Australians unhappy?

I don't suppose many people take seriously reports such as the one below but in case they do, perhaps I should say that I don't believe the results at all. All the Australians I meet seem to be cheerful and friendly folk whereas the British are a chronically gloomy lot. Yet the survey below would have you believe the opposite. I suspect poor sampling. It was probably phone polling. With Australia's benign climate and strong outdoors orientation, maybe it was mainly gloomy losers who were at home to answer the phone in Australia. And maybe it was only rich and happy people who could afford a phone in Puerto Rico and Columbia

AUSTRALIA is 22nd in a survey of the world's happiest nations - one place below Britain and seven behind New Zealand. Denmark, with its strong welfare system and social equality, was the happiest country, University of Michigan researchers found.

Zimbabwe, torn by political and social strife, was the least happy, while the world's richest nation, the US, ranked 16th. Puerto Rico and Colombia came after Denmark, followed by Northern Ireland, Iceland and Switzerland.

Overall, the world was getting happier, the survey found. Increased happiness from 1981 to last year was detected in 45 of 52 countries analysed.

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Leftist puritans rife in the Australian government

From which circle of hell did all these finger-waggers spring? Never have I seen so many preachers so keen to bully others for their own "good". Last week it was Health Minister Nicola Roxon (again) in her Sass and Bide hairshirt, this time warning smokers they may soon need a permit to puff. A licence for cigarettes, Roxon says, is "one of the types of things" her health taskforce may tell her to impose.

Have these people gone mad? Strained a tolerance muscle in their Pilates class? For the first time I feel the temptation to light up a cancer-stick. Indeed, I couldn't think of many nobler causes for which to lay down my wheezing life.

A new breed of puritans is upon us and growing far too puffed up themselves. It's increasingly urgent they be resisted. Consider what plans they've already unveiled to cramp your life and set it to their stern order. Sprinklers on your garden? Banned now for years - to "save" country rivers from the new dams that these concrete greens find hideous, or would if they ever drove out to see one.

Mockery of someone's faith? Also banned, under hate-speech laws - to "save" the too-tender ears of tolerance tut-tutters too intolerant to show tolerance themselves.

Plastic bags to lug home your shopping? To be fined with a 25 cent levy - to "save" the planet from a plastic that smug green baggers find capitalistically crass.

Pre-mixed drinks? Hit with a new alcopop tax - to "save" teenagers from a drink that these pinot preachers find sick-makingly sweet.

Petrol? To be made dearer by an emissions trading scheme - to "save" the planet from a warming that these car-haters and salvation-seekers won't admit halted a decade ago.

Cramp, crimp, crush, ban. Designer sackcloth for everyone. Good heavens, so drunk on bans are these people - drunker than any alcopopper - that a forum of St Kilda residents last week even suggested locals be made to wear ankle bracelets so that visitors could be detected after dark and thrown out. Yes, true, I'm afraid. What next: microchip owners of airconditioners?

Judge the censorious mood from this homely planet-saving advice in last month' edition of the Rural Women's Network Newsletter: "At Easter, we avoid foil-wrapped chocolate eggs by having our kids paint hard-boiled eggs and stones . . . For my daughter's sixth birthday last year we took a tribe of children on a nearby bushwalk and had a rubbish-collecting competitions." Stones for Easter eggs? Rubbish collecting for a little girl's party? This isn't meant to save a planet but to impose someone's joy-killing morality.

It's not just a madness confined to Australia, of course. The Left in every English-speaking land is now indulging its inner totalitarian. How mad is the mood? Here's another measure: America's Democratic Party says its national convention to endorse Barack Obama as its presidential candidate must be the "greenest convention in the history of the planet". So it's not only banned fried food and insisted on organic, but ordered that every meal served to delegates be nutritiously vibrant, including "at least three of the following colours: red, green, yellow, blue-purple, and white". When strangers hover over your plate, demanding you eat not only your greens but your purples, yellows and whites, both of you have a problem.

Actually, everyone does. I mean, if that's the bossing that Democrats inflict on each other, what might they do to everyone else once in power? Good question, and in Australia we already have the scary answer to what our own elite would do to us.

