Australian policy on troublesome African immigrants defended

Both the conservative government and the Leftist Opposition are defending the big cut in the number of African refugees accepted. No glass jaw over "racism" allegations in evidence in Australia

Colleagues have leapt to the defence of embattled Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, while Labor admitted to agreeing with the new policy on Sudanese refugees. Mr Andrews' decision to cut the number of Sudanese refugees coming to Australia was not racially based, Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile says. Mr Andrews has been accused of racism while defending the government's decision last week to cut the quota of Sudanese refugees.

Meanwhile, Labor has admitted to agreeing numbers of African refugees should be cut, but also denies its policy is race-based. Mr Andrews said the decision had been made due to concerns that they were failing to integrate and were becoming involved in crime.

Mr Vaile said the government's intake of migrants was greater than any other Australian government and it had a choice of who to accept. "This decision is absolutely not racially based," Mr Vaile told the Nine Network today. "Every government in Australia's history has always had the opportunity to adjust the mix if you like in the immigration policies of the day to benefit the nation and to benefit the migrants coming in and particularly refugees," Mr Vaile said.

He said he respected the view of Victoria' federal member for Mallee John Forrest that there should be more Sudanese refugees accepted into Australia. "He comes from an electorate where historically they've always been stretched in terms of getting a solid unskilled workforce if you like to work in their industries in the Sunraysia," [Fruit picking] Mr Vaile said. However, Mr Andrews' decision took in the interests of the broader community, he said, despite Labor's insistence the decision was born of incompetence.

Mr Andrews drew accusations of racism earlier this week when he declared Australia had reduced its African refugee intake because some, particularly Sudanese people, were failing to integrate and were becoming more involved in crime. His statements were totally at odds with his reasons in August for reducing the African intake - namely that Australia needed to accept more refugees from countries like Burma and Iraq and it had already filled its African quota to July 2008.

Labor agreed with the government's decision to cut back the African intake, but immigration spokesman Tony Burke today said he was mystified as to why Mr Andrews' had used this "new rhetoric". "I don't understand it," Mr Burke told ABC television. "I've got to say I think with Kevin Andrews you can't look past the possibility of incompetence. "I don't think you can discount incompetence in him misrepresenting the reasons that have been given." Asked if he thought the government was playing racist politics, Mr Burke said: "I hope not with something like this, I genuinely hope not. "I hope they're not dealing with it in that way." Mr Burke said police Not police in general. Just one very ideological police chief], who have disputed Mr Andrews' assertion that Sudanese people are over-represented in crime statistics, were a "more reputable source". "(Mr Andrews) has provided anecdotal evidence but he hasn't been willing to put publicly or provide directly to the opposition all of that information, he's just put out snippets of information," Mr Burke said.

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Failure of the PhD

A comment from another skeptical Australian

THE PhD is a dinosaur from a previous age of elite education.  It has failed at least one generation of research scholars and continues to fail the overwhelming majority of currently enrolled candidates. A radical rethink would be justified.

I’d like to stir the possum [be provocative] and canvass two options: enrolments could be slashed by at least 50 per cent with a doubling of scholarship and research support funding; alternatively, the degree could head in the opposite direction with an overhaul to take into account the employment prospects of those two thirds of students who will never find full-time employment within the university sector.

There is endless corridor chatter about shady practices surrounding the offering of higher degree research at Australian universities, but very few seem to want to speak out about the degraded state of the PhD itself. There is good reason for this.  It is called self-interest. 

At the top of the pile is an allocation system where universities receive competitive funding for PhD enrolments and successful completions.  Witness the trend in recent years towards advertising campaigns for research degree places around scholarship times, as universities attempt to trump and outbid one another for precious enrolments. This is reckless stuff and a possible breach of trust.  The ads do not mention that around 70 per cent of all enrolling PhDs will never secure research-related jobs in their fields of specialisation.

Down at the coalface, Gollum-like supervisors are endlessly suspicious of their colleagues’ intentions as they rake off workload points for the advice they offer to their students.  Such is the obsession with enrolments and candidacy that extra financial incentives are being offered for supervisions at a number of Australian universities. Given the circumstances, few would blame PhD supervisors for working the system in the manner they do.  Competitiveness is the name of the game and, like the bulk of Australian academics, PhD supervisors are afflicted by endemic workplace insecurity. 

The contemporary PhD suffers from a split personality.  The major and historic functions of the degree were to credential aspiring academics.  The problem is that only around a third of all successful contemporary PhD candidates will end up working in their specialist fields.

The PhD has been caught up in the movement towards mass education, but the degree itself has remained elitist and virtually unchanged for around fifty years.  Training in research methods is the exception and most universities provide a high standard here.  There is little evidence to suggest that other forms of training are being implemented.

