Unjust attack on conservative radio host

THE quality of justice in NSW is most strange. The Appeal Court bizarrely found it necessary to disqualify Margaret Cunneen, one of the best Crown prosecutors the state had the good fortune to employ, from a gang rape case; a senior judge agreed with a Muslim defendant that - on highly specious grounds - female court staff could not handle his drinking water; and broadcaster Alan Jones has been convicted of a criminal offence for broadcasting the name of a most repellent young man of questionable age after his identity, through error, improperly appeared in The Daily Telegraph.

Jones, who has for years been Sydney's most successful morning radio host, has always been on the receiving end of crude insults from those with smaller audiences and larger egos. But it now appears the judiciary - and the wannabe judges who run the highly politicised petty authorities - are joining the fray. Notably silent have been the legions of self-anointed protectors of free speech, the civil libertarians and civil rights lawyers because Jones's audience is not theirs and his appeals to common sense and understanding of government process usually expose them as the poseurs they are.

The self-acclaimed leaders of the media, who will be out in force to tut-tut over incursions on press freedom tomorrow night at a dinner to be addressed by Jonestown author Chris Masters, have kept their mouths smugly shut. They only want freedom for their speech, not that which challenges their politically correct vision of how the world should be.

Jones was found guilty under a rarely used law designed to protect innocent young victims of crime and children involved in criminal activities. The section of the Children (Criminal Proceedings) Act holds: It shall be conclusively presumed that no child who is under the age of 10 years can be guilty of an offence. That Act defines a child as a person under the age of 18. Tell that to the train drivers who had a brick thrown at the front of their train, or try convincing a victim of the mobs now ruling George St, that those responsible for bashing them cannot be guilty because they were too young.

The law against publishing is even more ridiculous, prohibiting naming individuals even when they are dead at the time of publication or broadcast. It means, as one legal eagle has said, that should the premier of NSW have a child murdered by al-Qaeda, that child's identity could not be disclosed by the press during any subsequent court action.

Jones's case involved members of a large Pakistani Muslim family, four of whom are convicted gang rapists and their late father was facing perjury charges when he died. The court heard that on April 10, 2004, a car thumping with loud music and bearing the number plate "ON DOLE" attracted some rude gestures from passengers in a taxi. The driver cut the taxi off at the next lights and at least two people got out and attacked the taxi and its occupants. One of them, who later claimed to be 14 years old, used a metal pipe. The taxi driver attempted to defend himself and struck out with a screwdriver, hitting one of the assailants, who later died.

The supposed 14-year-old was a key witness in the Crown case against the taxi driver. He had a lengthy criminal record, had used multiple aliases and many birth dates. During the trial he said he was 14 or 15 "or something like that" and at a later hearing that he was "16, 17". His father didn't know and his mother could only guess, basing that guess on her assertion her first child was born in 1978. No one knew - least of all the prosecution. Even the magistrate could only deduce the witness was born between 1988 and 1992.

Jones read The Daily Telegraph's report of the ongoing trial on air and was prosecuted by the DPP. Unfortunately, the DPP wasn't prepared and asked for continual delays running from 2006 and into this year, and all the while Jones was paying his counsel.

Even the fact the prosecution's case was based on a witness it was prosecuting for perjury didn't seem to trouble the magistrate. Nor was she concerned by his police record, the evidence that he bashed the taxi driver with a metal pipe, or that he had even bashed his own sister. Legally irrelevant to this case, perhaps, but most telling about the character of the "child" whose identity had been inadvertently revealed by Jones and The Daily Telegraph.

Deputy Chief Magistrate Helen Syme said she accepted Jones's argument that the urgency of breakfast radio meant he could not check everything that went to air. "From time to time, negligent or reckless behaviour may occur," Syme said, fining Jones $1000 and handing him a nine-month good behaviour bond - and a criminal record. Radio 2GB licensee Harbour Radio was fined $3000 and News Limited $4000. Jones is appealing the case. The transcript is worth reading. If this is the sort of justice meted out to a first offender, why should criminals have any respect for the law?

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Fake medical degrees accepted by Australian health bureaucrats

Those guys sure are good at protecting the public

A scandal over purported overseas-trained doctors in a Queensland public hospital is widening after revelations that a Russian nurse used an online medical degree from the Caribbean to get a job, while a Chinese woman used documents showing she would have just turned 14 when she went to medical college in Shanghai. Evidence obtained by Chief Health Officer Jeanette Young in an investigation into the hiring of three junior doctors, or interns, at Cairns Base Hospital has appalled officials and Queensland Health Minister Stephen Robertson, sources told The Australian yesterday.

