ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG comments on the push for a Republic now coming from both sides of politics





Economic madness about ethanol

The feedstock for producing ethanol is sugar and Queensland produces heaps of cheap cane-sugar. It also has a large reserve capacity to produce more of it. Using sorghum as a feedstock is much more costly. But Greenies don't care about what their obsessions cost other people, of course.

It would make a lot more sense to back Brazil-style integrated ethanol production at one of the now-closed sugar mills in North Queensland -- such as Goondi or South Johnstone. That process at present gives Brazil fuel that is cheaper than oil-based fuel. You've just got to crush sugarcane and sugar-laden juice flows out. And that juice can go straight into an ethanol distillery

ANALYSTS have warned that further food price rises are inevitable after the Queensland Government revealed almost half the ethanol to be blended in petrol used in motor vehicles in the state would come from grain. Queensland will become the national leader in biofuel use after the Bligh Government yesterday pledged to press ahead with plans to require petrol to contain 5 per cent ethanol by 2010.

The Weekend Australian reported that Premier Nathan Rees had ditched the commitment by NSW to introduce the nation's first mandated level of biodiesel and to boost the ethanol mandate from 2 to 10 per cent. NSW was the first state to introduce a biofuels mandate last October. Victoria and other states have gone cold on biofuels amid mounting evidence that taxpayer-subsidised mandates have contributed to growing world food shortages and rising prices. Up to 50,000 tonnes of grain a year are used for ethanol in NSW.

Queensland had indicated sugarcane waste would be used for ethanol production, but Regional Development Minister Desley Boyle told The Australian that 40 per cent of the ethanol needed for the 5 per cent mandate would come from grain. Most of the grain-based ethanol would be produced at Dalby Bio Refinery's new plant on the Darling Downs, which makes the biofuel from sorghum.

Ms Boyle said Queensland was not concerned by the about-face in NSW. "We will proceed with a 5 per cent mandate and that will be lifted to 10 per cent over time," she said. "A mandated level of ethanol is a good first step towards an alternative fuels industry." Ms Boyle said the use of sorghum for ethanol would have negligible impact on grain supply and prices. The sorghum would be livestock-feed grain standard. "This will have no effect on the food supply chain," she said.

Queensland would boost research to expand the use of algae, cellulose plant wastes and other environmentally friendly sources of biofuel production.

Biofuels analyst Geoff Ward, an agricultural scientist, said it was inevitable that the Dalby plant would reduce grain supplies and boost food costs. "It is nonsense to imply there is no effect on the food chain because it is cattle-feed grain," Mr Ward said. "Cattle-feed grain and food-quality grain are products from the same resource, produced from the same land and use the same inputs. Besides, feedlots use grain to produce a food - beef."

Meanwhile the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has rejected claims that service station operators were breaching the Trade Practices Act by misleading motorists about ethanol. The Australian Lot Feeders Association told the ACCC in a submission that motorists should be informed that ethanol-blended fuel should be sold for 4c a litre less than conventional petrol to compensate for its poor fuel economy. "Blended fuel is almost never priced less at this discount," said association president Jim Cudmore. However, the ACCC has told the association it was up to motorists to weigh the varying arguments about ethanol, including the possible benefits from its use such as improved urban air quality and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

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Shock! Horror! Politician speaks the truth!

It's only part of the truth but we have to be thankful for small mercies. The previously unmentionable fact is that blacks are, by and large, educationally hopeless. And Queensland has a lot of blacks. But that is not of course the whole story. The other half is that Left-run educational systems don't educate very well and there is a lot of "postmodernist" nonsense in Qld. schools

STATE Education Minister Rod Welford has blamed indigenous and remote area students for dragging down Queensland's academic performance. In comments to the Queensland Council of Parents and Citizens Associations' annual general meeting, Mr Welford said the state had been "weighed down" in the national literacy and numeracy tests for Year 3, 5, 7 and 9 students. Queensland finished second last among the eight states and territories, prompting calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the state education system.

Mr Welford yesterday said he was simply making the observation that "statistically there are groups that get lower scores", which affected average scores. "This isn't a reflection on any of those communities," he said. Mr Welford also acknowledged more had to be done to lift indigenous and remote area classroom standards.

However Mr Welford's remarks have sparked an angry backlash from Aboriginal education leaders, who say Education Queensland has badly failed disadvantaged children. "I find it offensive," Indigenous Education Leadership Institute executive director Dr Chris Sarra said. "I acknowledge the lag associated with indigenous performance (but) the system is failing indigenous kids quite dramatically."

Dr Sarra, leader of a successful national program to raise classroom performance through self-belief, said that accepting low standards and poor use of current resources were at the core of problems.

Indigenous scholarship program founder and Yalari chief executive Waverley Stanley said Mr Welford was trying hard but repeated failures called for a new approach. "It's about time we gave the education system a big kick up the bum," he said. "The definition of insanity is doing things over and over and not expecting the same result."