Four years ago, DEST released a report into what it euphemistically called “generic capabilities”. The phrase was catchy corporate-speak, and there the debate seemed to end: “When workplace-related skills are discussed, a variety of terms is applied (such as generic skills, transferable skills, and graduate attributes, to select but a few). This report uses the term generic capabilities to mark off the skills and attributes that have a direct link to postgraduate research students’ employability, whatever their research topic and/or discipline base.”

The substantive matter was lost: “The past decade in Australia has seen increased debate and scrutiny by government, employers and universities themselves on the readiness of graduates to enter the workplace. This report is concerned with strategies and practices Australian universities have developed to address the issue of employability in relation to postgraduate research students. In the domain of research graduates, employability is conceived as including entry to the workplace and also career enhancement and change.”

Four years on, the PhD continues to fail its most important people: the best new research minds in the country.

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What Australia's "noble savages" are really like right now -- after years of politically-correct "respect"

An excerpt from a recent speech by Mal Brough,Federal minister for Indigenous Affairs

Recently I was in South Yarra with about 200 people for breakfast, and I gave them a warning before I spoke that I would be honest with them, I'd be frank with them and, as such, some of them may find that a little difficult to take their breakfast, because there is nothing palatable whatsoever about what you see and hear in indigenous communities. And unless the rest of Australia actually understands that, the depth of despair that people are in, and the lack of culture that is resulting as a direct result of that despair, then we are going to lose not only another generation, we are in fact going to lose the last remnants in many places of what was a very rich culture.

The focus has been on the Northern Territory, and there are those who like to think this is just a problem of remote Australia, but last week I was not in the Northern Territory, I was in Western Australia. And I'm here to tell you the circumstances in Western Australia, not just the East Kimberleys, not just the Pilbara, but also the Central Desert and also in the suburbs of Perth, are worse than many of the circumstances in the Northern Territory.

And those who have not read the report, Little Children are Sacred, its two authors visited 45 communities in the Northern Territory. They didn't find sexual abuse in some of those communities, they didn't find it in most of those communities, they found it in every single community; 45 out of 45. Think about that, the enormity of that for a moment. People coming forward with the most horrendous stories. We have children as young as three with gonorrhoea, we have twenty-four year old grandmothers, we have so many babies being born with alcohol foetal syndrome that their - a capacity to pass on the oral history of their people is gone before they're even born. We have physical and sexual abuse of boys and girls and men and women. It knows no boundaries. That is the reality in the Territory and it also in South Australia, it is also in Western Australia, it is in New South Wales and Queensland to differing degrees.

The reason that the Federal Government has acted in the Northern Territory is simply because we have the capacity and the power to do so. Let me answer right up front the allegation that is thrown at me and thrown at the Prime Minister as to why didn't you do this for the last 11 years? Well, this time last week I was in South Australia before 700 indigenous childcare workers. And the first question that was thrown at me was by a white woman who said you have stood before us today and said that most of these interventions have come from direct requests from indigenous people to you, and that's true. And I'll articulate some of those as we go through.

She said, but tell me who told you to breach the Racial Discrimination Act, the Human Rights Act, and the Land Rights Act? I said, well, funny thing that, no-one, because no-one talks about it in those sort of terms when the children haven't been fed or they've been bashed the night before, or the situation they're living in is just horrendous. They actually talk about surviving. They talk about not being stabbed. They talk about some form of normality around their circumstances. And the crowd actually all applauded her for asking that question, long and loud, because I have breached the Racial Discrimination Act in a positive sense.

So the last question that was put to me on that morning was first of all the lady said I'm from Darwin. She said the first thing I want to say is thank you for what you've done. Then she went on to say that why didn't your government do this some time in the last 11 eleven years. And there was the same raucous applause, and I thought isn't it interesting the same audience can have two totally different perspectives. One, why did you breach the Racial Discrimination Act, and point up that that's wrong, and then 15 minutes later applaud when challenged for why I didn't breach it 10 years ago.

Now, that is what we get every single day. People dress up, and I think the comments by Noel Pearson that were quoted at the outset say it all: they dress up self-determination, they dress up land rights, they dress up all sorts of nuances of arguments that really in their heart are saying that the right of a child to be born and to be safe and to have an education and to have an opportunity in this country is somehow below that of these other niceties that don't even reflect anything of what occurs in their life.

Do you know how many times that I've had raised with me the issues of the stolen generation? Once in the Northern Territory in Darwin by a woman who wanted to be connected to family. The other time was at ANU by people who are not part of the stolen generation.