Queensland's anti-corruption body, the Crime and Misconduct Commission, will soon join the Health Quality and Complaints Commission and the Medical Board in a wide-ranging inquiry into why the hospital bypassed checks and balances before hiring the interns on more than $60,000 a year each. One of the three recruits could not speak English and was unable to communicate with anyone on the wards. Dr Young's investigation began after The Australian revealed, two weeks ago, serious concerns about the interns' qualifications.

Since initial claims by Cairns Base Hospital managers that the recruits were observers who had no unsupervised contact with patients, Dr Young has studied the charts of more than 500 patients and discovered that in a number of cases there were unsupervised examinations, diagnoses, orders for pathology and prescriptions. "The hospital's staff took the view that they would employ the purported doctors and, eventually, the Medical Board would get around to registering them," said a senior health source in Brisbane. "It is untenable. There will bean array of investigators descending on Cairns in the coming weeks." Mr Robertson's spokesman said: "We are concerned about the information emerging. But we can't say anything until we get Dr Young's report."

Health sources said the documentation relied on by the Russian nurse and the Chinese woman to obtain employment in Cairns made the CMC's involvement essential. CMC investigators will be given the task of tracing the documentation of the Russian nurse, whose curriculum vitae was contradictory. The nurse claimed to have received a medical degree from a university in the Caribbean. However, preliminary investigations revealed it was an internet-based qualification and should not have been recognised by Australian medical authorities. "It is a rather unusual degree in that it is an online degree with the teaching done online," a source said.

Dr Young's spokesman said: "The investigation is ongoing and is a matter of priority. The Chief Health Officer is happy to advise that the investigation thus far has uncovered no evidence of patient harm." A former colleague of the Russian nurse has communicated concerns to Queensland authorities about his conduct in a previous workplace. Several Cairns colleagues of the Chinese recruit have rallied to support her as a "person of integrity", with sufficient clinical skills to do a supervised internship prior to an examination by the Australian Medical Council. She has obtained statements from former students of the university in Shanghai who have said they were also aged 14 when they began medical training.

The controversy comes as Queensland prosecutors liaise with US counterparts to extradite Jayant Patel, the surgeon who has been blamed for contributing to at least 17 deaths at the Bundaberg Base Hospital.

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Vanished history education

Tragic Leftist destruction of our remembered past

I WAS watching the ABC’s serviceable tele-movie, Curtin, about our wartime prime minister, last Sunday night in the company of a fine young Australian professional. Winston Churchill was mentioned. Churchill was the president of America, wasn’t he, this young professional asked me.

Once again I was brought up short by the astounding dereliction in the teaching of history in Australian schools. We have just witnessed the moving national commitment to Anzac Day, we have just seen several Australian soldiers wounded in Iraq. In an unrelated development the states have decided to reinstate history, geography and economics as separate subjects, abolishing the educational atrocity known as studies of society and environment.

But still we are missing the point. How can a citizen today possibly have any understanding of the shape of the world in which they live without some knowledge of Churchill? Yet unless we change the way we approach the teaching of history, such fundamental gaps in people’s knowledge will continue.

The internet generation will not be the best educated generation in history, as it has the potential to be, but the worst educated generation in a long time because it will not have been taught the most important things.

The federal Government’s national history summit last year made a contribution and identified things Australian students should know about our history. Even the so-called conservatives at that summit, however, generally favoured thematic rather than chronological and narrative approaches to history.

Yet every year when Australians demonstrate in overwhelming numbers their curiosity about Anzac Day and our military history more generally, they are not asking for sociological insights into the role of early feminism in war. Nor do they wish to hear how the demonising of “the other” served the hegemonic power structure of empire. Still less do they ask for the inter-textual ambiguities of war reporting to be decoded in considering the journalism of the power structure.

They ask a much more basic question: “What happened?” In other words, people are yearning for content, the content of the story. That is the answer to the very first question that must be provided before any other intelligent question can even be asked.

I had a disturbing dinner the other night with a history curriculum developer, a good person in every way. She told me that world history is now considered to be too big a subject for content to matter. There is too much content for any school course to cover. Therefore the emphasis is on teaching the techniques of history so that students can develop their own inquiries into history.

