Gay bar win opens can of worms

HOTELS and nightclubs should be given the green light to ban men or women at venues with a "gender imbalance", the Australian Hotels Association said yesterday. The AHA made the claim yesterday after a landmark decision at the state planning tribunal allowing a Melbourne gay pub to ban heterosexuals.

AHA state CEO Brian Kearney said the decision should lead to more leniency for venues wanting to address the issue of gender balance. "We are hopeful this decision might result in a more flexible attitude to publicans who want to ensure a good mix of men and women at their venue," Mr Kearney said. "There have been a few cases before VCAT by hotels wanting the right to refuse entry to males or females when the balance isn't right, but they have been overwhelmingly rejected."

The Herald Sun yesterday revealed the owners of Collingwood pub the Peel won the right to refuse entry to straight men and women. Owner Tom McFeely argued the exemption, under the Equal Opportunity Act, would help prevent "sexually based insults and violence" towards its gay patrons. Mr McFeely said that while the pub welcomed everyone, its gay clientele had expressed discomfort over the number of heterosexuals and lesbians coming to the venue over the past year. "We've had instances in the past where, for example, a bucks' night has come up to the Peel or a hens' night," he said. "Our whole atmosphere changes immensely."

Mr McFeely said that before the ruling it was illegal to refuse entry to a large group of people based on sexuality, making his gay customers uncomfortable and unable to express their sexuality freely. He said there were more than 2000 venues in Melbourne that catered to heterosexuals, but his pub was the only one marketing itself predominantly to gay men. "Heterosexuals have other places to go to, my homosexuals do not," Mr McFeely said.

But he said there had already been a backlash against the decision, with dozens of people phoning with homophobic abuse. "The phone honestly hasn't stopped ringing and that's sad," Mr McFeely said. "But it also, in my head, demonstrates the need for this type of thing because there is still quite a bit of homophobia in the general community."

The Peel yesterday received support from the Equal Opportunity Commission, which said gays had the right to socialise in a safe place. "From my understanding this was not a move for a blanket ban of straight people. It was a decision taken to maintain the safety of the hotel's gay patrons," EOC chief Helen Szoke said. Ms Szoke said while the decision was unique, it did not necessarily open the floodgates for other venues wanting discrimination exemptions. "Each case before the Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal is looked at on its own merit," she said. "It is not OK in all cases to ban men or women just to get the gender balance right." [So she has prejudged the matter]

Source





Gross public hospital negligence



A WOMAN claims emergency doctors at The Alfred hospital told her to go home and take a Panadol after she had a mussel shell wedged in her throat. Experienced nurse Bernadette Ireland, 56, said she endured four days of excruciating pain and edged perilously close to death before medics finally took an X-ray. It revealed the razor-sharp shell lodged in her oesophagus at the base of her neck.

Ms Ireland said she was shocked when doctors in the hospital's emergency department suggested she had only imagined her problem. "They said, 'You only think it's in your throat -- it's only scratched your throat when it went down'," she claimed. Ms Ireland, a nurse of 35 years, said her protests fell on deaf ears. She said she told them: "I'm a registered nurse and I'm pretty sure it's in my throat."

The aged care nurse had been dining at Albert Park's Misuzu Japanese restaurant on April 27 when the shell piece -- bigger than a 20c coin -- lodged in her throat. Ms Ireland kept her composure and called for an ambulance but was told her case was not urgent enough, so she drove to The Alfred.

After she waited 45 minutes, a doctor said she would not be X-rayed as it would probably not reveal any shell fragment. "Nobody would listen to me, that's the worst part," Ms Ireland said.

She said she could not swallow after the ordeal but was instructed to down pain-killers. "They said, 'Take two Panadol and go home and the pain will go'," Ms Ireland claimed, so she took soluble Panadol every two hours overnight and into the weekend. Weak and unable to eat, she visited a GP on Monday morning who told her to get back to the hospital urgently.

Ms Ireland said she arrived with a fever of 38C and X-rays finally revealed the shell. It was surgically removed under anaesthetic about 11pm that day. Ms Ireland stayed in hospital for the next three days on an intravenous drip of antibiotics.

She said the hospital offered no explanation. "I didn't even get a sorry," Ms Ireland said. She said she went public because she feared her case would not be taken seriously if she went back to the hospital.