Finger-waggers, as you know, are most commonly found among the "intelligentsia" - famous for producing mega-theories to excuse sticking its nose into other people's business. Think, say, of communism, fascism and now global warming. Ever since the French Revolution we've known that such people are best kept well away from power. But, alas, earlier this year 1000 of the "best and brightest" of this very class, plus a few token conservatives, were instead summoned by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to come to Canberra and tell him how to run the country.

I knew this would end in tears. Read these people's final report, released a month ago, and tremble. Or laugh. It's a Mein Kampf for meddlers - a defence of for-your-own-good bullying that is startling in its contempt for our right to decide for ourselves not just how to live, but even what to eat. What? People deciding for themselves? Buying their own stuff? "We don't realise how insidious this individualism is," chorused our "best and brightest". "Individuality trumps community at every turn" when we really "need to move from individualism to community focus".

Even what people eat should be seen as a decision best made not just by individual diners, but with "the emphasis on collective responsibility". Of course, some party pooper at Rudd's summit must have coughed nervously, because the report goes on: "A view was put forward that this type of approach to policy and program implementation would risk the notion of a 'nanny state' and overrestriction of behaviour . . ." But damn it: "It was felt . . . that health promotion must not succumb to these pressures."

Why not is not explained. It is enough that our "best and brightest" disapprove of what you do. So, having given themselves licence even to dash the chips from your mouth and the slurpee from your hand, off they go, thinking up fresh ways to bully you into living the life of their jackbooted dreams.

Here's just some of the bans and new by-laws their 2020 report urges on Rudd: "A junk-food tax"; "a 2.5 cent increased tax on each cigarette"; "abolishing cigarettes and alcohol brought into the country duty-free"; "more stairs in workplaces to encourage people to avoid using the escalators"; "price foods according to their carbon costs"; and "educating the 'white' population on indigenous culture".

Making people suffer is actually good: "Cities should become car-unfriendly." Making them go without is the whole idea: "Don't just buy green, buy less." And having to force them to obey is no problem: "We need . . . accountability mechanisms to reduce their consumption", plus "levers" such as "taxation, incentives (positive and negative) and regulation". You can hear them drooling over that, no?

Here are bullies who dream of interfering even with your right to buy musical instruments, demanding we "move from buying to hiring", and adding: "Examples are pianos . . ." Pianos, but not didgeridoos, of course.

It's hard to believe our allegedly finest minds could still think like this not two decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Somehow, these are people who must have read George Orwell's grim 1984 as not a warning but an inspiration. When Orwell wrote of his poor hero being forced "to join in compulsory exercises following the instructions given by a woman from the telescreen", our intelligentsia must have thought: "Great idea! Let's tell Rudd!" And, sure enough, the report recommends that "half an hour of physical activity (be) built into sedentary jobs". Oh, what a kick, to force millions to run on the spot.

Who unleashed these salon Stalinists? These health fascists? These warming commissars? Who let them loose to flog us sinners into living lives more holy, by their grim creed?

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No strings school funding 'a failure'

GIVING disadvantaged schools extra money without tying it to specific interventions fails to lift the performance of students from poorer backgrounds. A review of funding programs designed to overcome social disadvantage says current arrangements are failing to reduce or neutralise the effects of a child's background on their achievement at school.

The study by University of Melbourne researchers contains a lesson for the federal Government in pursuing its education revolution, and its commitment to fund schools according to the needs of their students. Education Minister Julia Gillard has proposed a new funding agreement with the states and territories to fund schools according to the socio-economic status of their students. The study underlines the importance of funding being tied to programs designed to tackle problems identified by the school. One of the review's authors, Stephen Lamb from the university's Centre for Post-compulsory Education and Lifelong Learning, said merely allocating resources to schools without a clear idea on how they would or should be spent, fails to improve student performance. "It's an ongoing problem around the world," he said. "It's no use just handing over money to schools; in fact, you could be putting out good money after bad. We need to work out what works and fund that."

