School discipline revival in Western Australia?

SCHOOL bullies and other disruptive students will be removed from schools and taught in behaviour centres, away from their victims. Education Minister Mark McGowan announced the controversial pilot program yesterday. Three centres for teenagers are expected to be set up in Fremantle-Peel, the City of Canning and Kalgoorlie by October as part of the trial, which will be extended to other areas if successful. Five behaviour centres for primary school students are planned for 2008.

Mr McGowan said yesterday it was unfair for well-behaved students to put up with disruptive and violent classmates. It was also unfair to keep troublemakers in learning environments where they were unhappy. Mr McGowan said many disruptive students had underlying mental-health or emotional problems, learning difficulties or dysfunctional home lives, for which they needed help. "They need specialist help that is not always available in schools so that they can return to a mainstream school, training, employment or a combination of these options,'' Mr McGowan said. "The behaviour centres will offer intensive literacy and numeracy support, a specialised curriculum focusing on problem solving, coping strategies and regulation of behaviour, and individualised school transition plans.''

Yesterday's announcement follows a commitment by Mr McGowan earlier this year to improve the image of public schools. He said he was educated in public schools and believed in them. ``While (troublemakers) make up less than 1 per cent of the total student population, their impact is great,'' he said. ``There is no point expecting teachers to struggle on handling these students because everyone suffers. ``About 25 students are excluded from WA public schools every year, almost all of them secondary students. ``The pressure on teachers, other students and families is intolerable. ``Some kids have a very tough life and they will show behaviour that reflects that. ``I am not targeting them, but I am trying to find an environment that suits them while at the same time making the rest of the school better.''

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The unhinged Left in Australia

By Andrew Bolt

I WENT to Doctor S yesterday up at the Epworth and said I was in strife. That much I know is true. Something was wrong with my vision, I said. I wasn't seeing things as they surely must be if all was well. And that's true, too. Please tell me all I need is the long holiday I'm going on this very week, I pleaded. But Dr S rules out stress. So the awful suspicion grows that there's nothing wrong with my vision and the unbelievable things I've been seeing are all true, as well. How frightening.

For a start, I this week read - or thought I read - a United Nations Environment Program manual, which insisted the real problem with Zimbabwe was not that it was ground so deep in the dirt by its brutal leader that it was short of food, work and even power. No, it was simply growing too fast. "Zimbabwe is presently entering a stage of rapid industrialisation and motorisation," the UNEP sighed. "This has resulted in increased air pollution, as well as the increased emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide." Still, I guess the country's huge power blackouts will soon fix that.

But please tell me, dear reader, that it's just my eyes letting me down. Can such madness really be? Not all the odd things I'm seeing are so serious. Take Dust, a book the ABC has published with the sole purpose, it seems, of making happy children very sad. Again I thought I must have gone cross-eyed because no publicist could sell a children's book like this:

"In a perfect world, this book would not exist. But we do not live in a perfect world. At any given moment of any given day, there are people dying from natural disasters over which we have no control. Beyond natural disasters we add disasters of our own making, but even if we all learn to live in peace, there will still be millions of people who need help."

And no book for children could open with these words of a starved child in Niger: "I died last night." Or end with an image of the Grim Reaper leading black children across a hill littered with skulls. I know this is just a trivial example of those things I see that cannot be, yet like all the others it shows glad being subverted for grim, or foul being hailed as fair, or evil mistaken for good. A world stood on its head.

I first feared my eyes were playing up when I read the diatribe of Amnesty International's chief, Irene Khan, in her latest annual report on the world's worst villainy. She'd singled out just four evildoers by name: in order, our John Howard, the US's George Bush, Sudan's genocidal Field Marshal Omar Al-Bashir and Zimbabwe's brutal Robert Mugabe. I must be reading wrong, right?

Or is it really also true that of all the regimes that crush workers, ban unions and shoot union leaders, our ACTU picked Australia for the International Labor Organisation's shame file of the worst of the worst? Indeed, I heard ACTU president Sharan Burrow on radio, confirming that's exactly what she did. So maybe the problem's affecting my hearing, as well.

After all, yesterday I heard journalist David Marr complain for 15 minutes on the government-funded ABC that this Howard Government was silencing exactly his kind of dissent. What's more, I've witnessed Marr make the same claim on ABC television (twice) and in a new book and huge articles this month in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. If the Government is crushing dissent, what is this Dissenting Marr, this Sydney Solzhenitsyn? Just another of my strange visions? Indeed, Marr even spent a whole session of the government-backed Sydney Writers Festival whingeing along with Clive Hamilton, who so furiously agrees the Government is stifling debate that he's written his own book, Silencing Dissent, one of at least six new tomes this past year that damn dissent-crushing Howard. Whole perches of intellectuals now squawk that they cannot speak in fascist Australia, deafening us with complaints of being silenced, and deaf to irony themselves.

I'd laugh if I wasn't still worrying about my eyes, which cannot see the Australia that all these smart people say festers under my feet. Take retired County Court judge Peter Gebhardt, who this week said he agreed with Fascist America, in 10 easy steps, in which writer Naomi Wolf tells how America supposedly lost its freedoms under Fuhrer Bush. Gebhardt listed some of the ways: "creating a gulag (Guantanamo Bay); developing a thug caste (security contractors); setting up an internal surveillance system; harassing citizens' groups; engaging in arbitrary detention and release; targeting key individuals; controlling the media (arrests of US journalists are at a record level); believing that dissent equals treason; suspending the rule of law . . ." And he warned: "Over the past decade, many of Wolf's 10 steps have been evident in this country . . ."