Treaties: never is it raised to me by Aboriginal people in the communities, it's raised by white people in universities. They don't seem to understand the disconnect between where people are today and where they want to be and the fog that they're living in. Most of you probably don't realise that there is a thing called kava. Kava is used in the South Pacific for ceremonies, and it is coma inducing. That's what it does. People sip it. But no, in Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory it's been legal for years. Why? Because it stops people having violent outbursts. Instead, they're just comatosed under trees, they don't feed their children. Their children don't go to school and white fellas thought that was a better outcome because there were less people going to hospital.

When I discussed that with Galarrwuy Yunupingu, who was one of the champions of land rights, who is one of the most powerful lawmen in the Northern Territory, and I said, well, I understand why they did it, is to protect people from the violence of alcohol, and he said that's rubbish. I said, how do you mean? He said the reality is that the women are so comatose they get raped, but the difference is they don't actually fight back. He said this is another insidious drug that white man has inflicted upon us that needs to go. Alcohol needs to go, marijuana or ganja, as it's known, needs to go. Kava needs to go.

Let me take you to Kalumburu. Kalumburu is up in the East Kimberleys. It is a town of about 300. There are only 90 males in Kalumburu. It's isolated by the wet for a good part of every year. The wet will set in some time this month. Of those 90 men, in the last two months 15 have been charged with child sex offences. Fifteen out of 90 men. These are the charge sheets. Not one page, not two pages, not three pages, four pages. They're all an offence against a child, predominantly penetrating a girl or a boy under the age of 13. Who were these 15 men? They were the mayor, the deputy mayor, two other councillors, the police liaison officer, a truancy officer, two wardens. What does that tell you? These are people of authority. These are the people that white fellas like me and bureaucrats turn up to, who go to consult with about answers to their communities, who we give money and more empowerment to and we walk away saying, haven't we done a good thing.

I was one of them. I went there 18 months ago and I thought that this place had a smell of decay about it. It worried me. But you talk to the leaders. One of those leaders, who was the police liaison officer, was a man who I had great faith in. He was a man that the local police sergeant had great faith in and thought he would be an indigenous sworn police officer soon. He and his wife were doing good things. They asked for money from me to assist them to take young boys out of the community who had been truant or had come with brushes to the law to take them back onto the homelands to teach them cultural ways. We provided that money to him.

He has been procuring children as young as five and six. He sat before the police sergeant who he had worked with - and you need to hear this - and said to him, and by the way, there are no paedophile rings in these places they tell me. But you tell me what this is. He said, a friend of mine told me how to procure children. He said, what you do is you say to a six year old, a seven year old, a 12 year old, here, here's some cigarettes, here is some ganja, come with me. And they came with me, he said, and it worked. I tried it and it worked, so I did it. The depths of depravity, if you wish to look at them, are in these charge sheets. That's bad enough.

This week, or last week, I went back. Last week I went back because Magistrate, Dr Sue Gordon, who's heading up our work in the NT and is dealing with all the women's groups, she is a children's magistrate in Western Australia. She said to me, the problem with Kalumburu is that so many adults have just left their children behind. The adults have gone and left their children behind, just blown through. She said we can't actually find the parents to deal with these issues. This community needs some of your support. They need to know that you care, they need to know that even though we've got these criminals out of there, that we can do more.

So Professor Judy Atkinson, we organised for her to do some healing work up there over the next few years. I organised for the AFL, Australian Football League, to go up and to actually do work with the kids. But on Monday of last week, the one child protection officer discovered that the six and seven year olds in the community were running amok in a really unreasonable fashion. And it came to light on Monday of last week that eight six and seven year olds had been sexually penetrated by 11 to 15 year olds. They've been charged this week. What does that tell you about the society in that town, is that not only has it been passed from one generation to another, but it's been seen to be so normal that it is happening between children. Not just when they're becoming adults, but child to child.

This isn't a culture. This is not part of indigenous culture. This is not part of any sane culture. This is a culture that is being destroyed. And the people that stood outside there today were not prepared to come in here and hear this, because they're confronted by it. We should all be confronted by it.

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AUSTRALIA'S ADVERSE MEDICAL NEWS CONTINUES

Two articles below today



It's not only Britain that has poor public hospital hygeine

MORE than 7000 patients die and billions of dollars worth of health care is wasted every year in Australia because doctors and nurses do not wash their hands enough. And now they risk being sued for negligence for failing to prevent the spread of infectious disease.

The startling revelations have come from evidence and background documents given at public hearings last week of the Queensland Parliamentary select committee on health. Health Quality and Complaints Commission chief John Youngman said in evidence that half of all healthcare providers did not have appropriate hand hygiene processes in place. Surgery was a high-risk area in Queensland hospitals because of poor hand hygiene, he said. Dr Youngman said poor hand hygiene "is a major cause of healthcare-associated infection". He said research confirmed that "over half the adverse events that occurred were related to the operating theatre". Dr Youngman said the new health commission had published guidelines to fight infection outbreaks.