The review was conducted into the equity programs run by the NSW Government that are intended to close the gap in achievement between students from low and high socioeconomic backgrounds. Among the programs reviewed was the general equity program, called the Priority Schools Funding Program, which targets 21per cent of the most socially disadvantaged students, giving extra resources to about 25per cent of the state's schools.

The PSFP received about $20 million of commonwealth funding in 2004, with the state Government providing an additional 280 teachers to those schools. The review also analysed a pilot program called the Priority Action Schools Program, which gave 74 disadvantaged schools between $100,000 and $400,000 each. The PSFP hands money to the schools to spend how they see fit, with all schools receiving the same amount regardless of the level of disadvantage. But schools received funding under the PASP only after identifying strategies to address specific problems in their schools, linking the money to programs that then had to be monitored and evaluated for their effectiveness.

Comparing the results in literacy and numeracy tests and the Year 10 School Certificate between disadvantaged schools on the different programs, the review found that non-PASP schools tended to experience falls in the mean levels of student achievement in literacy and numeracy tests. In contrast, PASP schools tended to experience gains, and in some cases the change in achievement was statistically significant.

The report says the main approach to addressing social inequality in public schools in NSW in the past is largely based on fiscal compensation. "The assumption is that money is necessary and sufficient to improve the quality of schooling in disadvantaged areas," it says. "This leads to a situation in which there is little accountability from schools, and little control over how schools use the funds and whether or not they are employed to develop programs that target the needs of the students."

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Overstretched doctors turning away 'chronic' patients

When there are heaps of people wanting to get into medical schools, a doctor shortage is just plain government negligence. Why is money being spent on useless "postmodern" courses when funds for medical education are so limited?

STATE capitals are feeling the brunt of the nation's doctor shortage, with GPs in these previously well-served areas shutting their doors to new patients due to overwhelming demand. In some cases, patients are having to travel 20-30km from their homes to find a doctor who can see them. Some GPs are using fees to dampen demand, charging as much as $100 for an in-surgery consultation after 6pm.

Although governments for years deemed the doctor shortage to be a largely rural phenomenon, an analysis of GP statistics shows doctor headcounts are falling hardest in metropolitan areas, which have so far been largely overlooked by medical recruitment incentive programs. Workforce data for Australia's 115 locally based divisions of general practice shows that in at least parts of all mainland state capitals, the number of GPs and the number of services they provide annually have both fallen between 1995-96 and 2005-06.

At the same time, there has in almost all cases been a huge jump in the proportion of GPs in each division aged over 55, raising the prospect that the doctor shortages in the affected areas will worsen when large numbers of GPs start to retire.

In the Central Sydney division, the GP headcount fell from 680 in 1995-96 to 590 nine years later, while the population grew. The number of services provided by GPs in those years also fell, from 2.7 million to 2.4 million. Similar patterns were seen in at least six other Sydney divisions, while headcounts in many rural NSW divisions rose. Headcount falls were also seen in the ACT, at least eight divisions in Melbourne, two in Brisbane, four in Adelaide and three in Perth.

The real impact on the workforce would be bigger, because the trend towards more women qualifying as doctors has led to a reduction in the overall numbers of hours worked, as women are more likely to work part-time.

Perth GP Tim Lipscombe closed his books to new patients seven months ago, as have about half the doctors in his nine-GP practice. "I wasn't able to service my own patients and I was being inundated by patients with relatively complex chronic diseases who were coming from other practices that had closed," Dr Lipscombe said. "There are a lot of doctors around here near retirement age, who I have heard on the grapevine will be retiring soon. I'm not sure what's going to happen - it's pretty scary."

A practice in Indooroopilly, Brisbane, said some patients came from as far away as Ipswich or after ringing "six other centres and are unable to get in". "I know a couple of practices whose standard consultation is about $65 - and certainly out of hours, anything after 6pm is a lot dearer, around $100," said the reception supervisor, who asked not to be named.

Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon said the shortage of GPs was "a real issue right around Australia". "This is an issue we're determined to tackle," she said. "The increasing number of doctors coming on-line over the next few years should make a difference, but we need to do more."

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