Academics such as Dr Peter Ridd, of Queensland's James Cook University, claim a wider overhaul of education in Queensland is needed. "There is clearly a problem ... you have to fix the syllabus," he said. Dr Ridd said the Queensland Studies Authority - the statutory body responsible for syllabuses and testing - was "woolly eyed" and corrupted by modern teaching philosophies inferior to traditional approaches in other states and countries that get results.

Opposition education spokesman John-Paul Langbroek, the MP for Surfers Paradise, said Mr Welford's remarks were a sign of failure. The Isolated Children's Parents Association of Australia has been campaigning for more teachers and teacher aides in remote area schools for 18 months.

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A bigger hospital is better?

Public hospitals are impersonal and bureaucratic enough as it is and a bigger hospital is going to be even more so. And the bigger the bureaucracy the more error-prone it is

A NEW children's super hospital in Brisbane would save lives, foster research and improve training opportunities, says a respected specialist. As a turf war intensified between doctors over the merger of the Royal Children's and Mater Children's hospitals, Melbourne intensive care specialist Frank Shann said having a single facility was overwhelmingly the best choice for patients.

Professor Shann, who has consulted on children's hospital care worldwide, said bigger institutions delivered better quality care and at lower cost. "Very large centres that do a lot of work have lower mortality rates," he said. "The more you do, the better at it you get." Professor Shann said the existing public children's hospitals were both too small to offer advanced intensive care training for doctors. "Queenslanders who want to train in intensive care of children have to train in other states," he said.

Although some doctors have warned of an exodus of specialists from Queensland if the merger goes ahead, Professor Shann predicted it would attract better qualified staff.

A group of University of Queensland researchers last week warned the pending closure of the Royal Children's Hospital at Herston, in Brisbane's inner north, would cripple research into a vast array of diseases. But Professor Shann said the existing children's hospitals generated far fewer research papers than stand alone facilities in other states. "There'll be a bigger group of people working together rather than having two small groups. You can bounce ideas off each other," he said. "If you have an interest in a particular group of patients ... you'll also double your exposure to those patients."

The Queensland Government has pledged to build a $100 million research facility close to the new hospital but has yet to secure funding. Acting Premier Paul Lucas yesterday accused critics of being afraid of change. "The Government is not doing this to annoy people. The Government is doing this for all the mums and dads out there who expect to have world's best practice in our children's hospital," he said. Mr Lucas defended the current plans, saying all the evidence and analysis showed the Government was on the right track.

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ABARE Chiefs Warn Australian Agriculture is Doomed Under Emissions Trading Scheme

The current and former heads of ABARE have joined the growing chorus of Agricultural Economist who are warning that the Emissions Trading Scheme will have dire consequences for Australia's trade exposed Agricultural industry. Dr Brian Fisher, former head of ABARE for 18 years has expressed grave fears for the future of Australian Agriculture under the proposed Emissions Trading Scheme.

"Introducing a scheme ahead of other nations was not prosecuting Australia's national interest, it was prosecuting somebody else's and we are going to be damned if we do. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by going first here. We are a very, very small country. We constitute about 1.3 odd per cent of emissions on the planet. The government should focus its domestic climate change policy on adaptation because it will be "years" before there is an international agreement on emissions trading between the 190 countries involved in the ongoing negotiations."

Dr Fisher's views reinforce what Agmates said in the article: "ETS in Aust & NZ will Zero impact on global emissions" In fact if you are one of the 1,000's of informed Agmates readers you will have know for at least 2 months that the ETS in its existing form is disastrous for Australian farmers. Rural Press finally 10 weeks later have picked up on that fact. On the 5th of July we wrote:.

"What the main stream media have missed in the flood of coverage is the potential devastation to rural Australia the emission trading scheme will be."

Dr Fisher's successor at ABARE Phillip Glyde, supports his views. He points out that regardless of whether or not agriculture was included in the ETS from 2010, the impacts on farming through the use of emission intensive inputs would be significant.

"In the cropping sector, 39 per cent of the input costs to cropping came from emission-intensive inputs, while in livestock those costs were about 17 per cent. There's only one solution to all of this, particularly while the rest of the world doesn't introduce an ETS or have emissions trading schemes excluding agriculture - it is to continue down the path of productivity improvements.

The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE), located in Canberra, is the Australian government's own economic research agency and is respected for its professional independent research and analysis. It is incredible that the chief architects of the Emissions Trading Scheme Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Agriculture Minister Tony Burke and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong are ignoring their own Economic experts advice.

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Global cooling hits Western Australia

PERTH today shivered awake to its coldest September morning on record. The overnight temperature fell to a chilly 1C just before 6am. The previous coldest September morning was 1.5C, which was recorded in 2005.

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