Rudd's "Grocery watch" is a farce too

Joining "Fuel Watch" in absurdity. Typical of government services. And the Left want the government to control more and more of our lives??



It has 20 per cent of the grocery market share but you won't find independent grocery chain IGA on the Federal Government's new Grocery Choice website. The chain of independently owned grocery stores has 1300 outlets nationwide, and 60 "Supa Stores" - which compete directly with the grocery giants Coles, Woolworths and Aldi - in NSW. But they have been lumped in with "independents" on the ACCC's Grocery Choice website launched on Wednesday.

IGA said their Supa Stores price matched the cheapest price on offer by Coles, Aldi and Woolworths on the top 2000 grocery lines. The deluge of complaints since Grocery Choice was launched forced the Government last night to admit the online system was inadequate and needed to be refined. Consumer Affairs Minister Chris Bowen admitted the $13 million grocerychoice website failed to meet all shoppers' needs to save money on groceries.

A mini-shop by The Daily Telegraph of bananas, shaved honey leg ham and fresh chicken breasts in Doonside found that IGA was cheaper overall than Coles or Woolworths. A kilo of bananas, a kilo of fresh chicken breasts and a kilo of shaved honey leg ham came to $27.94 at IGA Supa Store Doonside; the same basket of goods cost $28.87 at Coles Doonside and $32.39 at Woolworths Marayong.

Budget-conscious mother of three Kylie Thompson said she travelled an extra 4km each week from her home in Blacktown past her local Coles and Woolworths to Doonside to shop at the IGA Supa Store there because it was "much cheaper". "We've shopped everywhere looking for the cheapest place to get our food and this is it," she said. "Even when they don't have specials on, it's heaps cheaper here."

Supa IGA chairman Michael Daly said the Grocery Choice website was a "complete waste" of taxpayers' money because it was too general. He was joined by Southern Sydney Retailers' Association president Craig Kelly, who said the website was "misleading" and called for it to be "abandoned immediately". "Every day it remains operational, the GroceryWatch website is only causing an embarrassment to the Government and making the ACCC a laughing stock, completely discredited in the eyes of the public."

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EDUCATION, EDUCATION

The Howard government made a big issue of declining educational standards but lost power before it could do much. Education problems remain, however, with the vested interests of Left-dominated government teachers entrenched against any reforms. Three recent articles below

Second-ranking government universities fear private competition

Lobby group Innovative Research Universities warns against allowing increased competition from private providers, and demands protection for existing public sector institutions in its in its submission to the Bradley higher education review. "We argue against applying a pure market model to universities - they are critically important to this country. We don't want to see the risk of market failure, as happened in the case of ABC childcare, effecting universities'' IRU executive director Lenore Cooper told HES.

IRU consists of six predominantly suburban and regional institutions, Flinders, Griffith, James Cook, La Trobe, Murdoch and Newcastle. Macquarie University vice chancellor and outspoken reform advocate Steven Schwartz took his institution out of IRU in June. IRU cautions against competition from private providers, arguing that further deregulation would "drive greater homogenisation" in higher education as all providers focused on low cost courses in high consumer demand and that student fees would rise.

Endorsing a 2006 Labor Party policy document the lobby argues that the "special role of public universities'' should be preserved and that "pure market-base forces are not the solution to current funding shortfalls''. "The opening up of Commonwealth supported places to private providers, which are driven by the need to maximise profits for owners and shareholders will inevitably result in those providers moving into the most profitable market niches,'' the submission states.

IRU also rejects further deregulation of student fees suggesting that study costs would either rise or if the market was price sensitive that "regional and outer metropolitan universities'' would lose income due to community pressure to offer a full range of courses at low fees. This would be "a recipe for lowered quality and financial decline''.

And the organisation also opposes research concentration, suggesting that it would be anti-competitive, and that its long term impact would be to "lock institutions into their existing profiles, stifle innovation in research and to deprive many Australian regions of the research support that is required to stimulate regional development''.

However the lobby also suggests that institutions undertaking insufficient research could lose their university status. "IRU's view is that a university must be able to demonstrate research strength in a number of areas. If an institution did not do enough research - it could elect not to be a university and thus not to compete for research funds. This would depend on how much research government specified was necessary for an institution to qualify as a university," Cooper said.

IRU proposes fine tuning the system to reduce the number of discipline clusters used by Canberra to allocate student funding and an end to what IRU says is the unfair subsidy of private providers which allows their students access to publicly supported loans while public universities are barred from offering full fee places to domestic undergraduates. The lobby also called for specific funding to increase university access for disadvantaged Australians in its submission. "There has been enormous change in the last decade and there will continue to be plenty of change but we don't want dramatic change,'' Cooper said.

