Your government will protect you

First it puts its employees into unseaworthy boats



THE families of five people killed when an immigration department boat capsized heard today during an inquest in far north Queensland the vessel was poorly designed and lacked safety equipment. All five people aboard Malu Sara died when the immigration vessel sank on its 74km journey across open seas from Saibai Island to Badu Island, in the Torres Strait, on October 15, 2005. The 6m aluminium-hulled patrol boat was carrying two immigration agents and three local residents when it vanished.

The Malu Sara was one of six vessels purpose-built by Cairns-based boat builders Subsee Australia - now in receivership - for the then Immigration, Multicultural and Indigenous Affairs Department. The fleet was launched by then immigration minister Amanda Vanstone on August 26, 2005, and issued a seaworthy notice on September 2 - only a month before the tragedy.

But at today's inquest at Thursday Island's courthouse, an investigator from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) said tests on the remaining boats found they were not seaworthy. He said tests on one boat saw it capsize just minutes after water was pumped into it. He outlined problems with the construction of the vessel and safety equipment on board, including that it had no navigational chart or sea anchor.

The remaining five vessels were impounded indefinitely after they failed almost every standard safety and construction test after the tragedy. An investigation by ATSB, which reported in May last year, concluded that it was a "tragedy waiting to happen". The Malu Sara was never found.

Source

And then it ignores survivor sightings

WITNESSES in search aircraft looking for five people missing after the Immigration vessel Malu Sara sank in the Torres Strait reported seeing people alive in the water the day after the tragedy. But the first day of a coroner's hearing into the sinking heard that their statements were discounted and left out of the official report into the disaster, despite details of what the "survivors" were wearing.

In a surprising twist, Ralph Devlin SC for the Immigration Department asked Kit Filor, the author of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau report into the tragedy, if he had seen witness statements from State Emergency Service personnel saying they had seen a person alive in the water on October 16, 2005, the day after the Malu Sara sank. Mr Filor - who is now retired but at the time was the ATSB deputy director, surface safety investigations - told the hearing before state coroner Michael Barnes he had read a search-and-rescue report that described "somebody in a red or yellow jacket waving his arms".

Mr Devlin asked Mr Filor if the witness statement came from a civilian aircraft with an SES officer on board. Mr Devlin then quoted from the witness statement: "A person alive in the water was located at 4pm on Saturday, October 15, and again contact was made at 1pm on Sunday, October 16 - but we do not see any mention of that in the ATSB report."

Mr Filor said he had not been made aware of the detail of the reported sightings. "We were made aware that sightings had been made but were discounted," Mr Filor replied. The Malu Sara has never been found and the body of only one of the five people on board has been discovered.

Mr Filor was later asked by Michael Fellows, counsel for Immigration Department officer Garry Chaston, if he had seen a report of a sighting of a person in the water "with a large brown pole". He said he had not been made aware of that detail, and it was then put that the sighting could have been the skipper of the Malu Sara, Wilfred Baira, who was known to have with him on the boat a "wap", a 5m spear used for hunting dugong.

Source







Don't count on osmosis to impart written language skills

A Leading legal academic laments that his A-grade university students are deficient in basic literacy and English grammar

ANY disinterested observer would say that the world is better today, on average, than it has ever been. People are living longer, much longer. They have more to eat. They can travel more. They have more leisure. They have more interesting jobs. A far, far smaller percentage of them are stuck as subsistence farmers. And however much things have improved for men in the past century or two, they are three or four times better again for women, at least in the Western world. If anyone seriously wanted to debate that basic claim with a straight face, I'd be happy to do so, preferably for lots of money. I mention it simply because normally it is just out and out false to paint former times - 30, 40 or 50 years ago even - as some sort of golden age when things were so much better than today.

Most jeremiads, or doleful laments about the failings of the here and now, are fairly implausible, to put it as kindly as possible. Rarely do these mournful denunciations of the present stand up to comparative testing. And yet there is one area of life I am intimately aware of where the falling standards grievance appears to be clearly correct. I am talking about university students and their basic grasp of literacy and grammar.

And let me be abundantly clear that I am talking about some of the best university students in the country. These are not just any students. They are what can properly be described as elite students, the very top high school students in all of Queensland who have managed to pass through a winnowing process that the vast preponderance of their fellow high school students fails to get through. It is extremely difficult to get into the law school at my university and the students who manage to do so have some of the best marks, and minds, in Australia.

