Plastic bag ban backfires

Bin liner sales in SA have doubled since free plastic shopping bags were banned more than two years ago. And most bin bags are made of thicker plastic than traditional bags, which means they take longer to break down in the environment.

Woolworths says SA sales of plastic kitchen-tidy bags of a similar size, capacity and shape to single-use plastic shopping bags, are now double the national average. At Coles, sales of kitchen tidy bags increased 40 per cent in the year following the ban in May 2009.

Bin bag manufacturer Glad reported a 52.5 per cent jump in kitchen-tidy bag sales in the first year of the ban, compared with a 5.5 per cent increase nationally.

In SA, 48 million Glad bin bags were bought in 2008, rising to more than 73 million in 2009 and 84 million last year.

The figures have raised concerns about whether the plastic bag ban has been effective in reducing waste sent to landfill. In 2009, South Australia led the nation with a ban on lightweight, checkout-style plastic bags.

The Northern Territory and ACT are now introducing their own bans.

Zero Waste SA chief executive Vaughan Levitzke claimed in January 2009 the ban would not lead to a significant rise in the number of bin bags bought. "Research shows purchase of bin liners will not increase significantly, compared with the reduction of plastic shopping bags," he said.

Yesterday, the government agency said it did not have any current information about sales of bin bags.

Opposition environment spokeswoman Michelle Lensink said the situation was "fairly predictable". "We said at the time that it was tokenistic, just about having a headline, being able to say we're the first to ban the bag in Australia," she told The Advertiser.

Supermarket chains now charge 15c at the checkout for thicker "reusable" bags that Ms Lensink suggests are going straight to landfill.

Samantha Lang, 20, from Craigmore, yesterday said the bag ban had not changed her behaviour. "We do buy bin bags because we need plastic bags to line bins," she said. "But we always forget our green bags so we're always stuck paying the plastic bag surcharge at the supermarket."

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Racket: Australian Federation of Islamic Councils siphons off money meant for Islamic Schools

THE nation's peak Muslim body is extracting millions of dollars in rent and fees from a successful Islamic school in Sydney that draws most of its funding from taxpayers.

Documents reveal the Malek Fahd Islamic School paid the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils $5.2 million last year alone, an amount equal to one-third of the school's educational funding from the federal and state governments.

An investigation by The Australian has uncovered millions of dollars in funds charged to the school, including unexplained "management fees".

The school has also been charged $2.59m in back rent after AFIC retrospectively altered a lease agreement in 2009. Last year, it paid $3.15m in "management fees" to AFIC, which included $2.2m in "management fees back charge".

AFIC, also known as Muslims Australia, has not explained how the fees are being spent by the organisation, despite detailed questions from The Australian.

Malek Fahd, in Greenacre in Sydney's west, received $15.7m in educational funding from the commonwealth and NSW governments last year, accounting for 74 per cent of its overall income.

According to the school's financial statement, it received a total of $19.6m in government funding last year, with the figure boosted by cash from the federal government's Building the Education Revolution program.

The school of about 2000 students is widely considered a success story for Islamic education in Australia, rating 15th in NSW HSC system ratings last year and in the top 10 in 2007.

The school is listed as independent and is a separate legal entity from its landowner and founder AFIC. Government funds are given directly to the school, not to AFIC.

Both are not-for-profit organisations, with the school entitled to a range of tax concessions as a charitable institution.

In 2008, a lease was signed between the school and AFIC that set annual rent for the Greenacre property at $1.3m, but documents reveal that in 2009 the lease was changed to increase the rent to $1.5m a year. The agreement was backdated to January 2004, resulting in a one-off payment of $2.59m going to AFIC.

According to the school's last financial report, another deal saw the school hand over a lump sum of $2.2m in backdated management fees to AFIC, with another $959,800 handed over for management costs in that year.

Neither the school nor AFIC can explain what the management fees are charged for.

AFIC president Ikebal Patel, who has held the role since 2007, is also the chairman of directors of the school. He was briefly removed from the position of AFIC president by the AFIC congress in 2008, but was reinstated after a complex federal court challenge to the legitimacy of the vote.

When asked by The Australian how he explained the fees being charged to the school and where and how AFIC was spending the funds, Mr Patel said: "The financial statement is out there. If you want to discuss anything else I'm happy, but I'm not going to discuss any of this."

Mr Patel has not replied to questions in writing about how the large fees were justified or where the money was being spent.

Mr Patel would also not answer questions as to how much he or other members of the AFIC executive were personally drawing in income or any other payment from AFIC funds.

Intaj Ali, the school's principal, told The Australian that "all questions about the school's finances should be directed to the school's director, Ikebal Patel".

However, it is understood that Dr Ali - a respected educator who has been principal since the school's inception in 1990 - is privately furious over the manner in which AFIC has been using the school's funds.

Senior figures at the school and in the Islamic community are angry the school is being denied its funds to reinvest into the school, which has large classes and generally caters to students of non-English speaking backgrounds and of lower socioeconomic groups. The school receives proportionately larger government funding for this reason.

The Greenacre school site was purchased by AFIC in 1989 for about $2.2m with funds from the Saudi royal family. The school, which charges fees of about $1200 a year, has been responsible for funding the construction of its own buildings.