An Alfred hospital spokeswoman said it was looking into the claims. Ms Ireland's is the latest horror story to emerge since Health Minister Bronwyn Pike was forced to defend claims hospital were taking drastic steps to cut costs as the financial year ends.

A great-grandmother, 91, died from heart disease 15 hours after she was discharged from the Royal Melbourne Hospital in April. A memo, published in the Herald Sun, revealed that the Royal Melbourne Hospital has set discharge quotas ahead of July 1. The Monash Medical Centre has blacked out most elective surgery procedures this week, leaving doctors idle and patients waiting.

Source






Labor Party backs down on plan to unleash rogue unions

LABOR has enraged unions with a pledge to keep the Howard Government's building industry watchdog for almost three years if it wins Government. Opposition IR spokeswoman Julia Gillard said Labor would retain the Australian Building and Construction Commission until 2010. "We will not tolerate old school thuggish behaviour," Ms Gillard said. "Anyone who breaks the law will feel the full force of the law."

Ms Gillard told the National Press Club the ABCC would eventually be replaced by a watchdog under Labor's workplace authority, Fair Work Australia. The pledge to keep the ABCC, even for just a few years, is a significant shift by Labor and will be used to blunt attacks that it is too close to the union movement. Ms Gillard said the industry was rife with illegal activity. "Under a Rudd government, there will not be a single moment where our construction industry is without a strong cop on the beat," she said.

Unions savaged the announcement, saying the ABCC could interrogate building workers with the threat of jail hanging over those who refused to answer questions. Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union national secretary Dave Noonan said Labor should be pledging to axe it as soon as possible. "The abolition of the ABCC should be brought forward, not pushed back," Mr Noonan said. "Labor ought to take a clear stand here in favour of workers, and that Labor ought to be abolishing this body and the laws it operates under."

ACTU president Sharan Burrow said the peak union body would continue to fight for the regulator to be axed. Ms Burrow said the laws covering the ABCC meant ordinary workers could be fined tens of thousands of dollars for taking industrial action.

Ms Gillard also announced Labor would ensure appointees to its watchdog were not just ex-unionists, and would have to be given the green light by all sides of politics. Officials from each state and territory would have to sign off on Fair Work Australia members, she said.

Workplace Relations Minister Joe Hockey said Ms Gillard could not be trusted to keep the unions at bay. "She released her workplace relations policies more than a month ago and they've changed with every speech and interview," Mr Hockey said.

Source




Independent schools are the model to which state schools should aspire

By Joanna Mendelssohn

RECENTLY I had a reunion with my very first friend, Anne. Our parents had been neighbours so we were babies together. Anne is blessed with an analytical talent for numbers, yet is a born communicator. She became a maths teacher. For more than 35 years she has taught maths to generations of students in state schools, in the city and the country.

She was able to take this path because, when we left school at the end of 1967, the NSW Education Department gave her a teaching scholarship that paid all fees and a generous allowance in return for her agreement to teach. This used to be the norm across the country; bonded teaching scholarships gave ordinary Australians the opportunity for a financially comfortable university education while ensuring a steady supply of young, qualified teachers for the state system.

In the 1970s, with the baby boom at an end, the system changed. Suddenly there was an oversupply of qualified teachers, so newly qualified teachers were freed of both their bonds and guaranteed jobs. Those who really wanted to teach could find soul-destroying work as casual relief staff until a vacancy occurred, but many left teaching altogether.

Before other avenues were open to us, teaching was often seen as the ideal profession for women, but by the 1980s this was not the case; there were also problems with teacher education. Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan's research at the Australian National University has tracked the entry grades of teaching students during a 20-year period. From 1983 to 2003, the percentile rank of teaching students fell from 74 to 61, while the rank of new teachers fell from 70 to 62. The drift was to a mediocre middle.

In those years the teaching force in state schools, bulging with teachers who had qualified in the late '60s, became stagnant as few new staff were employed. When, after years of casual teaching, young teachers finally found a job, they were often already burned out by a system that had failed them.

Anne told me of the school she remembers with greatest affection. It was deep in rural NSW. Because this school was so distant from any big town, the staff had no choice. They had to live near the families of the children they taught and they had to relate to the community. Teachers also socialised with each other outside of school hours. The direct result of this physical isolation was a culture of connectedness between the staff, students and community, and they worked together for the common good. Whenever I hear politicians speak of values and education in the same sentence, I think of this country school.

