Another Leftist attack on school discipline

Teachers warned for 'shouting'

TEACHERS have launched legal action against the NSW Education Department after being put under scrutiny for shouting while trying to control students. NSW Education Department officials are investigating teachers for shouting at students to "put that down'', "leave him alone'', "sit down'' or "pick up those papers'' and demanding to know, "who told you that you could go there?''

The Sunday Telegraph has obtained letters sent from the department to teachers, asking them to explain their actions. One letter stated: "It is alleged that while you were employed as a teacher you engaged in unreasonable conduct towards students, contrary to the Code of Conduct 2004, in that on unspecified occasions in class you unnecessarily yelled at students''.

Teachers have launched legal action against the department, claiming the investigations are eroding their authority and affecting discipline. The situation has resulted in 750 school principals signing statements of concern. Teachers Federation deputy president Bob Lipscombe said the investigations were a consequence of a decision by the department in December last year to cut back on the number of investigators who hold teaching qualifications.

"A number of teachers have been investigated for yelling in the classroom,'' he said. "These sorts of investigations can undermine their capacity to maintain reasonable discipline in their classes and the prolonged investigations often cause significant harm to teachers' wellbeing.''

Independent Education Union secretary Dick Shearman said the problem was a result of over-zealousness, with some teachers being accused of abuse after raising their voice. "It's been a battle to distinguish between what might be normal discipline or genuine psychological abuse,'' he said. "In some schools, there's overzealousness of this approach. If someone raises their voice on one occasion, this can be interpreted as child abuse. "You can harm a child without physically harming them. "It's not the notion we have a problem with, it's the interpretation of it. "We're not criticising child-protection legislation.''

Despite the letters ordering teachers to explain why they yelled at students, the department denies it investigates them for shouting. "A teacher raising their voice at a student will not prompt an investigation by the department,'' a department spokesman said in a statement. "The Employee Performance and Conduct Unit investigates staff for serious misconduct and poor performance.'' Almost 1000 teachers and other staff are currently listed on the department's not-to-be-employed list.

Opposition education spokesman Andrew Stoner said teachers were left to deal with ill-behaved children who were not being disciplined at home. "I certainly got the cane at school a lot because I was a little bugger,'' he said. "I don't suggest we bring it back, but let's say discipline was a lot tougher in former years. "The Government has taken away a lot of teachers' powers to discipline children in the classroom. It's no wonder teachers sometimes end up yelling at unruly and difficult students.''

Sarah Redfern public school principal Cheryl McBride said the investigations had resulted in an erosion of discipline. "A normal disciplinary action to prevent dangerous or threatening behaviour is being interpreted as something that needs to be reported as a child-protection incident ... whereas that might be very appropriate discipline for the child,'' Ms McBride said."

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Celebrities unite to battle animal activists

SOME of Australia's biggest names have told an extreme US animal rights group to back off in its campaign to boycott a national icon. As People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) convinced another international retailer to boycott Australian wool that has been mulesed, leading fashion designer Alex Perry has thrown his weight behind the wool industry. "PETA needs to back off," Mr Perry said. "I understand where they are coming from, there needs to be alternative to mulesing, but give farmers a chance to develop it." Mulesing involves cutting the skin and wool from a sheep's backside to stop blowflies from laying eggs.

Mr Perry, along with rugby league star Nathan Hindmarsh, Myer, country music singers Gina Jeffreys, Shannon Noll and John Williamson want PETA to stop attacking wool farmers. Mr Perry, the judge of Australia's Next Top Model, said executives sitting in offices overseas like New York should not be making a decision to boycott goods without all the facts. He used Australian wool in his recent winter collection and vowed to continue to use it in the future. "Wool is a huge export and the rest of the world gets our best, but PETA goes to the extreme and it doesn't understand how it impacts on our industry," he said.

The industry - which last year exported 395,000 tonnes of wool valued at $2.09 billion - has agreed to phase out mulesing by 2010 and is already using alternatives like anaesthetic and plastic clips. But the group has not backed off.

