Only the best will do for Greenies

A government department advocating environmentally-friendly practices used $18,000 worth of paper shipped from Italy to print a report. The highly-awaited draft report of climate change economist Ross Garnaut snubbed Australian-made paper in favour of a better-quality Italian brand.

The printing costs of the report, released in July, left taxpayers with a bill of $70,000 for the 600 copies, a Question on Notice asked by Liberal Party Tasmania Senator Eric Abetz revealed. However, when asked how many "carbon miles" were used to bring the paper into Australia, Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said it had not been calculated or offset.

She said her department picked up the tab for printing the report and 9Lives80 paper was used because all "virgin pulp used in manufacture is derived from well-managed forests and manufactured by certified mills". "There were two Australian-made options which were assessed by the printer as being of lower quality," she said.

Senator Wong said Professor Garnaut's travel and accommodation expenses paid by the department had reached $14,000 at August 13. She said the department had also provided him with $200,000 in staffing resources. "The department pays 35 per cent of Professor Garnaut's total mobile phone bill," she said. "As at August 13, $1539.45 has been paid by the Department of Climate Change. "Professor Garnaut has not been provided with a Commonwealth vehicle nor has he chosen to claim his vehicle allowance."

The revelations came as new information revealed that millions of dollars were spent on wages for media management and public affairs by the Environment, Water, Heritage and Arts Department and its agencies. A Question on Notice by the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, Nick Minchin of the Liberal Party, revealed that about 64 staff have been employed to disseminate the Government's spin. Wages for the staff have reached about $4.5 million a year.

The department, headed by Environment Minister Peter Garrett, directly employed 28 people who were "responsible for communicating and raising awareness of Australian Government policies and programs". The other staff were shared between nine government agencies.

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Elitist advertisements for Australia will appeal to few

It's no-spin name spells it out: Tourism Australia is meant to sell Australia to tourists. Lots of them. But now check Tourism Australia's new Come Walkabout ads: it's decided instead to sell spiritual therapy to urban salvation-seekers. These two commercials, released this week and destined for screening in 22 countries, are invitations to a church, not a holiday. And to a very exclusive, family-unfriendly church, with not even the hint this time of Lara Bingle's famous bouncing breasts.

Sigh. Loosen up, guys. Once again, the taxpayer-funded Tourism Australia has fallen to the modern temptation to preach, rather than please. Forgetting its last disaster, it's spending $40 million to advertise not Australia, but its own chic, green-tinged sensibilities. What's most remarkable is not that director Baz Luhrmann's new ads are the first for Tourism Australia that spend more time on New York and Shanghai than on the country they're actually meant to be selling. It's that the only glimpses shown of Australia are of the very bits few foreign tourists bother to visit.

Forget Sydney, with its bridge or Opera House. The Gold Coast, with its hotels. The Reef, with its resorts. Melbourne, with its MCG. Ha! That's just where the crude crowds in their novelty T-shirts flock by the planeload. This time we're flogging places where few tourist buses go and no trains reach - outback places where jaded urbanites fancy they can commune with the Nature gods of tribal peoples, far from modern man and his buildings.

Luhrmann actually opens one of his two commercials in rainy New York, showing us a chic professional woman, perched over a late-night laptop, and losing it with the stress. Her partner is whingeing to her on the phone: "It's always work. You're not the same person I fell in love with." A hundred years ago, a woman in such existential despair may have consulted a priest. Thirty years ago, she'd go for a shrink. And 10 years ago, she'd go to a life-skills workshop by some guru she saw on Oprah. But this is 2008, and salvation comes instead from a little Aboriginal boy, near naked, whose mere presence turns off televisions, computers and all the electronic machines of busy-busy. He pours sparkling red dust in her hand and whispers: "Sometimes we have to get lost to find ourselves, sometimes we have to go walkabout." How wonderfully mystic! And just how I plan my own holidays, consulting not a travel brochure but a fistful of dirt.

Only then does Luhrmann shift the scene to Australia, with Professional Woman and Whinger plunging into what may look like the pure waters of Katherine Gorge, but is actually Nature's own baptismal font. You see, these urban spiritualists have just been reborn. Professional Woman emerges glowing newly, and the captions proclaim: "She arrived as Ms K. Mathieson, Executive VP of Sales. She departed as Kate." As Luhrmann, director of Moulin Rouge, explains: "The land itself, the place itself, transforms her character." Mine, too, as you can tell.

Lurhmann's Shanghai ad tells of the same awakening. This time it's a stressed, emotionally dead Chinese finance manager who gets dust dropped into his hand, leading him to dance at dusk on a dining table set on a patch of our vast Outback. How marvellously that will play to the kind of privileged professionals who salve their monied conscience by buying Wilderness Society calendars for their en suite and carrying their French brie home in green bags.

But I'm looking at these ads as an ever-eager tourist and wondering, what would my kids be doing while I bathed in spirituality? Where would we shop afterwards? Where would we stay? How much time and money would it take to actually get to these distant places? And what would we do the next day? Oops. Did I just break wind in church? But you see, there's a reason why just 150 foreign tourists a day visit Katherine Gorge, many of them backpackers with skinny wallets not worth fighting over. And there's a reason you'll find tens of thousands at places where there's plenty to see, lots to do and enough Australians around to make them feel welcome. Like reef cruises. Wildlife parks. Big cities. Stuff for the kids.