The report points to a lack of education, a lack of recognition and a lack of understanding of good hand hygiene. It said there was a lack of commitment and awareness at government level. The guidelines stress the need for hand washing with antiseptic rubs to reduce transmission of antimicrobial-resistant organisms such as methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or "golden staph".

It is estimated there are as many as 150,000 healthcare-associated infections in Australia a year. Yet compliance with hand washing guidelines "remains universally low", according to the report. "These infections can result in a prolonged hospital stay, culminating in significant financial and health outcome implications for both the patient and the hospital," the report says.

A companion report warned health professionals they risked claims for civil damages and criminal actions. "It is conceivable that medical administrators could be charged with offences if they were to permit the spread of infectious disease," the report warned. During the inquiry into the Bundaberg Hospital, whistleblower Toni Hoffman said infamous surgeon Jayant Patel did not wash his hands regularly.

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Archaic medical training needs drastic revision

The prospect of managing ageing populations, the cost of whizzbang medical technologies and a demanding public is an awesome task. Health is arguably the greatest non-security challenge that Western governments face. One key piece of the jigsaw is medical training, a fact acknowledged by the chairman of the State Government's ministerial taskforce to investigate emergency departments, Dr Rod Bishop, who partly blames the crisis on the staffing of departments by locum doctors. A locum doctor is a casual doctor who works for an hourly rate. More and more junior doctors are heading into such a lifestyle, attracted to its rates of pay and flexibility. By doing so they opt out of the long path to becoming a specialist.

Rather than blame junior doctors for wanting to have control of their lives, medical authorities and the Government should examine the real nature of the problem, part of which lies in the archaic conventions of medical training. Medical training is one of last bastions of the old world and requires a genuine shake-up. In the past 10 years almost every other sector has faced enormous pressures, resulting from the phenomenal pace of communications development, to perform their tasks faster, cheaper and better simultaneously. Failure to do so quickly resulted in extinction. Medical training is not such a sector. It is the East Germany of our society, waiting for its wall to fall.

It is only in the past year that doctors in training have had a say in the colleges that govern them, after strong recommendations from the Australian Medical Council, which accredits colleges. The length of training that graduates face borders on the farcical. If we assume that someone entering university never takes time off, something highly unlikely for this generation, he or she is unable to practise independently for, on average, about 13 years. In that time, their friends in other industries have often progressed to senior positions, established themselves financially or experimented with multiple careers. The present batch of young doctors is among the biggest relative losers in the globalisation and economic boom of the past decade, trapped in the public sector with limited mobility.

In NSW, the wages of training doctors have risen an average of 3 per cent a year since the mid-1990s, barely keeping abreast of inflation. Despite the great power of the profession, their union representation has been poor, relying locally on an ineffective Health Services Union, which represents everybody from hospital cleaners to paramedics.

While the work of any kind of doctor, especially those practising complex procedures, requires enormous technical expertise, there are few tasks in today's world that require a decade and half to practise independently. Fighter pilots are ready in a fraction of that time. Barristers complete an exam and are deemed ready to start. It is only in medicine that each new facet of knowledge is just placed on top of the pyramid of training, so that the pyramid gets higher and higher and is administered by colleges that are not subject to genuine scrutiny or competition. This is despite the fact that the ultimate tasks of modern specialists are exceedingly narrow and usually very repetitive. The modern specialist trains to be a fighter pilot, but spends most of his life riding a bike.

In my experience, the main gripe from colleagues is the sheer length of time it takes to come out the other side and the terrible working conditions along the way. They feel that training is a euphemism for serving as cheap labour in under-funded public hospitals, especially when they reach a senior level. Only federal MPs have a greater disconnect between their hyper-responsibility and monetary reward.

The problem is only likely to worsen, considering the number of medical students is set to nearly triple in the next decade, the likely oversupply giving them even less industrial clout. The governmental dream is a bottleneck where a host of highly qualified doctors are trapped at the point of becoming a specialist, effectively doing the same work but for a fraction of the pay. Some of the country's best and brightest young people are being short-changed by a system that does not value them and places undue demands on their lives. Unfortunately, the arrangement suits many in authority, both within the profession and in government.

It is high time that competition was introduced in this sector by allowing universities to run training programs alongside colleges. Senior trainees should have the capacity to claim Medicare rebates, perhaps at a reduced rate, considering they are often doing exactly the same work as a specialist. This will be a good start to producing a more motivated medical workforce, an absolute prerequisite for the world-class public health system we deserve.

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