Fifth-generation wool grower Jamie Swales, who runs 10,000 sheep near Armidale, said he was gradually phasing out mulesing. "We will try and gradually breed out wrinkly backsides by selecting sheep with less wrinkle, but it takes time, it doesn't happen overnight," he said. "Farmers don't mules sheep to be cruel, it's the better option available. Instead of crucifying us, (PETA) should be working with us to come up with alternatives."

PETA claims it has convinced 34 international companies with more than 3000 stores across the US and Europe to join its campaign. The latest is German-based companies, Adidas and Clemens and August, which have followed in the steps of Swedish-based AB Lindex, to black-ban Australian wool that has been mulesed.

AB Lindex spokeswoman Sara Carlsson confirmed PETA had been "steering" the company over animal rights issues. She could not explain what mulesing was or why it was done when The Daily Telegraph questioned her about the issue "I have never seen this. I can't explain it to you," she said. "We are a fashion company not an expert on how to treat animals. We want to shame Australia into seeing that mulesing ends, it's important to put pressure of Australian industry to look at other options."

Myer National Corporate Affairs Manager Mitch Catlin yesterday added: "Myer is throwing its support behind our Aussie farmers, given we are Australia's largest department store and the home of leading Aussie designers and fashion."

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More bureaucratic bullying of health workers

Must not blow the whistle on health propblems

A DISPUTE over a memo has cost Queensland taxpayers more than $120,000 in legal fees, and patients the services of a veteran therapist. Senior speech pathologist Quaneta Greenwood, was suspended, with pay, 13 months ago after she wrote a memo exposing a staffing problem that threatened federal funding for a state nursing home. Fraser Coast health district manager Kerry Winsor said the memo portrayed Queensland Health in a bad light, and she banned Ms Greenwood from seeing patients, gagged her from speaking to the media and accused her of misconduct.

As a result, taxpayers are stuck with a growing legal tab and are paying Ms Greenwood not to treat patients. Records show the bill for Queensland Health's lawyers, Minter Ellison, totalled $120,000 by September. Health Minister Stephen Robertson recently denied health workers were still being bullied by health bureaucrats. Yet Supreme Court documents filed by lawyers for Ms Greenwood include bullying and harassment among the claims. A Queensland Health spokeswoman said: "Since this is a matter between the employee and the department, it is inappropriate to comment while the process is ongoing."

The case hinges on a single-page memo, dated April 17, 2007, written by Ms Greenwood and a co-worker to five colleagues about speech pathology services to Yaralla Place nursing home. The memo said the district did not have enough staff to meet extra speech-therapy services requested by federal inspectors who found the home deficient. "To attend to these (referrals) we would be spending much of the day, every day at Yaralla Place, which is simply not possible," Ms Greenwood wrote. "Our department is not resourced to provide such services."

In a memo a month later, Ms Winsor accused Ms Greenwood of suspending nursing-home services without authorisation and demanded she turn in her work keys and stop treating patients. Ms Greenwood, who had spent 23 years treating cancer and stoke victims with speech and swallowing problems, was devastated by the accusations. In a court affidavit, she said she exposed the problems to help the health system and the public. "It is wrongly asserted I withdrew services. In fact I worked over the Easter holidays to provide patient services to those I had objectively assessed as needing a rapid response. I was simply doing my part to try and see to it that accreditation would go ahead. "The Aged Care Accreditation team were threatening sanctions if the dietetics and speech-therapy-patient backlog was not dealt with."

Barrister Stephen Keim, SC, is representing Ms Greenwood, who is seeking to have Ms Winsor stopped from taking further disciplinary action. Mr Keim argued that the bureaucrat could not be impartial in determining misconduct because she had shown bias against Ms Greenwood. But Justice John Byrne dismissed the application, which is being appealed at a further cost to taxpayers

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Man Drought

Australia's new government recently sparked a lively public debate when it signaled its intention to substantially increase immigration. The chatter has focused on what kind of immigrant Australia needs, and where they should come from. That all misses a vital point, though. What Australia needs now more than anything is a few (more) good men.