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Call for standards in testing Year 12 of school

One of the nation's leading education researchers has called for national minimum standards in fundamental skills that all students must meet before qualifying for their Year 12 certificate. Australian Council for Educational Research chief executive Geoff Masters said Year 12 certificates should come with a guarantee that students had achieved minimum standards in some basic skills.

At an ACER research conference next week, Professor Masters will propose minimum levels be set for fundamental skills including reading, writing, numeracy, science, civics and citizenship, and information technology. "Most students can complete 13 years of school and be awarded a senior certificate without having to demonstrate minimally acceptable levels of proficiency across a range of fundamental areas," he said yesterday. "Some things are so fundamental we should expect all students to achieve at least a minimum standard by the time they leave school."

Professor Masters said the available evidence suggested that many students leave high school without possessing these fundamental skills. He said the results from international tests run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development showed that 13 per cent of Australian 15-year-olds perform at a minimum baseline, below which students are considered atrisk of not having the basic skills to work or participate in thecommunity. While there is no data on how many Year 12 students graduate without those basic skills, Professor Masters said there was no evidence suggesting that proportion would decrease between Year 9 and Year 12.

In fact, it was unlikely struggling students of that age had received the assistance they required to meet such benchmarks. Professor Masters said a national debate was required about the level at which the standards should be set and how the assessment should be conducted. He envisaged a system under which students could demonstrate they had reached the minimum standards earlier than Year 12 if they felt ready. The assessment could take the form of a national or state-based external exam or an online exam or use teachers' regular assessments where appropriate.

Professor Masters said the current certificates were based on assessing students' knowledge in subjects. "If someone is doing maths in Years 11 and 12, then you can be pretty confident they're going to pass a numeracy test," he said. "But not all students study maths or science, for example, in those years and there's no way of knowing what they understand."

Professor Masters said the standards should be set as part of a national consultation, but outline a minimum level of skill required in everyday life, such as reading and filling out job applications. The system should also report a range of proficiencies in the basic skills to give employers and others a sense of what students could achieve. "We should set the standard at the level we hope everyone should reach by the time they finish school," he said. "There's always a risk that standards are set too low and that the focus is then just on achieving low standards so there needs to be levels beyond a minimally acceptable standard."

Other skills that could be considered were employability skills nominated by employers, such as planning, organisation and teamwork. But Professor Masters said assessing these skills was more complicated than the straightforward tests used in literacy and numeracy.

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Postmodern path to student failure

POSTMODERNISM is hobbling Australia's best and brightest university students by locking them into narrow, prescriptive and politically correct ways of thinking and using language. The domination of postmodern theory, especially in humanities courses, is setting up a generation of students for educational failure, University of NSW professor Gavin Kitching argues in a book to be published this week. Based on an analysis of all honours dissertations written by politics students at the university over 23 years, Professor Kitching concludes that the students had abused their intelligence in writing their theses.

In the book, The Trouble With Theory, he says even the best students produce radically incoherent ideas and embrace the "extraordinary proposition" that language uses people rather than being a tool manipulated by people. Professor Kitching, who describes himself as being politically left-wing, said postmodernism had become identified with being left-wing.

"It's postmodernism as intellectual radicalism - if you're on the Left politically you have to believe in all of this," he said. "There are other traditions of being left-wing which respect the facts, which don't believe the world is simply what we believe it to be, that think if you're going to make political arguments, you have to have evidence to support them. I want to reinstate that kind of rigorous, realistic Left liberalism."

Professor Kitching, a professor of politics and fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, argues that postmodernism locks students into inflexible and emotionally manipulative definitions of words in a way that ignores the nuanced nature of language and often defies common sense. This means that terms like terrorist, asylum seeker and gay are used to create stereotypes and not simply to refer to a group of people or to challenge the stereotype. He argues that postmodernist theory does "active intellectual damage" to able students and clouds their thinking. "Postmodernism is addling the brain and wasting the time of some our brightest young people," he says.

In an interview with The Australian, Professor Kitching said the book was not a critique of postmodernism but looked at the educational cost of theory in teaching. "This book is about what a group of intelligent students think postmodernism is," he said. "You could say they don't have it right, they don't understand it, they haven't grasped it. But if this is what they think postmodernism is, if it has led them to argue in these ways, then it's educationally damaging irrespective of whether they have it right or not." Professor Kitching analysed theses that achieved a distinction or high distinction. While they were only those in the school of politics, he said his experience as an external examiner and discussions with colleagues showed the problems ran through history and sociology.