But the ability to think clearly and judge shrewdly, based on knowing the central facts, is likelier to come from wide reading and intelligent discussion than anything else. These days students are awarded history prizes for their original research, which normally means interviewing folks about their experience as migrants, workers, local identities or whatever. I once did such an exercise myself as a student, on the history of my local suburb.

It was one of the least interesting or useful things I did at school. And it was based on the ludicrous premise that to drive a car you need to be a mechanic. But, more important, it really has nothing to do with the study of history, which is necessary to have the minimum knowledge to navigate the world meaningfully. Is it really more important to know that my local RSL was built in 1957 or that Hitler murdered six million Jews in the greatest genocide in history? If a history teacher cannot make the study of World War II fascinating, they have no business being a history teacher.

I have three sons who in the past six years have completed high school. They all went to a good Sydney school, for which I have nothing but warm feelings, in the state that, thanks to Bob Carr, has the greatest commitment to teaching history. Yet not one of my sons made the acquaintance of John Monash or Alfred Deakin at school. As a way to treat young Australians, this constitutes a kind of criminal child abuse and neglect.

Monash was the most innovative field general of World War I and an extraordinary and compelling figure, a Gallipoli veteran, the child of German Jewish immigrants, a fluent German speaker, who came to lead all Australian forces though he was not even a professional soldier. He was by a vast distance the most important military figure Australia produced.

Deakin shaped Australia more than any other single individual. A spiritualist, a hearer of inner voices, he was a profoundly thoughtful, intellectual and complex man who, while prime minister, wrote an anonymous column for an English newspaper about Australian politics.

Both these men are richly rewarding to study because they recorded so much of their lives and thoughts and emotions in letters and journals and the like. I would think they are two of the remarkable figures of the 20th century. There should be feature films and docudramas and new interpretive histories and novels in profusion in which they figure, but instead we impose on our young people a deafening silence, a devastating absence of their heritage. The fashion has turned so comprehensively against the grand narrative and the great men approach to history that we fill the classes with trivia and nonsense.

One year I looked over one son’s shoulder and was reassured to find him studying World War I. Just what are you studying about it, I asked him. The answer? The role of women in Australian society in World War I, a legitimate enough topic but, given that there was no study of the amazing Billy Hughes or of the course of the war, this was just more of the discouraging undifferentiated pap offered as a substitute for content today.

The next year he was studying World War II. This is promising, I thought. What are you studying, I asked him: Curtin, MacArthur, Hirohito or Tojo perhaps? The answer? The role of women in Australian society in World War II.

Much of the public discussion has focused on Australian history and that is entirely as it should be. But there are things we have to know about the history of the wider world, especially 20th-century history. Without this irreducible core of content, no student can possibly understand the shape of the world in which they find themselves. This content must include World War I, the Depression, World War II, Nazism, communism, the Cold War, the Korean War and the Vietnam War. There is much else that it is desirable to know but this is an absolute bare minimum. We have a UN, a refugee convention, a US alliance system, to take obvious examples, directly because of World War II.

Without studying World War II - and not only the role of women in Australian society in World War II - no student can possibly make any sense of these institutions. Without a narrative history full of content, meaningful citizenship or even mere functioning cultural literacy is history.

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Another railway boondoggle coming up?

Do they ever learn? The Alice Springs to Darwin railway was a huge waste of taxpayer funds and will never give a return on funds spent. It will need many more millions of taxpayer money to build this next one. Railways are obsolete anyway. Converting all railways to dedicated truck corridors would do a lot more good

AN inland rail line linking Victoria and Queensland would cut truck numbers on highways, reduce freight costs and boost rural communities - and looks set for government funding. A multimillion-dollar grant is expected to be unveiled soon to kick-start efforts to attract private sector funding for the $3.1 billion project. It is understood Prime Minister John Howard discussed it with premiers at the recent Council of Australian Governments meeting in Canberra.

The rail line's potential to reduce the number of trucks on national highways amid spiralling freight loads, and its positive impact on rural communities, are the driving forces behind the Government's support. Australian Transport and Energy Corridor chairman Everald Compton said it could be built by 2012. "In these days when climate change is a big issue, trains make a lot of sense," he said.

The likely route for the standard-gauge rail line from Melbourne is through Albury, Junee, Parkes, Dubbo, Moree and Warwick before linking with Toowoomba. The ATEC has asked the Government for a $150 million grant for the track between Moree and Toowoomba, and another $150 million for a final link between Toowoomba and Gladstone.

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