A shortage may seem improbable given Australia's unshakably masculine image. In the immortal words of our poet laureates, the pop band Men at Work: "Do you come from a land down under, where women glow and men plunder?" No one actually knows what that means, but it is suggestive that we have the whole gender thing worked out. Yet despite the image of Australia being entirely populated by males - square-jawed, bare-chested and draped in an Akubra hat - there is in fact a shortage of us blokes in the land down under.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the national gender ratio is 98 males to every 100 females. Compare to a global average of 102 males to every 100 females, and to countries like China, which has 107 males for every 100 females. Australia might not be the worst off in this regard; America's ratio is 97 males to every 100 females, and Estonia's is a distressing 85:100. But within Australia, the differences can be pronounced. Six out of Australia's eight states and territories have lower numbers of males than females.

One of Australia's leading demographers, Bernard Salt, has labeled the phenomenon a "man drought," and he argues it could have serious repercussions, especially since there are also pronounced swings in the gender ratios within age groups. While overall there are 27,000 more men in their 20s than there are women in the same age range, among 30-somethings women outnumber men by 15,000. Once you hit the 40s, women outnumber men by 23,000. And again, regional differences pop up. In parts of Sydney, there are only 85 men in the 25-to-35 age bracket for every 100 women in that category.

Where have all the men gone? Part of the disappearance is due to the risk-taking male psyche. Men are statistically more likely to engage in dangerous activities in their teens and 20s, too often with tragic results. But this is nothing new, and Mother Nature has compensated for it since time immemorial: At birth, males outnumber females by about 105 to 100. As for the rest, the Australian government estimates that there are about 900,000 Aussies living on a permanent or long-term basis in a foreign country. They're often drawn overseas by the lure of a better career. And a lot of these are men, relatively young, well educated and rich.

In the marriage accounting, this is taking a lot of good assets entirely off the balance sheet. Note that the man shortage becomes more pronounced just at the age when people tend to start thinking seriously about marriage and childrearing. But if you are a woman looking for a husband in this age group, chances are the only thing you are being squeezed by are the numbers. The shortage of men in this critical age group is thought to be contributing to Australia's low fertility rates. Although we have had a small increase in fertility recently, Australia is currently well below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman that is required just to replace herself and her partner. In 1961, Australian women were having an average of 3.55 children. Today it is 1.8 children.

Faced with similar fertility numbers, other governments around the world have resorted to dramatic measures. For example, Singapore has a government-run dating agency, the Social Development Unit, which encourages university graduates to meet each other with a view to marriage. Fortunately, Australia need not resort to such an extreme. We can import our way out of this dilemma and get the eligible men of the world to move to Australia. Migration is actually one of the few things that can fix this imbalance, short of stopping outward-bound Australian men at the border.

Clearly, we as a country need to be more focused on attracting men. Indeed, the government may already be doing so. Consider Australia's recent international tourism campaign that featured pictures of a bikini-clad woman posing the question: "So where the bloody hell are you?" The "you" clearly refers to men. It is worth repeating - where are you? The statisticians and the women do not know.

But if more guys come to our shores, can international men compete with that paragon of manliness, the Australian male? It will be tough, but I am optimistic (and more importantly I think Australian women will be too). Yes, we are the country that produced the likes of Hugh Jackman and Errol Flynn, but male migrants who might once have been intimidated by our raw masculinity can take comfort in our budding new-age sensitivities. In a survey released last month it was found that only 5% of Australian men regularly play a game of football, 50% do not lift the bonnet of their car and shed ownership has dropped by a staggering 27%. Moisturizer sales have gone through the roof.

The high-jump bar is high, but to the men of Japan, China, India, Korea, Thailand and beyond, the land of opportunity (and females) is here. Come for the beaches, but stay for the women. [The likelihood of an Anglo-Australian woman choosing an Asian male is very low. Caucasian men getting grabbed by Asian women is however quite common -- JR]

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