Education has been dragged to the centre stage of the political debate, where it is squabbled over as some kind of trophy in an increasingly infantile battle between politicians, teachers unions and dogma-led lobby groups. Meanwhile, parents are left puzzling their way through the verbiage as they try to decide which school can possibly deliver the most appropriate education for their children.

The problem with Australian schools is not whether they are independent, state or faith-based, but the size of their governing bureaucracy and the nature of the culture within that bureaucracy. State schools, independent schools and faith-based schools all teach to the same curriculum (albeit a different one in each state). The first great advantage of independent schools is not their manicured sports grounds or sandstone buildings (some of the best schools have neither). It is that they are small, discrete entities. The bureaucracy has a human scale and an easily identified chain of command. Parents and children know where to go if they have a problem. Each school employs its own staff and is free to foster their professional development, and promote them when they excel.

It used to be the case that teachers working in independent or faith-based schools tended to be poorly qualified in comparison with those in state schools. They were also paid considerably less. As the salaries and status of state teachers sank, in a kind of seesaw effect, the salaries, status and qualifications of teachers in independent schools rose.

The way this happened is at the heart of the state of school education today. When the state systems would not employ their newly trained teachers, private and faith-based schools leapt at the chance to upgrade their staff, and many state school-trained teachers, once rejected, now hold leadership positions in elite independent schools.

In the '70s and '80s, innovative principals, including Rod West of Sydney's Trinity Grammar, went out of their way to encourage first-class scholars to think of teaching as a career. Thanks to a significant real increase in school fees and increased government support for non-state schools, teachers in these schools are paid the same or more than those in the state system. They do, however, earn their money, as these teachers are faced with far higher expectations. As well as teaching in the classroom, teachers in independent and faith-based schools are expected to become a part of the school community. They need to be available (often by email) out of school hours and, above all, to adopt the ethos of the school where they work. It is amazing what a school can achieve if the entire school community is travelling in the same direction.

The key to developing quality teachers in whatever system comes back to how they are appointed, mentored and promoted. Good schools look after their staff. Smaller, flexible administrative units make it easier for independent schools to identify the talent, mentor new staff to ease them into a career path and then promote staff or redeploy them to where they can be most useful to the school.

By contrast, state systems are still struggling to free themselves from their historic bureaucratic past. Australia's state school systems were established well before Federation, when every state proclaimed itself to be a nation. In other English-speaking countries, where the population was less sparse, schools tended to be run by local authorities. Australia is unique in the immense size and scope of our centralised education administration. There is in any bureaucratic institution a tendency to "team think". In schools, this tendency was exacerbated by a tightly controlled employment structure where, for more than a century, almost all employees had started as school-leavers and risen up a well-defined hierarchy.

Because the dominant group entering this workforce was from an aspirational working-class background, there was from the start a strong union presence. The union presence was embedded within the departmental hierarchy so the junior teacher would often discover that the person supervising her was also the union representative.

Times change, but workplace cultures change slowly. Although there have been some reforms in the way staff are appointed, it is still the case that individual state schools in Australia have less flexibility in appointing and dismissing staff than government-funded schools in equivalent countries.

The Prime Minister has recently declared that he will require a situation where principals alone have the choice to hire and fire staff. At the same time, he has declared a fatwa on bullying in schools. I'm not sure that replacing an unfeeling bureaucracy with an authoritarian hierarchy is going to change school cultures to something inclusive.

A school is a large and complex organisation. Surely the best way to build a team with the school community is to have each school appoint staff, but using a committee that includes parents and colleagues as well as the hierarchy. Bringing the community into the life of the school is a big task. Independent and Catholic schools do this well by co-opting that most effective cultural glue, Saturday sport. All students in these schools are expected to play a team sport and every Saturday, across the country, parents are car pooling and driving to ovals in distant parts of the city. At the ovals parent groups run barbecues, and cheer on their children. The teachers also participate as coaches and wise school principals call by. The schools' sense of community comes from such small weekly acts.

If sporting clubs could liaise with local state schools and be funded so that all state school children could play competitive Saturday sport, and if state teachers could also be involved with supporting their students, then more parents would be involved in the daily life of their schools. It is the kind of cultural glue our schools need to make them strong and help give them a sense of community.

Source