Gosh, they have? Yet the police state this ex-judge describes resembles nothing remotely like the country I've lived in, and still see today. But you see why I worry. Surely all these intellectuals, so many with important public jobs, cannot all be mad? You might try to cheer me by saying such people see things more gloomily than the rest of us, but up bobs Prof Robert Manne, voted our Most Influential Public Intellectual. Sure, Manne is as convinced as Marr that "debate is presently under threat", but he's also quick to hail a kinder, gentler, more moral society when he's told of one.

Hear barking Manne start to coo when he describes not our own foul society, but the "enchanted world" of Aborigines before whites came: "(Anthropologists have) discovered a world that was filled with economic purpose; leavened by playfulness, joy and humour; soaked in magic, sorcery, mystery and ritual; pregnant at every moment with deep and unquestioned meaning." But still I worry: How could our top intellectual so praise a society in which the strong ruled the weak, infanticide was common, death rates by warfare horrific, life expectancy low and bashing of women - as measured by the fractured skulls since found - astonishingly high?

Is it me? Or is upside now down? Inside out? Maybe it is. Consider . . . We now worship global warming preachers who belch more greenhouse gases from their mansions and private planes than do their disciples. Our richest musicians stage Make Poverty History concerts in which not a dollar is raised for the poor and even the fans get in free. Our politicians say "sorry" for stealing Aboriginal children no one can find or name. The head of Melbourne University Press, formed to publish academic works of the highest quality, now wants to publish the memoirs of al-Qaida recruit and dropout David Hicks. The Sydney Peace Prize is given to a writer who tells us to join the "Iraqi resistance" - now blowing up women and children - because their "battle is our battle".

The Australian Catholic University gives an honorary PhD to Age cartoonist Michael Leunig, who likens Israel to Auschwitz, paints George Bush as the devil, asks us to pray for Osama bin Laden and praises "the music you can hear playing in your toes at night". Our leading historians defend the fashionable untruths they tell about our "genocidal" past by sighing - as did Professor Lyndall Ryan - "Two truths are told. Is only one 'truth' correct?" Marrickville Council, in inner Sydney, decides this month to twin, not with any town in Israel, but with the Palestinian town of Bethlehem, now under the control of Hamas extremists.

On it goes: the artists who take pride in displeasing; the Age columnist who yesterday declared, "I'd be happy with a benevolent socialist dictatorship"; the prominent Leftists, led by the ABC's Phillip Adams, who invite Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez to come here to "inspire" us to be just that; the academics who want to try George Bush, not David Hicks; the immigrants who want Australia to be more like the countries they fled; the discrimination police who entrap Christian pastors, but leave hate-preaching imams well alone; and . . . And? God, it's all true. I'm out of here. Goodbye.

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Well-deserved Royal recognition for Australia's greatest satirist

CBE is in the middle ranking of the order -- just below where the title "Sir" confers



HIS comic creations Dame Edna Everage and Sir Les Patterson, have had an "in" with the Queen for years. Now, it's finally Barry Humphries' turn. One of Australia's funniest and most beloved performers was yesterday awarded a CBE (Commander of the British Empire) in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. "It's very nice to receive an honour from the Queen," Humphries said while eating breakfast in the Brisbane City Botanic Gardens. "It means that I can be called Commander. It also might help me getting a good table in a restaurant," he joked.

In Brisbane until next Sunday with his production Barry Humphries - Back with a Vengeance, the 73-year-old said it was lovely to receive such unexpected recognition. "This really came out of the blue," he said. "You get a letter from Downing St, from the Prime Minister, asking if you would accept it and you write back and say, 'I think I might'." The satirist received his letter three weeks ago and has had to keep the award secret since, even from his family. "It was rather hard. I did feel like running around immediately with a loud hailer and telling the world," he laughed. "It's put a little smile on my face which might not have been so broad yesterday."

Source. More on Humphries here. There is a description of his latest performance here.






Nuke deal between Russia and Australia very close



AUSTRALIA is set to strike a controversial nuclear deal with Russia. Uranium from Australian mines could be powering Russian nuclear power plants by the end of the year, Federal Government officials say. The Howard Government is close to finalising a treaty with Vladimir Putin's regime to allow exports of Australian yellowcake, and possibly enriched uranium. The Opposition says the Government also has plans to accept nuclear waste from overseas. Australia has never exported yellowcake to its Cold War foe, although Russia has processed Australian uranium for other countries under a 1990 agreement.

John Carlson, head of the Federal Government's Australian Safeguards and Non-Proliferation Office, said the bilateral treaty could be finalised by September. "The timetable is very tight but I believe we can do it," Mr Carlson told a Russian news agency. Mr Carlson discussed the deal on a visit to Russia this month. He also told Russia that Australia would enrich its own uranium at some point. "It's too early to say whether we will or will not participate in the Russian (enrichment) centre but our principle is to have enrichment in Australia in future," he said.

Opposition environment spokesman Peter Garrett said the treaty with Russia raised doubts about the Government's uranium policy: "As a senior government official has now admitted that we will have nuclear enrichment in Australia, we also need to know what discussions and commitments were given to Russian officials or any other countries concerning Australia being used, as Russia's nuclear weapons stockpile is one of the world's largest, although Moscow is not making new bombs, and its three plutonium reactors are used for power generation."

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said a condition of the treaty was Russia's decision in 2006 to separate its civilian nuclear program from its military one. Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane confirmed on Friday that Australia was considering building an enrichment facility. There has been speculation it would cost $2.5 billion, and could be located at Caboolture in Queensland, Redcliffe in South Australia or outback Western Australia.

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