This is the sort of thug that the Labor party intends to put in Federal Parliament



This is one of several who have now been unmasked. How many more of their numerous union candidates are this type?

A LABOR candidate has been forced to resign on the eve of Kevin Rudd's crucial televised election debate with Prime Minister John Howard. Labor campaign headquarters forced the candidate for the Queensland seat of Maranoa, Shane Guley, to quit after allegations he acted as a union thug, assaulting one of his managers and routinely intimidating co-workers. Mr Rudd has pledged to adopt a "zero-tolerance" policy towards "violence or thuggery in any workplace."

The resignation follows a concerted campaign by John Howard in which the Prime Minster has claimed Labor is controlled by the unions and that Mr Rudd will be powerless to stand up to them if he wins government. The claims have been backed by an advertising blitz pointing out that 70 per cent of the Opposition frontbench have union backgrounds.

Queensland State Secretary Milton Dick confirmed the resignation. Mr Guley's letter read: "Dear Milton, I write to tender my resignation as the endorsed Australian Labor Party candidate for Maranoa. I take this step in response to the re-surfacing of allegations made against me more than six years ago. These matters were dealt with by the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission, and my claim was upheld. However, I take this step today so that my candidacy does not distract in any way from the election of a federal Labor Government. Yours sincerely, Shane Guley". Mr Dick said in a statement: "Nominations for Maranoa will be re-opened on Monday and we expect to have a new candidate in the following days."

Mr Guley is a former AMWU delegate who held a number of union positions and worked for Queensland Rail at the Rockhampton Railway Workshops. It's now been revealed that, in 2001, he was sacked after years of persistent violent behaviour that included:

* Assaulting a manager in a pub in front of several work colleagues;

* Making a threatening phone call to the same manager, saying: "I will f****** get rid of you, you're No 1 on my hit list ..."

* Threatening to call in his political connections in the Queensland Labor government to get rid of people on his "hit list";

* Threatening and intimidating a work colleague who had made allegations against him of bullying and harassment;

* Intimidating investigators brought in to investigate employee complaints against him, and;

* Allegedly making vexatious and vindictive allegations against other employees in response to their legitimate complaints.

Following two Queensland Rail investigations confirming Mr Guley's repeated bullying and threatening behaviour, he made an unfair dismissal claim to the Queensland Industrial Relations Commission. The QIRC upheld his claim on a due process technicality but found he had engaged in repeated bullying and intimidation of co-workers. It refused his application for reinstatement on grounds that his conduct "was unacceptable and inappropriate behaviour to the extreme."

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Labor Party's committment to Kyoto would be costly

Labor's goal is to reduce Australia's CO2 emissions to 60 per cent of 2000 emissions by 2050. This sounds fine in the abstract - but what might it mean in reality? In 2000 Australia's total emissions were about 550 megatonnes in CO2-equivalent terms. So Labor's policy translates into a target of 330 megatonnes of emissions by 2050. In the absence of any policy interventions, business-as-usual greenhouse emissions are projected to grow strongly. Indeed, the Australian Greenhouse Office's best-case scenario projects that even with abatement measures in place, total emissions will be about 700 megatonnes by 2020 -- which is more than double Labor's 2050 target.

By 2050, Australia's emissions will probably exceed 1000 megatonnes. In other words, achieving Labor's target could easily be equivalent to eliminating more than 100 per cent of current activities that use fossil fuels. All of this in order to reduce global temperatures by exactly nothing.

The other part of Labor's climate change policy is to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. This is a strange objective, given Kyoto is basically dead in the water. The Kyoto Protocol limits emissions to percentage changes from a 1990 baseline. The biggest problem is not with the targets themselves, but the process by which emissions cuts are supposed to be achieved. The ratifying countries were forced to agree to their Kyoto targets without knowing what the costs of meeting those targets would be. This is like agreeing to spend the rest of your life with someone you have only just met during a one night stand. It is simply not a credible or sustainable commitment.

As a result, most Kyoto-ratifying countries have failed to significantly abate their greenhouse emissions and reach their targets. And why should they? There is nothing unreasonable about exceeding emissions targets by significant amounts when you are unsure of the costs of meeting those targets. Any other course of action would be sheer folly.

