These are the types that Labor party policy will put back in charge of Australian workplaces

OPPOSITION Leader Kevin Rudd has been embarrassed by accusations from a major union that the US is a terrorist state - and the emergence of another video allegedly showing CFMEU thugs threatening employers. As Mr Rudd struggles to distance himself from the unions, it has been revealed that the powerful Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union has openly condemned the US for sponsoring terrorism. The union provides millions of dollars to the Labor Party in campaign funding.

News of its attack on the US comes as Mr Rudd has been at pains to emphasise his commitment to the ANZUS alliance, after former Labor leader Mark Latham condemned George W. Bush as the "most incompetent and dangerous President in living memory''.

On its website, the CFMEU is promoting a campaign for the release of the so-called "Cuban Five'', offering T-shirts emblazoned with the demand "Stop US Terrorism''. According to websites on the issue, the US arrested the Cuban Five in Florida in 1998, alleging they were spies in a group called the Wasp Network. Charges included use of false identification, espionage and conspiracy to commit murder. The five were convicted on all 26 counts by a US Federal Court and jailed in December for terms of between 15 years and life. An appeal is pending.

A spokesman for Mr Rudd refused to comment on the CFMEU website, saying it was a matter for the union to explain its position. At the same time, another video tape has emerged of a CFMEU official in Perth allegedly trespassing on a construction site and threatening employers who try to evict him. It follows a similar video of West Australian CFMEU official Joe McDonald screaming obscenities at employers on the same site.

Mr Rudd is moving to expel Mr McDonald from the ALP but he is refusing to go quietly, demanding a chance to put his case to the ALP's National Executive. The latest tape involves an alleged altercation between a manager from the Q-Con company and two union officials at a Perth site during a union inspection on April 27, shortly after workers rallied to highlight safety concerns at the site. The tape shows pushing and shoving between the parties, amidst warnings from the employers that the union officials are illegally on the premises. The tape also shows police being called to end the impasse.

Mr Rudd said he understood the tape was at the centre of an ongoing police investigation. "I have made my position clear on the matter of workplace violence,'' Mr Rudd said. "We have drawn a line in the sand. I have a policy of zero tolerance when it comes to violence, threats of violence and unlawful behaviour in the workplace.''

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Australian health bosses adopting British-style dirty tricks to "fiddle" their statistics

HEALTH chiefs have been accused of using "sneaky tactics" to reduce surgery waiting times at Queensland hospitals. Thousands of patients waiting for operations are getting letters from Queensland Health asking them if they still need treatment. If they fail to reply within 30 days, they are automatically taken off the list and forced to return to their GP.

The Sunday Mail can reveal there are about 32,000 Category 2 and 3 patients who currently qualify for a letter from the department. Usually about one person in four fails to respond.

Hospital staff are outraged that as many as 8000 patients could drop off the list, perhaps without realising. They spoke out after Health Minister Stephen Robertson recently boasted how his measures to reduce surgery waits were working. One doctor, who couldn't be named because of a Queensland Health ban on staff speaking out, said it was a dirty trick to play. "It's just more sneaky tactics by the Government to make the waiting times look better", he said. "There is the risk that people could move house or be on holiday and not receive the letter. They could have their letters lost in the post, and others could just forget about replying altogether."

Ross Cartmill, Queensland president of the Australian Medical Association, said it was wrong not to publicly announce the letters were being sent. "I can understand them wanting to cleanse the waiting list by finding out who still needs treatment, but they should be using the media to tell people about it." The letters are sent out to Category 2 patients needing an operation within 90 days, and Category 3, who require surgery within a year. Managers say the letters are sent out to "ensure the highest standard of service to our patients". Patients who fail to specify they still need an operation are sent a follow-up letter. It states: "If you require further treatment for your condition, we urge you to contact your general practitioner."

There are 35,583 patients on the waiting list for operations across the state. More than 10,000 of these are waiting longer than is clinically safe with almost 200 classified as needing urgent treatment within 30 days. Health bosses refused to reveal how many people have failed to respond. Spokeswoman Carolyn Varley said: "We don't collate that." But sources told The Sunday Mail about a quarter of patients do not reply.