Yet lots and lots of these highly intelligent tertiary students lack basic grammar knowledge. Forget gerunds or the subjunctive. They cannot cope with basic sentence construction. They use semicolons and colons without the faintest idea of how they should be used, and on a seemingly random basis. The possessive apostrophe is either wholly absent, is regularly confused with the abbreviating apostrophe, is sprinkled around in the hope of getting it correct once in a while (giving the reader such treats as the possessive its'), or all of the above. Definite and indefinite articles are regularly omitted. Run-on sentences are commonplace. And it's not even an exaggeration to say that a few of them don't seem to realise that you need a verb to make a sentence, that "Being the prime minister" doesn't quite cut it.

Quite simply, my elite law students, or a good many of them at any rate, have been provided with almost no technical writing and English grammar skills. One must assume that the same is true of virtually all Australian school leavers. Nor are these particularly challenging skills to acquire. All of my students have the intelligence to learn them in two or three weeks, in my view. They have quite literally, or so I hear on occasion, never been taught these things. Why not? It could be, I suppose, that these skills are no longer considered important. More crucial, on this view, is the fostering of children's (or should we now say childrens?) creativity and self-esteem. But if that, or some similar notion, is one of the reasons so many tertiary students seem to have atrocious writing skills, let me give you the other side of the story.

No one can think at all without language and its labels, categories and generalisations. It follows that no one can think clearly unless they can use language clearly. To make a subtle point or introduce a fine distinction, one needs the tools that a complex and sophisticated language offers. Nor does a knowledge of these complexities and sophistications curtail creativity. Jane Austen was a master of English grammar. And what would Winston Churchill's speeches have been had he not had a superb grasp of the language?

Of course, one might think clarity, precision, irony, humour and even a fully developed capacity for self-expression must bow down before the need to foster students' self-esteem or creative urges. Personally, though, I've never come across any very creative writers - be they political commentators, authors of fiction, historians, what have you - whose grasp of basics was deficient.

Worse, or at least ironically, the absence of sound writing skills may well, in adult life, serve to lessen one's self-esteem. It may make it harder to get a job or a promotion, or may make one feel inarticulate and dumb. Take law, my profession. Lawyers spend their working lives manipulating language. They draft contracts, wills, articles of incorporation and myriad sorts of letters. They argue in court. They interpret statutes. They pick over the words of judges in past cases. Their job revolves around the expert use of language. Of course a solid grounding in basic English skills is a huge advantage to them, and to many, many others.

Alas, a more depressing possibility in getting basic grammar skills taught today may be that a sizeable chunk of our recently graduated teachers may not know these skills themselves. Years of the osmosis school of learning to write, where you just cross your fingers and pray that by reading enough some ineffable and mysterious process will kick in and people will magically pick it up, may be coming home to roost. That wouldn't be much of a surprise, would it? Merely to state the osmosis approach shows how ridiculous it is.

(The author above, James Allan is a professor of law at the University of Queensland, has taught at universities in New Zealand, Canada and Hong Kong)

Source







Stem cells help Australian woman to walk

A sad day when Indian bureaucracy is less restrictive than Australia's



A BRISBANE woman who was paralysed in a car accident is walking again after receiving controversial stem-cell treatment in India. Australian doctors told mother-of-three Sonya Smith 18 months ago that she would spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. Her spine was broken after she was crushed by her car when the handbrake failed and it rolled down a hill. But after eight weeks of embryonic stem-cell injections, Mrs Smith, 45, is now able to stand with the aid of calipers and has regained bowel and bladder control.

She says she has recovered "deep sensation" in her thighs and feet and has been able to swing her legs. "When I first moved my toes, I was blown away," she said. "The doctors in Australia told me I would never walk again, but now I actually think I will be able to - without calipers some day."

Mrs Smith heard about the treatment from her sister, who lives in India, where medical guidelines are less stringent. Phil Smith, 44, said yesterday that his wife's recovery had been "amazing". Mr Smith, an editor with Channel 7 in Brisbane, spoke from the family home in Bardon where the couple live with their daughters, Kirsty, 10, Holly, 8, and Carly, 7. He said his wife would be coming home next month for Holly's birthday. "I've been speaking to her every day and she gets better all the time," he said. "It's been hard for her having the treatment in India and we hope one day it is available here. "Of course there are concerns about stem cells, but Sonya wouldn't have had a chance."

