A big need to resist a return to the past by the reactionary Left

By pandering to unions, the Labor Party has spent a lot of goodwill. (The ACTU is equivalent to Britain's TUC or America's AFL-CIO)

In Labor's new world view it's acceptable for trade unions to spend tens of millions of dollars criticising a government they don't control but not for business to raise concerns about Opposition policies they believe threaten the nation's financial wellbeing. What's worse, at the first sign of frustration, Labor's response to the doubters is to reach for the iron bar. This is not a good look for a party that claims to be about ideas and the future.

The ugly truth for Labor is that opposition to Work Choices rollback is not confined to what it would like to consider the usual suspects at the big end of town. It is widespread, from small business owners to the world's biggest mining companies, and includes West Australian Labor Premier Alan Carpenter. In private, at least, concern that Labor has blown its chances is now widespread within the party. By accepting the ACTU's demands, Kevin Rudd has spent Labor's hard-won gains with the business community and made the difficult task of defeating the Howard Government much harder. In the face of such widespread concern, Labor must rethink its decision to scrap all Australian Workplace Agreements and at least grandfather those that are already in place.

Above all, the IR [Industrial Relations] debacle has shown what an odd couple the Opposition Leader and his deputy, Julia Gillard, really are. This has always been the great compromise at the heart of Mr Rudd's ascendancy. It is now clear Mr Rudd took his eye off the ball in a critical area and that, rather than trusting Ms Gillard and falling back on the ACTU, he should have spent more time listening to Labor's real economic thinkers such as Lindsay Tanner and Craig Emerson. The charitable view is that Mr Rudd has shown a lack of domestic political experience in leaving formulation of Labor's IR policy to Ms Gillard, who can now add the rollback debacle to her Medicare Gold disaster of the last election. As Medicare Gold proved, the electorate knows when it is being made a promise that is too good to be true. This is why voters will be receptive to the Government's message that Labor's plan for a return to a more rigid, union-dominated workplace will cost jobs and weaken the economy. The evidence that voters understand the economic realities of life is at sharp odds to the simplistic nonsense put by commentators such as Richard Farmer that "the idea that a Labor Party still supports labour will hardly hurt the chances of an Opposition winning back the support of a battling working class".

As The Australian predicted, the charade at the heart of last week's Labor national conference has now been exposed. The efforts to make Mr Rudd appear reasonable and as having trodden a middle path, by insisting on secret ballots and making it harder to strike, have been blown away by the scope of the capitulation to the ACTU on its core demands of union access and collective agreements. If Mr Rudd has any excuse for being hijacked it is that he was distracted by irrelevant concerns such as the Sunrise program's "false dawn" Anzac service fiasco. But having failed to adequately assert his authority, Mr Rudd now faces an even bigger test. He must either force a compromise within his party or fight an election armed with policies that have galvanised the business community against him. The Government will in turn mount a fierce scare campaign highlighting Labor's economic recklessness and irresponsibility. If Labor persists with these regressive policies it can expect defeat.

The tragedy is that by returning to pattern bargaining and compulsory workplace agreements by a majority vote, Labor has turned its back on the party's hard-won legacy of reform. It was the Bob Hawke and Paul Keating governments that began the freeing-up of the labour market, introducing workplace agreements and linking pay increases to productivity gains, that has helped underpin the past decade-and-a-half of prosperity. The Howard Government's industrial reforms have been a continuation of that legacy. The Work Choices reforms are designed not only to aid job creation during times of economic boom, such as now, but to break the previous cycle of prolonged high unemployment when the economy turns down, as happened under Mr Keating. The evidence is that flexible workplace arrangements underwrite a quicker recovery in both employment and economic growth.

Labor's stand on IR goes to the heart of the party's economic credibility. Does Labor believe that a free market can deliver a better outcome for employment? Work Choices rollback suggests it does not. And by insisting on a return to a more rigid system, Labor has demolished its own credibility in its criticism of the Government for falling behind in the reform agenda and in promoting productivity growth. A chorus of business leaders is now saying that Labor's workplace laws are incompatible with the party's claim that it will focus on lifting productivity. With IR, Labor had a chance to win over the doubters and prove it had recaptured the reform legacy of the Hawke and Keating years, but it has blown it. As The Australian has consistently argued, the Opposition always needed more than an ACTU-sponsored scare campaign, based on dubious evidence, to defeat a government during good economic times. It needed to offer a better plan. Having taken his eye off the ball on IR, it can only be hoped that Mr Rudd has paid closer attention to Treasury matters. His response to next week's budget will be a test of that.