Most tourists are, after all, more pragmatic than religious, and want to fill their too-few days of vacation with fun and value, rather than ommmms and clapping sticks, with a long and dusty trek afterwards to the airport. I'd have thought Tourism Australia knew that already, given the history of its own ad campaigns.

Paul Hogan's "shrimp on the barbie" ads, after all, remain the most famous and loved, remembered even today by many who saw them 20 years ago. How irresistible was his Australia - of beaches, bikinis, barbecues and an Opera House on the sun-lit harbour. It was an Australia populated by charming people who said "g'day" in charming accents, and not at all like Luhrmann's - at its best without a local to be seen or endured. It worked, of course. Tourism to Australia doubled in the five years Hogan's ads played.

But such happy populism has always had its critics in our creative class. The artist-feeding Australia Council, for instance, said the Hogan ads made it "cringe", and Tourism Australia must have grown equally sensitive because in 2004 it decided to give us more tone. You won't remember most of the ads it shot in that $120 million "See Australia" campaign because half were so bad they were scrapped before they were even released.

One showed Aboriginal artist Barbara Weir, sitting in red dirt in faded clothes, quoting DH Lawrence in her local language and painting dots. Another had poet Les Murray reciting lines from his work: "Shorts in that plain like are an angelic nudity. Spirituality with pockets!" And a third had a Brett Whiteley seascape come to animated life, to the gasps of Michael Parkinson. They may have catered only to our pretentions, but the Australia Council hailed them as "sophisticated, subtle and sexy". Yes, as travel ads they worked. Trouble was, those who saw them wanted to travel fast to any place but where they were, or were watching.

Chastened, Tourism Australia flicked the switch back to more traditional fare of kangaroos on golf courses and Bingle on the beach wondering: "Where the bloody hell are you?" - perky stuff that saw traffic to its website leap 30 per cent in a year.

But the arts lovers have waited for their chance to seize back Tourism Australia, which seems the last battlefield of the culture wars. And now they have it. The Bingle ads were a bungle, declares new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd - "a rolled gold disaster" - overlooking the fact that any dip in tourism had more to do with our dollar having gone up a third in value, pricing us out of many budgets.

So now we have Luhrmann, selling his Church of New Age Australia. What was Tourism Australia thinking? Well, maybe it figured it could double the impact of its tight budget by commissioning ads that tie in closely to Lurhmann's outback epic, Australia, out in cinemas next month. I guess it's banking on the film being a look-at-us smash, even though it stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman.

But I suspect from the launch ads that Luhrmann may have also given in to the fashionable urge to improve us locals, rather than lure in strangers. In introducing the star of his ads, 12-year-old Brandon Walters, also in Australia, he made a boast that showed his heart of Reconciliation gold: "Our next leading man is about four foot high, (with) long, sort of gold hair, and is an Aboriginal boy." A sweet and noble art-house conceit. But rather unlikely, to be bluntly pragmatic. Which is a lot like the vision sold by Tourism Australia's ads, really, and the hopes that rest on them.

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A disastrously mismanaged NSW ambulance service

After a decade of wall-to-wall inquiries, the NSW Ambulance Service still fails its noble undertaking on care, at least to its own workers. As health mottos go, the NSW Ambulance Service's Excellence in Care is an efficient mantra. But once the service had loftier ambitions. "Together," said its old motto, "we will be the world leader in ambulance services, providing a shield of protection to our community." Now its ability to deliver excellence and protection has been questioned. How can it deliver to the community, when it cannot guarantee a protective work culture for its employees?

The ambulance service has been the subject of 11 inquiries since 2001; the latest, expected to hand down its findings on Monday, has been inundated with hundreds of disturbing stories of abuse, bullying and harassment. Barely 24 hours before the NSW upper house inquiry began in July, a Premier's Department review of the service concluded serious operational and workforce issues were harming the welfare of ambulance officers.

In opening the upper house inquiry, the chairwoman Robyn Parker said it was called in response to concerns "raised by ambulance officers and the community with members of Parliament and in the public domain regarding, in particular, bullying, harassment, intimidation and occupational health and safety issues". Parker said this week that a decade of ignoring the issue had to stop. "I guess what I really feel personally now is that I see an ambulance officer and I want to go up and hug them . We call triple-0 and we expect them to turn up and we don't expect that they're not treated well. "The community holds them in such high regard yet the services and the structure and the government is not matching that with the resources they need to do the job. The ambulance service has got to breaking point."

The inquiry heard tales of officers unable to endure the lengthy complaints management system - criticised by the Health Services Union as being so aggressive it was a form of bullying in itself - who gave up and went on stress leave.Others obtained apprehended violence orders against officers; some committed suicide. For too many officers, management's repeated failure to even address their problems exacerbated their pain.

The service has responded. A harassment taskforce was set up last year, and a healthy workforce summit was held last May. Still, ambulance service research shows 75 per cent of the 3105 paramedics are unhappy and the rate of sick leave outstrips the average for other health department employees, including nurses.