Mrs Smith is one of more than 300 patients who have been treated in New Delhi by controversial stem-cell pioneer Dr Geeta Shroff. The treatment, forbidden in Australia, involves collecting stem cells from embryos and injecting them into injured or diseased patients. When taken from embryos, the cells are undeveloped and seem better able to replace damaged tissue.

Critics have described the treatment as irresponsible and unethical. But Dr Shroff shrugged off the scepticism. "These are people who are desperate and I have given them hope. What is wrong with that?" she said. Dr Shroff claims to have an "inexhaustible" bank of stem cells from a single embryo, which she uses to treat Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and motor neurone disease. She has never submitted her work for international scrutiny.

Australian legislation was passed last year allowing scientists to clone human embryos to extract stem cells, but only for research. This month, state MPs will vote on whether to allow the practice in Queensland. Mrs Smith, a teacher aide at Petrie Terrace State School, urged governments to do more to make the treatment available in Australia.

Source






Drug use in prisons is of no interest to you

The government freedom FROM information mentality again

At any time of day at least 1200 inmates of NSW jails are floating through their sentences in a drug-induced haze. We know this because every time the Department of Corrective Services tests them, one in seven comes up positive. And yet, the department has ruled that although this information is not exempt from release, it is not in the public interest to do so. In a determination that leaves you wondering just what material will ever qualify as being of public interest, the acting Commissioner of Corrective Services, Luke Grant, says a request for these results has failed seven out of seven public interest tests.

See if you can understand the thinking in the bureaucracy that runs the state's prisons. In the late 1980s, the Greiner government began compulsory urine testing of prisoners and released the results. Nearly twenty years later, testing is a fixed part of prison life. Each year about 18,000 tests are done on the 9000 inmates and we now know the results are consistently 12.5 to 14.5 per cent positive.

Results have not been released for years, so the Herald lodged a freedom-of-information request for figures for the past five years ,with a breakdown of which drugs had been detected. We also sought any reports on the program for the same period, to see whether the hundreds of thousands of dollars it cost each year were worth spending. And we asked for the 50 per cent discount on any charges. These turned out to be a modest $232.50, but the law says discounts are available in only cases of public interest.

Although it agreed to release the material requested, the department refused the discount. We asked for a review of that decision. As the acting departmental head, it was Mr Grant's job to explain why it was not in the public interest to grant access to these results, which used to be released by the government without charge. In deciding where the public interest lay, Mr Grant referred to the Premier's guidelines on freedom of information. They are the ones written in 1994, before the internet arrived; the same ones which the Premier told Parliament in August were being updated and would be released last December. Those old guidelines give Mr Grant seven points to consider before granting a discount.

There is no space to list them all, but here is a summary. To what extent will the information be made public? What is the value/benefit/interest of the public in the information? Is the information otherwise available to the public? Will granting a discount foster the disclosure of information? Will the discount help extend as far as possible the right of the public to access government information?

Mr Grant found against the Herald on every count. One reason he cited was that the department already published reports on drug use by prisoners. That is true, but these contain radically different findings to the urine tests, with no explanation of why.

The latest report, dated 2005, was based on interviews with prisoners. It said 63 per cent of male prisoners used illegal drugs in jails. And that figure did not include the unauthorised prescription drugs that were caught in the urine tests.

How widespread that problem is we do not know, because the department did not release those figures in its breakdown of the urine results. It says it provided a breakdown, but it was a breakdown minus the numbers. Most would call it a list. More proof of insufficient public interest was the Herald's handling of documents received from an earlier freedom-of-information request for the results of a new program of drug-testing prison officers.

Mr Grant was concerned that a Herald report detailing these results appeared under the headline ``Prison system skilled at delaying release of facts''. The headline, on this column in December, ``would not have captured the attention of members of the public who are interested in the drug testing of staff ...''. Therefore, he argued, the information would not have flowed to the public at large. Let us hope Mr Grant was more pleased with the headline this week on our story summarising the department's urine-test results, ``Crackdowns failing in battle on drugs in jail''. Maybe that meets the public interest test.

Source