A second Queensland Health spokesman said the figure was not "accurate", but was unable to say what the figure was: "This process is not done to reduce waiting lists, but to ensure they are accurate and that resources can be utilised efficiently." Opposition health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek said it would be more ef- ficient and cheaper to phone patients. "This is just an underhand way to try to reduce waiting lists and it's not fair on patients," he said.

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Greenie politics of empty gesture from the Australian Left

Comment by Christopher Pearson

KEVIN Rudd calls climate change "the great moral challenge of our times". His guru, German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, certainly wouldn't have agreed, given his old-fashioned preoccupations with abortion and eugenics. But it's the kind of rhetorical flourish that probably tells us all there is to know about the Opposition Leader's moral compass. As he sees it, a hypothetical threat - which has got a lot of people vaguely worried about something that may well never materialise - trumps poverty and preventable disease in the developing world, international peacekeeping initiatives and winning the long war against terrorism.

If Rudd wants to paint himself as a moral crusader, with curbing greenhouse gas as his great cause, he should at least be prepared to demonstrate that he means business. So far all the Opposition has had to offer is gesture politics and desperate attempts to shirk debating the economic and social costs of bizarre prescriptions advanced by various climate change fanatics, including Labor's environment spokesman Peter Garrett.

Labor holds it as an article of faith that there can be no serious response to climate change unless and until Australia ratifies the Kyoto Protocol. That is the beginning and the end of what the Australian Labor Party is pleased to call its comprehensive approach to climate change. It's no more than a shibboleth, as group-defining as a Masonic handshake and almost as much of an anachronism.

Ratifying the Kyoto Protocol is a hand-me-down policy bequeathed to Rudd by Kim Beazley and to Beazley by Simon Crean before him. As a policy, it is intellectually threadbare because most of what it has delivered is the illusion of making a difference rather than the reality. For people looking for some sort of insurance against the risks climate change is said to pose, the debate moved beyond Kyoto years ago. Australian diplomatic initiatives culminating in the foreshadowed Sydney Declaration at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum summit, and bringing the Group of Eight nations into post-Kyoto undertakings, are much more pragmatic, but Labor has tended to trivialise them because it didn't think of them first.

The existing Kyoto targets cover barely one-third of global emissions. The agreement does not cover the US, India or China, leading emitters now and for the foreseeable future. Even in the most unlikely event that all the signatories to Kyoto meet their targets, emissions are set to rise 41 per cent in 2010. Without Kyoto, the increase would be 42 per cent. It's a case of much ado about not much.

China and India are perfectly reasonable in seeing economic development as their main priority if they are to lift many hundreds of millions more of their people out of poverty. They simply won't sign up for emissions targets that shackle their capacity for growth, notwithstanding the moral hectoring of affluent advanced economies, which historically were the main emitters. India and China sought and won exemptions that they are unlikely readily to surrender.

As for the chief proponents of the protocol, most have proved unable to meet their Kyoto aspirations. From the outset it has been obvious to all but the zealots that the Kyoto system was designed by Europeans, adopting European prescriptions that suited European interests, with precious little regard for highly fossil-fuel-reliant economies such as Australia's. Yet even in the countries where the protocol is defended most fervently, performance on carbon emission cuts is abysmal.

As the latest report of the European Union Environment Agency makes clear, the 15 EU economies of western Europe taken together have succeeded in achieving only a 1.5 per cent reduction in emissions since the 1990s, against a Kyoto target of 8 per cent. It is only when you count the eastern Europeans, whose decrepit smokestack industries crumbled after the collapse of the Soviet empire, that the EU begins to get close to meeting its commitments.

Were Rudd's Labor as serious as it claims to be about climate change, there is another crucial policy it would have to reconsider. Of those countries in western Europe that have achieved significant emission reductions, almost all have nuclear power generation or access to nuclear-powered electricity grids. For example, Sweden gets 46 per cent of its electricity supply from nuclear power, Belgium 54 per cent, Finland 28 per cent, Germany 27 per cent, Britain 15 per cent and France a hefty 78 per cent.

The ALP remains obsessed with a shambolic and unworkable Kyoto system. Yet at the same time, as John Howard never tires of pointing out, it remains an unwavering ideological opponent of the one energy source capable of providing an alternative baseload electricity supply with negligible carbon emissions. This is less of a climate change policy than a climate change posture.