Source




Schools are too left wing, says Victorian conservative spokesman

TEACHING materials in primary schools have become too politically correct in depicting single sex couples and a black armband view of Australian history, according to the NSW Opposition. The Opposition's new spokesman on education, Andrew Stoner, accused the Labor Government of using schools as "a vehicle for left-wing indoctrination", saying it needed to "rein in the PC culture" within the Department of Education and NSW Board of Studies.

"Under Labor, up to half the curriculum in some subjects focuses on a purely indigenous perspective, including emotive terms such as 'British invasion', as well as 'Survival Day' instead of 'Australia Day'," Mr Stoner, the National Party leader, said. "No one doubts the integral role indigenous people play in Australian history, but any teaching of our past must be balanced. "Labor's political correctness in education also extends to gay causes, including the funding of reading material for children as young as five, regarding gay and lesbian parents. "[The Premier] Morris Iemma should keep his promise and teach kids respect and responsibility, leaving controversial issues like same sex marriage and adoption to parents."

He said books about same-sex parents, used in some primary schools include My House, Going to Fair Day, Koalas on Parade and The Rainbow Cubby House, produced by the Learn to Include project, were funded by the Crime Division of the NSW Attorney General's Department. The books tell the story of a young girl with two lesbian mothers and include a visit to the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras.

A spokesman for the Attorney-General, John Hatzistergos, confirmed the department had funded the project in 2004 when the books were produced as a teaching resource to help combat bullying in schools.

The Minister for Education, John Della Bosca, said Mr Stoner had been highly selective in his use of examples from the curriculum. His strong views about Aboriginal history and sexuality "should be a case study on why you don't let a National Party politician desperate for votes write the primary school syllabus". "This syllabus was designed in consultation with parents, teachers and many professional and community experts and has been successfully taught for nearly a decade. Historical events can be seen differently depending on your view and the syllabus requires teachers to always present a range of perspectives."

The president of the NSW Primary Principals Association, Geoff Scott, said principals and teachers had the final veto on which books were used in schools. Books that simply reflected the gay lifestyle, as opposed to espousing it, would generally be considered acceptable for children. However, each school would exercise discretion in consultation with parents to decide whether a book was appropriate. "There would be a number of occasions when award winning books that are well written but have inappropriate content are not put on the shelves in schools," Mr Scott said. "The principal and teachers would be up to speed with what community expected. The books in primary school libraries are not espousing a particular point of view or pushing values on to children. If a story written about people in same sex relationships, that's real life and provided it is at an appropriate standard, then it can be available for children."

Source






Children force-fed global warming hysteria

JUST when you thought some common sense was back in schools with the return of core subjects history and geography, it turns out there may be new nonsense on the agenda. Apparently the NSW Board of Studies is looking to introduce climate change classes for kindergarten to Year 6 children as part of its science and technology syllabus. At first glance, it sounds sensible. Climate change could be a critical issue for our children, as well as for us. The problem, of course, is what they will be taught.

There are plenty of reasons for concern on this score. Adults have barely engaged in a grown-up conversation over the causes of global warming. Debate over the what, how, why, and when on global warming has been drowned out by hysteria. Global warming has been cleverly framed as the big moral issue of our time to quarantine it from debate.

Even conservative politicians shy away from suggesting scepticism because anyone who is a sceptic is labelled a denier. If you disagree with some of the science, and the religious fervour it has fuelled, or even evince a level of agnosticism towards it, you are not just wrong. You are a bad person forced to defend your integrity as well as your arguments. This is an old trick, but a good one. Given that stultifying atmosphere among adults, it is a stretch to imagine that classroom talk will be different.

A hint of what students might learn came a few weeks ago. My 13-year-old daughter returned home from school to tell me our house on the coast would be swamped by 6m of water. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was compulsory viewing for Year 8 students at her Sydney school that day. Gore told her sea levels would rise 6mby 2100. And people are causing this horrible global warming, she said.

Fortunately, I had just read up on the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and informed her that their worst case scenario prediction is that sea levels may rise by 26-59cm. Hold back the hysteria, I said. Some eminent scientists are suggesting other reasons for global warming, I added. Indeed, some point to evidence that the world may undergo a global cooling. Curious about the climate change curriculum, I asked the school if the movie coincided with a follow-up lesson to enable students to discuss or even question the Gore message on global warming. No, came the answer. “So Gore was it?” I asked. Yes, said the teacher.

So you see why it’s time to ask serious questions about what our children will be taught about this issue. It will, no doubt, start at the silly, harmless end. Keeping it simple for kindy kids, will they be treated to entreaties by pop star cum global warming guru Sheryl Crow? Crow is calling on people to use only one sheet of toilet paper per visit, rising to two or three for “those pesky occasions” as she writes on her blog.