But Kyoto has very little to do with reasonableness. Just ask the New Zealanders. Our friends across the ditch signed up to Kyoto in December 2002, even though a 2001 National Interest Analysis on the case for ratifying the Kyoto Protocol could not decide whether moderate global warming would be detrimental or beneficial for New Zealanders. Helen Clark's Government ignored this information and committed her country to a program of reducing emissions over the 2008-12 period to 1990 levels or to take responsibility for the difference. In practice, that means hundreds of millions of Kiwi tax dollars will be paid to former Soviet Union countries, which have been lucky to accumulate carbon credits.

Actually, luck has had little to do with it. The surest way for a country to reduce greenhouse emissions and accumulate carbon credits is to implement policies which wreck the economy - something at which many former Soviet Union countries excel.

The New Zealand Treasury estimates New Zealand's Kyoto liability currently stands at NZ$708 million. This doesn't sound like very much, but this guess is more than double what it was two years ago. At that rate of increase, at the end of the first Kyoto commitment period in 2012, New Zealanders will owe about NZ$4.2 billion - or about NZ$1000 per person. So, in a nutshell, the main effect of Kyoto will be for New Zealand taxpayers to subsidise bad economic policies by politicians in the former Soviet Union. Does Kevin Rudd have similar plans for Australia?

On the one hand, ratifying Kyoto and committing to a process which has unknown costs seems to be a very strange policy, particularly for someone who constantly bombards us with claims that he is an economic conservative. On the other hand, history suggests Labor has a strong record of reducing greenhouse emissions. The only prime minister who has managed to do it was Paul Keating in the early 1990s, when he engineered "the recession we had to have" and our emissions levels plummeted. Perhaps this is exactly what Rudd has in mind.

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Bishop too fat for surgery

In general, discrimination on the basis of weight sounds to me no different from discrimination because of skin colour. But I have to agree with the doctors here. The vast weight of the man would undoubtedly be a factor in why his knee has collapsed and leaving the weight as is could well make a replacement knee largely futile

A BISHOP who has dedicated his life to the church has been refused surgery by a Victorian hospital because he is too fat. Bishop R.J. Gow of St Mary's House of Prayer, at Elaine, west of Ballarat, is in desperate need of a left knee replacement. "It's my praying knee," the good humoured priest said. "I'm having a lot of trouble walking and standing at the altar."

Three months ago the clergyman, 66, was referred to an orthopedic surgeon. "The surgeon said the waiting list at Ballarat Hospital for that surgery was two years, but he was now doing surgery at Bacchus Marsh hospital so to go there," Bishop Gow said. "I made an appointment, but within five minutes of them seeing me they said "unless you lose weight you won't be having surgery here". Bishop Gow, who stands six feet tall, weighed 147kg (330 lb.). Since that first appointment he lost 15kg in 11 weeks and is now 132kg. "They told me to lose 17 kilos before I came back," he said. "But when I came back they told me I'd have to lose another five before I see the anaesthetist on October 26. "The only way I can do that is to starve myself."

Bishop Gow said he was annoyed at the level of discrimination towards overweight people. "This is a hospital discriminating against people who are overweight," he said. "They're excluding people and I'm not the only one. I heard them saying to the person in front of me that they would also have to lose weight before an operation. "I questioned her about it and she said it was hospital policy. She showed me a copy of minutes of a meeting where it was stated they would only operate on patients who had a BMI (body mass index) of below 40. "This is discriminatory. Obesity is a disease caused by pyschological or physical factors - people don't get fat because they want to. "But what really annoyed me was I had a look around the hospital and there were empty beds. What's happening with our health care?"

Bishop Gow, who has spent more than 20 years working with the poor, sick and disadvantaged, said his knee was deteriorating and he was in a lot of pain. "But I haven't private health insurance and the operation would cost thousands of dollars," he said. Bacchus Marsh Hospital's Acting CEO David Grace said the hospital had a policy on surgery for the obese "for patient safety. We use an objective BMI assessment. "If someone is higher than the cut-off point of 40 they're considered a high anaesthetic risk and we wouldn't allow treatment." He would not comment on a specific case, but said he didn't consider the practice discriminatory. "It's about patient safety," he said.

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Australia's education wars

Education unions and left-wing education academics cling to proven failures in education theory, despite years of evidence demonstrating the errors of their thinking. They reject, for instance, the research-based evidence showing that "whole language" dominated reading programs do not work for a large proportion of children.

