lebanese thugs" at the Cronulla railway station. Jones today played another excerpt from around the same time telling a listener not to promote the riot, which eventually ensued on December 11. "On countless occasions ... I had as I have regularly on this program opposed violence and brutality and urged people to allow the law to take its course," he said today.

He said the people who made the original complaints only heard excerpts aired by an ABC broadcast, which also provided information to its listeners on how make a complaint to ACMA. "The people who complained to ACMA had not heard any of my program," he said. "If people don't listen to the program all the time, why then are 26 seconds of comment that I might have made, chosen to hang me. They can't have their argument both ways. "This outfit which regulate radio ... if that doesn't constitute bias I don't know what does."

ACMA will be writing to Harbour Radio shortly about the action it may take against the broadcaster. Compliance measures could range from suspending or cancelling 2GB's licence to lesser penalties including fines and requiring staff to attend compliance training programs.

Jones called ACMA's report false and said the regulator disregarded 2GB's defence, which was considered in ACMA's ruling. "To be charged with all of this is just unbelievable, especially when you've mounted the defences, and these were our defences, and at the end of the day, they didn't want to know about the defences," Jones said. He also condemned the process, saying he was unable to read the excerpts from his program that led to ACMA's decision. "Because of the charge laid against me, I'm unable to read you those pieces," he said. "This is like parliamentary privilege. They can say what they like about me. Can I sue them for defamation? - no, no, no. "This is very serious stuff - it's only serious because it's untrue, that's why it's serious and bordering on the dishonest."

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NOTE: The article above is as originally published. It has subsequently been altered to record a defence of Jones by the Prime Minister