Secretive government railway

There are clearly some big nasties being covered up. Don't travel on a NSW train. You too could be involved in another "Granville" disaster

The NSW Ombudsman has released a scathing report into RailCorp's refusal to release documents about rail safety and replacement of old carriages even though the Ombudsman says release of the documents is clearly in the public interest. RailCorp has blocked access to the documents for more than three years. The Ombudsman's report says RailCorp's behaviour "may be indicative of a broader systemic failure to properly determine freedom of information applications by journalists".

Even though the applications for documents were made in 2004 and 2005, and much of the information is now of historical interest only, RailCorp is still refusing to abide by the Ombudsman's recommendations and release the documents.

The report criticises RailCorp for the excessive delays and says the Minister for Transport, John Watkins, refused an invitation last year to speak with the Ombudsman about the report.

Both FoI requests were made by the Herald: one for documents involving the decision in 2004 to buy 498 new rail carriages and the other for technical reports about the risks of the Goulburn Street car park in the city and the Hurstville SupaCentre collapsing on train lines.

The Ombudsman spent two years negotiating with RailCorp and arguing there was nothing sensitive about many of the rail carriage documents RailCorp would not release. Although RailCorp eventually released some documents, it refused access to many others including such apparently innocuous ones as those dealing with "design of passenger windows on future rolling stock". The Ombudsman was bewildered: "We could not see any consistency as to why some documents were released but not others." ... "RailCorp has not provided any compelling reasons why such confidentiality should be maintained years after the documents came into existence."

The Ombudsman was equally critical of RailCorp's refusal to release to the Herald's former state political editor Anne Davies its risk assessments and other documents about what could happen if a train derailed and hit the piers supporting buildings constructed above train tracks.

RailCorp has argued commuters may lose confidence in CityRail if they knew of the risks, including the numbers who might die, and that CityRail would lose revenue as a result. Even though RailCorp has admitted to risks associated with some buildings above rail tracks, and announced steps to reduce risks of them collapsing, it still refuses to release the technical reports. It has also claimed that the reports might be of use to terrorists planning an attack.

The Ombudsman's report dismisses these arguments. "In our opinion it is very much in the public interest to know that obvious or known risks have been reduced and this interest is not outweighed by a mere theoretical possibility that this kind of information could somehow be used in an engineered attack." The Ombudsman makes four separate findings of "unreasonable" conduct by RailCorp and recommends RailCorp release further documents. RailCorp has already said it will not do so. A RailCorp spokeswoman said it was considering the Ombudsman's findings.

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Rudd says No to intellectual Left agenda

Kevin Rudd has assured mainstream Australia he will avoid radical social and cultural change by resisting calls to broaden his reform agenda and by sticking to his election promises. The Prime Minister warned that people had "elected the wrong guy" if they believed that once he was in power he would unveil a secret left-wing reform agenda or suddenly yield to pressure from sectional interests.

Calling for people to move beyond "the classical Right-Left divide", Mr Rudd said he had been upfront about his election promises and would focus on delivering them in full. "There's nothing terribly complicated about me," Mr Rudd said. "If you obtain the people's support, that's what you go ahead and do."

The Prime Minister made the comments in an interview with The Weekend Australian to mark Monday's passage of 100 days since he was elected. He also said he had no interest in debating whether the private sector should be contracted to deliver government services, and foreshadowed plans to engage the private sector in his fight to improve the lives of indigenous Australians.

He said that despite the threat to the economy of inflation, he would deliver his promised $31 billion tax-cut plan in full. And despite Opposition warnings of a possible wages breakout, he would also rewrite industrial relations laws as planned.

Mr Rudd will celebrate his 100-day landmark still riding a wave of public support for his formal apology to the indigenous Stolen Generations and his ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change. The latest Newspoll survey for The Australian, published last week, gave him a record preferred prime minister rating of 70 per cent.

In the lead-up to the election, the Coalition warned voters that Mr Rudd would be a captive of trade union leaders, state Labor governments and sectional interests, and that his pre-election claims of economic conservatism would quickly disappear after he was elected. The Prime Minister also faces a growing clamour from the Left for wider reform outside the promises he made in last year's election campaign. A collection of 20 essays written by academics and thinkers released last week and edited by Robert Manne calls for Mr Rudd to "resume the conversation between public intellectuals and government". The essays urge him to consider some politically risky moves such as scrapping 99-year leases on indigenous land, overhauling negative gearing, limiting first-home buyers' grants and introducing punitive laws on electricity generation and car emissions.

Yesterday Mr Rudd said he had no secret plans and gave short shrift to the wish list. "I think they might have elected the wrong guy," Mr Rudd said. The Prime Minister said he was not worried that his approach would alienate the left wing of the labour movement, stressing that politics had moved "beyond the classical Left-Right paradigm". "It just doesn't apply to the politics of the future," Mr Rudd said. "It's time to put some of these classical, and I think arcane, divides behind us."

