Prohibition for blacks?

Once condemned as "racist" by Leftists, it is a Leftist government that wants to bring alcohol prohibition back. Up until the 1970s it was a policy of long standing -- based on the readily observable difficulties that Australian Aborigines have with alcohol. But Leftists were wiser than all that of course. I myself believe that totally equal treatment of blacks and whites (including abandonment of all "affirmative action" programs) is the only way forward for blacks but it is amusing to see a clear example of how our "compassionate" Leftists really do not have a clue

PROMINENT indigenous leader Noel Pearson says Queensland's Alcohol Management Plans have failed because of poor management by the State Government. Mr Pearson has backed Premier Anna Bligh's call to consider prohibition after she this week acknowledged the AMPs had failed. Mr Pearson said "taking grog off the black fella" would make communities and leaders responsible for their own actions, with AMPs initially succeeding and then failing only because of poor management. The Government had failed to address demand reduction strategies like addict treatment centres and loopholes exploited by sly-groggers.

"The other part of the solution is Aboriginal people and leaders facing up to problems in the community and, to date, we have not done that," Mr Pearson said. "In Hope Vale, bootleggers have been using back roads to dodge police, and young ones have written F- - - Off on signs warning of alcohol restrictions. We can't have the law being mocked like that."

Mr Pearson did not see prohibition as an unfair law imposed by whites on blacks. "White fellas don't live with 800 relatives in the same township. Black fellas in these communities have got hundreds of relatives living around them, and when you add grog into a kinship system, it becomes a very ugly, dangerous thing."

But evidence detailed in Alcohol Management Review reports obtained by The Courier-Mail shows banning alcohol is unlikely to work, with drinkers prepared to go to extreme lengths to get their liquor of choice. One review states young men in five communities are endangering their lives by going on "grog runs" to Thursday Island and returning drunk at night in boats overloaded with liquor. On Mornington Island residents are brewing alcohol in unsanitised bins and charging up to $50 for a two-litre bottle. In Napranum residents are carting banned liquor across crocodile-infested areas.

The town is one of seven communities which connect an increase in petrol sniffing among children with introduced alcohol restrictions. A spokeswoman for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Partnerships Minister Lindy Nelson-Carr said the Government had taken many initiatives to bolster the effectiveness of AMPs in indigenous communities. She cited the introduction of a night patrol on Mornington Island. But a community spokesman said the patrol was infrequent.

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Incredible shrinking bureaucracies

It seems that it can happen

QUEENSLAND'S fire service has been put on notice, with a review of bureaucratic fat coming only days after the ambulance service was overhauled. In an attempt to ease union concerns about frontline firefighter shortages, Emergency Services Minister Neil Roberts has revealed he will investigate whether resources are being used appropriately across the other arm of his department. The move comes after similar concerns about QAS staffing allocations, including a recent safety audit finding fire crew numbers in one region dropping below the accepted "safe" ratio more than once a week.

Mr Roberts last night said he would not pre-empt the review by speculating on possible staffing changes similar to the QAS, where 100 office positions were axed this week to fund 100 new paramedics. While the ratio of QFRS frontline personnel to desk staff is more favourable than the top-heavy QAS, Mr Roberts is attempting to heed Premier Anna Bligh's mantra of finding problems before they get out of hand. "Like any emergency service, the QFRS must continue to focus on the front line," Mr Roberts told The Courier-Mail. "I want this review to also consider how the QFRS will respond to Queensland's continued growth, climate change, advances in firefighting and rescue technology."

The United Firefighters Union has welcomed the review, insisting unnecessary pressure on the frontline has been felt across the state for too long. "There has been a feeling for some time that the place may be overloaded with bureaucracy and we are always complaining about a shortage of staff on the frontline," UFU Queensland president Henry Lawrence said.

However, Opposition emergency services spokesman Ted Malone said the method of the review was flawed in a similar way to the QAS audit. The QFRS review will be conducted internally by director-general Jim McGowan and Fire Commissioner Lee Johnson with no involvement from those who audited the QAS. "This is long overdue . . . but my concerns are they just reviewing themselves," Mr Malone said. Like the QAS, the QFRS was allocated a record budget this financial year with a $36 million increase to $360.1 million.

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Rudd takes control to new highs

SOME of Australia's major institutions will have their media releases vetted by the Rudd Government to make sure they reflect Labor's "key messages". A directive was issued this week by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research to about a dozen statutory agencies. Recipients include the CSIRO, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, the Australian Research Council, the Co-operative Research Centres and Invest Australia. Even the Questacon science museum in Canberra was sent the directive.