Officers have inquiry fatigue and say significant cultural change in dealing with bullying and harassment will not occur without an overhaul of the executive. They are also critical of the union for apparent inaction. They hold out some hope this inquiry will be different, given its independence from ministers and ambulance bureaucrats, but acknowledge implementation of recommendations depends on government.

Carlo Caponecchia, a University of NSW psychologist, told the inquiry that bullying and harassment were unsurprising, given the stress in ambulance officers' jobs. "Things like fatigue, rostering, being stationed in the country without ever knowing when you are going to leave, lack of career progression - all these kinds of things . need to be dealt with." Caponecchia said there was no evidence to suggest bullying and harassment in the ambulance service was worse than elsewhere. But workers' health and wellbeing were affected, regardless of the individual's personality.

The director-general of NSW Health, Professor Debora Picone, told the inquiry the ambulance service tended to operate on an old-fashioned "command and control type structure from the military" that was at the root of some of its bullying and harassment problems. Picone believes that bullying and harassment are "in pockets rather than widespread". Bullying and harassment are compounded by workplace and operational problems. Officers complained of the difficulty of getting holidays or transfers approved, of the lack of counselling after traumatic events, and how overtime was essential to a satisfactory wage, yet it caused fatigue.

Face-to-face counselling was used 544 times in the past 12 months, but Picone told the inquiry post-traumatic support was employed only once. This raises questions about the adequacy of "debriefing" services, particularly as international research shows stress is one factor increasing the likelihood of workplace bullying.

The ambulance service's chief executive, Greg Rochford, concedes that officers have traditionally been promoted to management without being trained in people skills or conflict resolution. And Picone says it is planned to have all 400 operational managers trained in complaints handling by the end of the year.

But Dennis Ravlich, a Health Services Union official, was scathing at the inquiry about the service's inability to turn things around. "The Premier's Department review and a number of reviews that we have participated in over the previous eight or nine years consistently identify issues that the service needs to do better. Yet no one is accountable, 10 or eight years later." He said that in investigating complaints or disciplinary matters the service's professional standards and conduct unit "has almost institutionalised a rather aggressive approach to staff - indeed, almost to the point of being harassing in itself", and that reports on bullying allegations "drop into a big black abyss".

Parker told the Herald on Thursday: "This has gone for so long, and the chief executive officer [Greg Rochford] and the Government has been clearly aware of this issue for more than 10 years now, and a broom needs to be swept through the service, starting at the top. "Ambulance officers painted a bleak picture of their workplace. It was just so dysfunctional, the morale so low. There was so much unresolved conflict and time and time again we heard about this nepotistic old boys' club; it just has to change."

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Labor Party punished in NSW, ACT elections

It might be noted that the Labor party also lost control of Western Australia recently. The widespread losses should keep Kevvy from getting too cocky

NEW South Wales Labor's worst by-election fears have been realised, with massive swings against the state government in three Sydney seats yesterday including a rout by the Liberal Party in the seat of Ryde. Labor is set to suffer swings of at least 20 per cent against it in Ryde and Cabramatta and a double-digit swing in Lakemba.

Liberal candidate Victor Dominello has claimed victory in Ryde, previously held by former deputy premier John Watkins by a 10 per cent margin. It was the first time the north-western Sydney seat has been won on the primary vote. While in Cabramatta the count will go to preferences, the predicted 22 per cent swing to Liberal candidate Dai Le will not be enough for her to wrest the seat from Labor's Nick Lalich. Former minister Reba Meagher held the seat for the ALP with a 29 per cent margin.

Labor's Rob Furolo has retained former premier Morris Iemma's vacated seat of Lakemba. But Liberal Michael Hawatt has eroded the 34 per cent margin previously held by Labor and ended its time as the ALP's safest seat in the state. The Greens also enjoyed success in Lakemba, more than tripling their primary vote from the 2007 state election.

Premier Nathan Rees had expected his government would receive a "kick in the pants'' for its poor performance in the 18 months since the 2007 election. A spokesman for the premier tonight said that was exactly what the government had received. "The voters in these three electorates have sent a very strong message and we have heard their message loud and clear,'' he said. "The people of NSW expect big changes and we now begin the task of rebuilding the credibility in this government brick by brick and delivering the services that they expect.''

Opposition Leader Barry O'Farrell said the strong showing from the Liberal Party in all three by-elections showed that people want change in NSW. "It's a verdict on the future and it demonstrated that people have voted to start the change - change to open, honest and accountable government,'' Mr O'Farrell said. "One that finally focuses on people's needs, not on the needs of politicians.''

The Liberal's coalition partners, the Nationals, appear to have failed in their bid to reclaim their once-safe seat of Port Macquarie on the mid-north coast. The seat was vacated by former National-turned-independent MP Rob Oakeshott when he made a successful transition to federal parliament. Mr Oakeshott's former staffer Peter Besseling looks set to keep the seat in the hands of the independents, fending off the Nationals' Leslie Williams. With seven independents on the card, the seat will be decided on preferences.

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