Mr Rudd, whose wife, Therese Rein, built a successful job-placement company by delivering Job Network services for the previous Howard government, said the quality of government service was more important than the delivery mechanism. Citing the example of his election promise to lift indigenous life expectancy and literacy standards, Mr Rudd said: "It's not who provides services to indigenous communities, it's who most effectively provides those services to deliver what isthe agreed national set of policy outcomes. "That's where the real debate is. It's not in debates about public or private ownership or classical divides between Left and Right. The key thing here is to have a clearly defined set of objectives for the nation. Then the legitimate intellectual and policy debate for the country, given that we've been elected, is how we best reach those objectives."

The Prime Minister said the high point of his first 100 days was the fact that he could "look the Australian people in the eye" and declare he was keeping his election promises, such as the Kyoto ratification and the indigenous apology. "Why I say that is a high point is that the public have become exceptionally cynical about 'core promises and non-core promises'," he said, referring to his predecessor, John Howard. "I think we have to work incredibly hard, therefore, in order to maintain the public's trust in order to do the things you will need to do into the future."

The low point of his first three months had been the assassination attempt on East Timorese President Jose Ramos Horta - a close friend.

Mr Rudd said he was surprised by the strong national and international reaction to his apology to the Stolen Generations. But he would not be truly satisfied unless he followed the apology with real improvements in indigenous health and education standards. "I am also acutely conscious of the fact that to get effective local community buy-in, we're going to end up with hundreds of different solutions on the ground across the 400 remote Aboriginal communities across the country," he said. "But the ultimate policy effectiveness will be measured against the targets we've set."

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Police thugs in Victoria

The assault of an armed robbery suspect by three detectives, which was captured on secret video surveillance, had been a one-off incident totally out of character, their lawyer claimed yesterday. The footage recorded by corruption investigators was shown to the Melbourne Magistrates Court yesterday following guilty pleas to assault charges from Robert Dabb, Mark Butterfield and Matthew Franc. Defence barrister Paul Holdenson QC said the three had already paid a high price for the assault on May 10, 2006, losing the careers they "lived for and loved". He said both the prosecution and defence would be submitting that the three should not be sent to jail. The hearing was adjourned to March 12.

Mr Holdenson said the suspect was believed to have been responsible for two violent jewellery store robberies in which shots had been fired, and the detectives were eager to locate the gun so that 'it not be used again by someone else". He said Dabb, 36, had suffered depression since resigning and was living on a disability pension. Butterfield, 38, was working as a builder's labourer on a "substantial reduction in income" and Franc, 38, was driving a delivery truck.

Prosecutor Michael Tinney said the suspect was repeatedly assaulted after being arrested by detectives from the now disbanded Armed Offenders Squad. The assault was captured on a camera installed by the Office of Police Integrity, which was investigating complaints against the unit.

The hearing was told that Butterfield threw the suspect off his chair and then assaulted him. Later, after the suspect complained he had not been allowed to make a call, Dabb hit him over the head with a telephone and said "Here's ya f**king phone call", Mr Tinney said.

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Exodus from Australia's state schools

Note: The figures below cover primary and secondary schools combined. The flight to private schools is much greater at the High School level

The exodus from Australia's battling state schools has grown, with more parents sending their children to Catholic and independent schools. Official figures released yesterday showed 66.4% of the nation's 3.4 million full-time students were at government schools last year, falling from 66.8% a year earlier and 70% in 1997. In Victoria, which has the second highest proportion of students in non-government schools after the ACT, just over 35% of students, or 297,970, now go to non-government schools, compared to 262,948 a decade ago.

While the proportion of Australian students attending government schools fell, the state school student population rose 1.7% to 2,268,377 in the decade. But their growth was dwarfed by the performance of non-government schools, where enrolments rose almost 22%.

The figures are given in the Schools Australia report released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. The snapshot of the education system also showed that while there was a jump in teacher numbers over the past decade, much of the growth was in non-government schools, where the number of full-time teachers grew by almost 38% from 1997, compared with 10.5% in government schools. In Victoria, the number of teachers in non-government schools grew 33.1% in the decade to 2007, while the government school teacher population increased by just 14%....

The figures released yesterday reignited debate about the cause and effect of the drift to non-government schools as the Federal Government stood by the contentious funding model inherited from the former government. The funding formula, known as the SES model, measures a school's need according to the socioeconomic status of families who attend....

Nationally, retention rates of full-time students from year 7/8 to year 12 rose slightly, from 71.8% in 1997 to 74.3% last year. Federal Education Minister Julia Gillard said there was still a long way to go to get the retention rates to 85% by 2015 and 90% by 2020 - targets nominated by the Labor Government.

The annual Schools Australia report also showed [that] A greater proportion of teachers were female, with a 3.5% increase since 1997. Last year 68.7% were female compared to 65% a decade ago.

State opposition education minister Martin Dixon said what was of most concern was the numerical drop of students in Victorian state schools, from just over 536,000 in 2006 to 535,800 last year. "People are voting with their feet and going to what they think are better schools."

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