It says the Prime Minister's office has instructed that "all strategic media releases which relate to the Government's key messages" must be forwarded to the department which will then submit them to the office of the minister, Kim Carr. If necessary, Senator Carr would send the release to the Prime Minister's office. The department would contact the agency "regarding required changes". The directive says releases "of a more pedestrian nature" need not be vetted but anything to do with climate change, industrial relations policy, education and science reform, tax policy, national security and health must be submitted. It has caused concerns within the statutory authorities which were never subject to such conditions under the Howard government.

One former Liberal minister called the Rudd Government "control freaks". "The CSIRO sent out a lot of things that were quite contrary to our position on climate change. We just gritted our teeth and wore it," he said.

A Government spokesman said vetting the releases was a temporary measure until ministerial staff were in place. The secretary of the department, Mark Paterson, said there was nothing unusual about the directive, especially in the early days of a new government. Only 30 per cent of the public service had experienced a change of government and a number of agencies had sought "guidance on how to deal with media release issues", he said. Mr Paterson said statutory authorities should not be immune. "There's a mindset with some that statutory authorities are independent for all purposes. They're not," he said. "They are created to undertake a particular task. That doesn't give them free range or nor should it."

Meanwhile, the head of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Peter Hendy, will resign and become the chief of staff to the Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson. Mr Hendy helped draft the first round of industrial relations changes in 1996 when he worked for the then minister, Peter Reith. He was also implicated in the children overboard scandal. While at the chamber he led the business advertising campaign attacking unions and supporting Work Choices.

Relations between Labor and the chamber reached such a low that Kevin Rudd called Mr Hendy a Liberal Party operative. On taking office, Labor sent several veiled messages to the chamber. In the first weeks , Julia Gillard and Wayne Swan gave speeches to the chamber's rival, the non-partisan Australian Industry Group. Dr Nelson has agreed to abandon Work Choices but has hinted he will not let Labor abolish Australian Workplace Agreements.

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National literacy exams planned for all schools

If Rudd doesn't overturn them. But Leftist State governments have agreed to it all so the only immediate peril is dumbing the whole thing down

SPELLING, grammar and punctuation will be assessed nationally for the first time next year with the introduction of uniform tests for students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. The national literacy and numeracy tests, to be held over three days in May, will include an extra test on language conventions in the literacy assessment, in addition to reading and writing. The language conventions test will comprise about 50 questions, half on spelling, half on grammar and punctuation.

Sample tests show that Year 3 students will be asked to correct misspelt words in sentences such as "we jumpt on the trampoline", choose the correct tense of a verb to insert in a sentence and show where quotation marks or capital letters should go. By Year 9, students will be asked to correct misspellings such as "apreciate" and "seperate", place apostrophes and identify whether "a" in the sentence "a product" is a noun, definite article or indefinite article.

The national testing regime includes separate tests on reading, writing and numeracy, with students in years 7 and 9 to sit two for maths, one using calculators and one without. In reading, students will be given several passages of writing of different styles, varying in number from six for Year 3 students to eight in Year 9, and asked to answer mostly multiple choice questions. The writing task next year is to compose a narrative, with students in all years given the same brief. The sample question is based on discovery, and gives students half a dozen sentences about people discovering new ideas, objects or secrets, from which they are expected to write astory. Previously, states and territories set literacy and numeracy tests in years 3, 5 and 7. Results were manipulated to compare students in different jurisdictions against national benchmarks.

Under pressure from the Howard government, the states and territories agreed to replace their tests with common literacy and numeracy tests and include Year 9 students in the assessment. University of Western Australia professor Bill Louden, who has written reports on literacy education, said constructing a separate test for spelling and grammar was a better way of assessing students' skills than marking it as a part of a writing assignment. Professor Louden, head of the graduate school of education at UWA, said parents, teachers and employers tended to regard students' spelling and grammar as markers of their quality. "Students may not be aware people draw all sorts of inferences from the general ability to spell and construct grammatical sentences, so tests are important to draw students' attention to that," he said.

Australian Education Union acting federal president Angelo Gavrielatos had concerns that a national testing regime was being introduced before the development of a national curriculum. "We appear to be going at this the wrong way; we're talking about reporting first then assessment before we've had a conclusive discussion about curriculum," he said. "Curriculum must be centre stage."

Terry Aulich, executive officer of the Australian Council of State School Organisations representing government school parents, said the tests should be trialled on adults as well as on the students to ensure they were an accurate reflection of ability. Mr Aulich expressed concern about the sophisticated language skills required in the sample tests, with the use of words such as "dugong" and "habitat" in the Year 3 reading test, which he said were not part of the average eight-year-old's vocabulary

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