Then it will get more serious. Perhaps older students will read an extract from the Nicholas Stern report on global warming and be introduced to the growing fad of food-miles. They might be told that kiwi fruit is a climate change culprit because flying 1kg of kiwi fruit from New Zealand to Europe translates into 5kg of carbon being discharged into the atmosphere. Given the dumbed-down nature of other parts of the school curriculum, perhaps climate change lessons will involve excursions to the local supermarket where children, armed with a food miles calculator, will add up the environmental impact of food travelling long distances to our shops.

Don’t laugh. British organisation Carboninfo.org has developed a software package to do just that because “it is essential that people are able to make informed choices about buying food and the effect on the environment of moving food around the planet”. Echoing that call, Tesco supermarkets in Britain are making the exercise easier with its plan to introduce a carbon count on their products - little stickers that will allow you to spot the products that, as the Environmental News Network suggests, “only a carbon criminal would dare take ... to the checkout”. Tesco is also planning to halve the amount of air-freighted fresh produce - a good green initiative that our own supermarkets ought to follow, the students might be told.

Children might then be taught that individual action is all well and good. By all means count your food miles - but governments must also do something to save the planet. Friends of the Earth might pop up in the curriculum with their demand that we need tougher policies to stop out-of-town stores to put an end to car-based shopping.

They want government-funded schemes to ensure local and regional food supplies. Governments must, they say, get tougher to reduce food miles. Like Earth Hour, when Sydneysiders were asked to turn off the lights, there is a certain child-like appeal to these think global, act local campaigns.

But unlike flicking a light switch, the focus on food miles provides a number of lessons on what is wrong with many of the reactions to the global warming hysteria - lessons unlikely to make it into the classroom. Will students, for example, be told that poor African farmers will be the real victims of conscientious Westerners looking to reduce their food miles? When buying local produce is promoted as good, buying foreign food must be bad. And, as the BBC reported earlier this year, that is bad news for countries such as Kenya where horticulture is second only to tourism as the biggest foreign exchange earner. We rightly encourage poor countries to build up their economies and sell their wares to rich, Western countries. Now they are being punished for doing so all in the name of global warming. Will students be asked to consider that?

Indeed, of all the reasons to be sceptical of the climate change agenda is the way it is coalescing with the anti-globalisation, anti-capitalism movements. Will students be asked to reflect on whether food miles is a new form of old-fashioned protectionism dressed up in the alluring language of global warming? Unlikely.

Which brings us back to the core problem. Making students aware of climate change is necessary. Infusing hysteria is downright dangerous. If we do not encourage students to debate, dare one say, to be sceptical about global warming, we risk creating a generation that will demand policy responses that end up causing more harm than good. Even worse, they will be denied the essence of a good education - recognising uncertainty, challenging assumptions and asking questions in the quest for knowledge.

Source





Top-level alarm over Ritalin

THE Iemma Government will launch an unprecedented statewide investigation into attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), amid warnings that doctors are creating a Ritalin generation. Health Minister Reba Meagher has also called for a national inquiry into the issue, citing concerns among medical experts about the use of the controversial drug to treat ADHD. The move follows accusations by Judge Paul Conlon, revealed by The Daily Telegraph, that doctors had created a generation of Ritalin children now committing violent crimes and coming before the courts.

Last year there were more than 264,000 Ritalin prescriptions issued in Australia compared with 11,114 in 1992. Australia's diagnosis rate of ADHD is among the highest in the world and 32,000 NSW school children are now on medication for it. "Community concern is escalating around prescriptions and use of these types of drugs to treat conduct disorders of children," Ms Meagher said. In a speech to be delivered to the ALP Business Dialogue Health Policy Forum this morning, Ms Meagher will reveal that talks with health professionals had raised "significant debate" about the use of the drug. "But it was clear in my discussions with stakeholders that significant debate in the clinical community exists about treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder," she said. "I have therefore established a review committee to carefully consider current practice in NSW public health services."

Spearheaded by the Clinical Excellence Commission, the committee will:

* COLLATE evidence and practice in the treatment of ADHD;

* ADVISE on the current development of clinical guidelines for treatment of ADHD and on treatment with the prescription of dexamphetamine, methylphenidate and atomoxetine; and

* ENSURE current practice considers appropriate clinical guidelines.

The review committee will comprise some of the state's top clinicians, including Clinical Excellence Commission chief Professor Clifford Hughes. It has been instructed to report to the minister within three months. Ms Meagher also backed federal Labor health spokeswoman Nicola Roxon's call for a national inquiry. "The availability and prescription of these drugs is largely a matter for the commonwealth so we believe this is best looked at at a national level," she said.

Source