From his analysis of the theses, Professor Kitching said students were captive to a form of linguistic determinism that held that language forces people to think in certain ways. Students equate the way language is used with the meaning of words, so that the word "terrorist" always means a person using extreme violence for political ends, and anyone called a terrorist is actually a terrorist. But he said such thinking excluded sentences such as: "Calling these people terrorists distracts attention from the justice of their cause. "They have a very narrow idea of how we use words.

"(They believe) words have given meanings, and these meanings have certain biases or prejudices. If you use words, you have to accept the biases or prejudices - you're stuck with them. That you can use words ironically is not something they can take seriously. "Clearly that's not true. We use words to refer to things, but we can refer to them ironically, we can refer to them sarcastically, doubtingly, aggressively."

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Reversal of government baby policy coming?

Anybody who takes notice of government propaganda has only himself/herself to blame. Australians are a skeptical lot fortunately. At least the previous government put its money where its mouth was in its pro-baby propaganda. THAT had an effect

Forget those plans to have a third child for the country because further increases in the birth rate could harm the economy, the nation's productivity watchdog has warned. A major analysis of the nation's increasing fertility rate said it was at its highest level for 25 years - but the Productivity Commission yesterday warned further increases may aggravate rather than solve the problem of the ageing of the population. This is because it will shift women out of the workforce while they care for babies, depressing labour supply and reducing the taxation base as our population ages, the Daily Telegraph reported.

The small number of extra babies born would make little difference to the rate of population ageing, the commission said. And the women having the babies would be exacerbating the financial impacts on the government of the ageing of the population because the tax breaks offered to parents to have children occur up front, while the cost savings of a bigger working population and bigger tax base from extra children are deferred until they are of working age.

The commission's views were of particular interest as next month it is expected to hand down a much anticipated report into whether the nation should adopt a paid maternity leave scheme. It found the $5000 baby bonus, which is expected to be rolled into any new paid maternity leave scheme, had had only a partial role in lifting the fertility rate. The baby bonus represented only a 1 per cent reduction in the lifetime costs of a first child, which would cost its parents at least $385,000 over its lifetime. "Any significant fertility effect from the bonus would suggest the presence of short-sightedness by parents about the lifetime costs of raising children," the report said.

The commission said the Family Tax Benefit payments, averaging around $5000 per family per year, were more likely to have had a bigger impact on lifting the national fertility rate. These payments cut the cost of children by 8 per cent a year and the generosity of these benefits increased significantly after 2000. More than 285,000 births were registered last year, the highest level in 25 years. The commission said this was mainly a catch-up effect as women deferred childbirth to later in life. "Having reached older ages, they are now having these postponed babies," it said.

The fertility rate would be even higher but for the effects of high house prices and better educated women, the commission said. More highly educated women can earn good money if they work rather than stay at home to care for children and this had depressed the birth rate. The higher cost of housing meant it took longer to afford a house, which has delayed child-bearing.

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Qld. health boss caught misrepresenting hospital waiting lists

Nice to have such a bright spark running the public hospitals

HEALTH Minister Stephen Robertson has been caught massaging hospital waiting list figures as his department fails to treat the sickest patients in time. Mr Robertson bungled his attempt to laud the latest quarterly public hospital report card for elective surgery waiting lists as a significant achievement. The report showed Queensland Health treated a record 33,732 patients during the June quarter, up from 28,416 for the same period last year. However, the number of patients stuck waiting on lists grew from 34,454 to 34,703.

Having used the annual change to show the record numbers treated, Mr Robertson then moved the goal posts and used the quarterly change for category breakdowns. The number of category one patients not receiving surgery within 30 days had blown out by 35 per cent, from 188 to 254 patients, over the year.

Mr Robertson repeatedly claimed the list was decreasing but was eventually forced into an embarrassing backdown. "Oh, I beg your pardon. There has been a slight increase in cat ones," Mr Robertson said of the 35 per cent rise. "Yes, it has slightly gone up."

The report also showed the Princess Alexandra Hospital and Royal Children's Hospital as among the most under pressure with list backlogs. Opposition health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek said it was not good enough for the sickest patients to wait for more than two weeks longer than they should. "Queensland Health is continually failing to meet these (doctors') time recommendations for surgery," he said.

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