The power of sensible thinking by political leaders in holding off barbarian ideologues can be seen in the influence of the former NSW premier Bob Carr, who saved NSW from the worst educational excesses suffered elsewhere, particularly in Western Australia, where a decade-long experiment in outcomes-based education has just been abandoned.

But while governments control the purse strings they have little effect on deep-rooted cultural prejudices in organisations such as the ABC and teacher unions. In the battles for hearts and minds, they are outclassed by ideological guerillas, who can only be vanquished from within. At last, however, there are encouraging signs from teachers that the civil war may have begun.

Take the English Teachers Association, which claims to speak for all English teachers. Its most honoured operative is former president Wayne Sawyer, an associate professor at the University of Western Sydney, who has helped develop the NSW English curriculum and is editor of the journal English in Australia. It was his editorial that blamed the Howard Government's 2004 re-election on the failure of English teachers to properly educate their charges in critical theory.

And in the last edition of the International Journal of Progressive Education, Sawyer tackled the discredited "whole language" theory of teaching reading in an article entitled Whole language and moral panic in Australia. He claimed "moral panic" was behind a "media campaign . to demonise whole-language methods" of teaching reading, despite the fact the National Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy (which I served on) spent a year examining the worldwide evidence about the best way to teach children reading and came down on the side of systematic, direct instruction in phonics.

If you ever wondered how the teaching of reading could be politicised, the journal is instructive, having devoted its entire June edition to whole language, including "the multilayered dimensions of social justice activism involved in whole language teaching". The articles read like a long confession from the stubborn practitioners of a movement which has condemned so many underprivileged children to illiteracy, while professing to care about injustice.

In an article about teaching sixth graders in Grover Cleveland Middle School, New Jersey, the authors "search for ways to disrupt the pre-service [trainee] teachers' traditional notions of teaching, learning, and curriculum . We strive to help our pre-service teachers understand that their roles as teachers include a political dimension . "Too often," they complain, the teachers "fall back into the direct instruction model with which they feel comfortable."

Naughty teachers, trying to teach rather than indoctrinate their students. But Sawyer and his acolytes at the association have so provoked those they purport to represent they have sparked a grassroots protest movement of teachers across the country. In Western Australia, one group of teachers became so fed up at having to implement outcomes-based education, a favourite of the English Teachers Association, that they managed to have it overturned this year. Their lobby group PLATO, People Lobbying Against Teaching Outcomes, persuaded the West Australian Government to reinstate the traditional syllabus, concentrating on literacy and numeracy.

Now a group of secondary English teachers from Catholic, government and independent schools in Western Australia have formed the English Teachers Forum, the ETFWA, in direct opposition to the English Teachers Association, because they are "concerned about the misrepresentation of English teachers and their views regarding the implementation and the efficacy of the English Course of Study". In a letter to the association, the breakaway group wrote: "The ETAWA must realise that the collective voice of the majority of English teachers simply cannot be ignored any longer. It is not just a matter of numbers. It is also a matter of fairness." The English Teachers Forum has also managed to have Western Australia's year 11 and 12 curriculum reviewed by a "jury" of impartial classroom teachers, with the result the West Australian Government agreed to rewrite the courses by 2010.

In NSW, there is similar grassroots unhappiness with the English Teachers Association, judging by a letter I have received from an anonymous secondary English teacher of 30 years. "The problem in NSW English teaching is not the syllabus. It is the way the syllabus has been interpreted by the English Teachers Association of NSW and its transformation from a wonderfully principled, supportive professional association to a site of left-wing political activism and ideological posturing .. "My dismay comes from a jettisoning of our literary heritage for an obsession with critical literacy and an approach to English based on overt critical theory. "I look through my past issues of [the association's journal mETAphor] and ask myself what has happened to the aim of fostering a love of literature in our children? What has happened to the great works of literature?"

That journal is full of articles about postmodernism and such literary gems as: "Power Struggles in the Big Brother House" and "Earnestly Queer: Responding to Oscar Wilde's The Importance of being Earnest Through the Critical Lens of Queer Theory" by Mark Howie, the president of the English Teachers Association. It is no good for Australian students that a body promoting extremist ideology should have come to represent their English teachers. But it seems their teachers have finally had enough. Hoorah for them.

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