For all I know, at heart Rudd may be as sceptical about greenhouse gas-induced global warming as Michael Costa, the Labor Treasurer of NSW, who openly dismisses it as a bad joke. But no matter what the Opposition Leader thinks, caucus would insist on ratifying the Kyoto Protocol if he wins the election. Julia Gillard and Greg Combet, to name but two, are feudal chieftains who just wouldn't take no for an answer.

As the last rounds of preselections are finalised, a clearer picture is emerging of what a Rudd government would look like. A lot more union officials will be entering parliament and demanding frontbench positions at the expense of younger and more politically savvy people who presently occupy them, especially the women. It would not be a ministry of all the talents, comparable with the first Hawke cabinet.

It's unlikely that many would aspire to be change-managers with a commitment to economic reform, like the best of the class of 1983. Nor are they technocrats in Tony Blair's New Labour mould. The main emphasis would be on re-entrenching the union movement's anachronistic privileges as far as possible and otherwise playing it safe and keeping faith with party pieties. The mind-set that gave us the no-new-mines policy on uranium and steadfastly resisted the sale of Telstra for the past 11 years on some elusive principle, after selling off far more strategic assets in public ownership, would be much in evidence. In so far as we can judge from its platform, it would be a government that seldom allowed the high cost of implementing bad policy to deter it from doing so.

As most readers will know, I am a greenhouse sceptic and bitterly regret that the Howard Government didn't use the advantages of incumbency to stimulate a far better informed debate on climate change than we have seen so far. I have repeatedly urged the Prime Minister to sack or move sideways the string of environment ministers who so often became the hopeless captives of their advisers, only to see the Government en masse follow suit.

Watching the federal Government poised to spend billions of dollars on a notional problem when there's no shortage of real problems that need fixing, is wormwood and gall to me. The only crumb of comfort is that some of the projects funded under the greenhouse rubric can be defended on other grounds. For example, coal is a dirty fuel as well as a source of carbon dioxide. Burning it, and any other type of fossil fuel, as cleanly and efficiently as possible makes sense. Again, there are other reasons Australia may choose to pay the developing world to stop deforestation apart from carbon storage, including protecting the diversity of species and the earth's supply of oxygen.

Apart from those considerations, I suppose if there's going to be any kind of government intervention on greenhouse gas emissions, it would be better to leave it to the Coalition's relatively cautious style of management rather than entrust it to green enthusiasts. It is, after all, only by virtue of a hard-nosed approach to bargaining and pleading a special case for fossil fuels in our domestic economy that Australia got an achievable Kyoto target in the first place and became one of the few countries on track to meet it. In any event, as we are reckoned to be responsible for only 1.5per cent of global emissions, our contribution to curbing them should also be commensurately modest.

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School discipline problem greeted with the usual wringing of hands

And expressions of good intentions, of course. No suggestion of bringing back real punishment for misdeeds. A great lesson for kids to learn!

EDUCATION Minister David Bartlett does not support suspension and wants to reduce the use of the discipline tactic in Tasmanian schools. He said research showed long suspensions led to students becoming disconnected and dropping out of school. Last year, 2713 students were suspended, at least once, for an average three days for reasons including drugs, sex, weapons and physical attacks.

Yesterday Mr Bartlett flagged sending students to alternative educational venues in schools or in the community rather than suspending them. "What I believe is that we do need to keep young Tasmanians connected to schooling," he said. "A suspension of three days does not necessarily disconnect them from schooling. "But I do get concerned when students are spending longer times out of schools."

He has ordered an audit of what government and non-government venues already exist and wants to start promoting them to schools. "We need to get the schools using them," he said.

The Australian Education Union is pushing for small separate schools, or behavioural units, to send violent students to. The AEU has argued that suspension does not improve a student's behaviour and has heard reports of students attacking teachers every week. Last week, AEU state manager Chris Lane said teachers' only option was to suspend children who returned to the classroom just as badly behaved.

Mr Bartlett said suspension was not his preference but sometimes it was the "only solution". He said the Government did need to invest in education programs to provide another option to sending students home. These programs included the Keep it Big program at Rosetta High, Chance on Main at Moonah and the Bridgewater Farm School. Schools set their own policies on suspension and Mr Bartlett said a suspendable offence varied from school to school.

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