Along with Mr Patel as chairman of directors of the Malek Fahd, the school's board also has several other AFIC executives. These include AFIC vice-president Hafez Kassem, treasurer Mohamed Masood and assistant AFIC treasurer Ashraf Usman Ali.

Neither the commonwealth nor the NSW education department has provided comment on the matter, but The Australian understands the school's funding issue has been brought to the attention of NSW Premier Barry O'Farrell's office.

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Nightmare as patient 'awake in surgery'

A WOMAN who was allegedly conscious during surgery - but could not tell anyone of the "incredible pain" she was feeling - is suing the anaesthetist involved in the operation.

Wendy Felgate, of Mission Beach, north Queensland, claims she was conscious but paralysed during laparoscopic surgery.

The Court of Appeal in Brisbane heard Ms Felgate, then 48, experienced a phenomenon known as "surgical awareness" during the 2008 surgery at Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital.

In her initial 2007 notice of a personal injury claim served on Dr Paul Tucker, Ms Felgate said: "I was not properly anaesthetised by Dr Tucker. I was only paralysed and was therefore conscious for the whole procedure."

She claimed she suffered acute pain and suffering, "torture", anxiety and later experienced flashbacks and nightmares.

Dr Michael Steyn, Director of Anaesthesia at RBWH, said in a court-filed report that an Australasian review of 8372 anaesthetic incidents found 81 cases of surgical awareness.

This month Ms Felgate unsuccessfully appealed against a judge's refusal to allow her access to a legally privileged statement about her anaesthesia, written by Dr Tucker to his lawyers.

In an August 12 judgment, Court of Appeal president Justice Margaret McMurdo said it was pertinent factual background that the day after the surgery Dr Tucker wrote in Ms Felgate's medical chart: "On two occasions the surgeon noted she coughed." Dr Tucker has denied liability in respect of the claim.

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Intolerant women and male/female sex differences

Bettina Arndt is a good-humoured Australian lady who has been a sex columnist and counselor for many years -- both before and after her own happy marriage. Her husband died of a heart attack aged only 37 in 1981. She later remarried. She has elsewhere dealt with the problems of women whose husband has lost interest in sex but below she deals with the opposite problem: Men whose wives have lost interest in sex.

Faced with the misery of a lifetime spent dealing with the frustrations of monogamous sex-starved marriage, most men don't leave. On my website forum, there's a letter titled "Do I stay or do I go" from a 40-year-old married man who's gone for years without any sex in his marriage. The letter has attracted hundreds of responses, many from men urging him to go. He left, for a while, but then came back and is struggling on, trying to make his marriage work. Like most men who write to me, he loves his wife and children and feels he has too much to lose if he leaves.

We hear constantly about men in trouble over sex. Men in trouble for not keeping their trousers zipped, for groping and harassing women, men caught out looking at pornography, or gazing at women in the wrong way. But what we never hear about is men's restraint, the remarkable stoicism of current generations of heterosexual men who cop it sweet, despite their immense frustrations.

Last year The Sunday Age published a sweetly amusing story about men's sexual fantasies, written by a man who describes himself as a "respectable, married" man who has spent the last few years taming what he calls his "inner goat". There's no place for hidden sexual yearnings in his proudly reconstructed world - he boasts he keeps his goat firmly locked inside a concrete pen, tethered to a post. Yet he ruefully acknowledges that sometimes it manages to escape and he finds himself mentally undressing a woman as she walks past.

The online responses to his article were intriguing - the men who applauded his courage and the women who condemned him for expressing such thoughts. "Men, you could put your minds to much better use than fantasising about women you are never going to get … There's something you can do: you can respect women and learn to control your pathetic, primitive minds. Meditation helps," wrote one smug woman.

A male responder hit the nail on the head, summing up what's happened here: "While the feminists and soft men like to kid themselves that they are changing our nature, all they've really done is teach men to keep their mouths shut, while our minds still explore exactly the same topics they always have."

There's an interesting book - The Testosterone Files - written by a feminist writer who had a sex change and became a male. The author, Max Wolf Valerio, describes being blown away by the urgency of his newly acquired sexual urges, his constant sexual fantasies - sex is now food, he says. He cringes when he sees female audiences on talk shows pursing their lips, shaking their heads at sheepish male guests who are supposed "porn addicts" or "womanisers". He's shocked by women's ready assumption of moral superiority.

"How to explain this to women?" Valerio ponders. "There is this thing about men that they cannot completely know. Few people want to believe that there could be a real chasm, a chemically induced difference of sexual drive between the sexes. Few want to believe that there might be any difference at all that is not socially constructed.

"Now that I am Max, I see that this rift, this fundamental chasm between men and women's perceptions and experience of sexuality, is one that may never be bridged.

"There certainly can be no hope for understanding as long as society pretends that men and women are really the same, that the culture of male sexuality is simply a conflation of misogyny and dysfunction. That the male libido is shaped and driven primarily by socialisation, that can be legislated or 'psychobabbled' out of existence."

The strong male libido remains, even if the inner goat now must remain firmly tethered. Men live with up to 20 times the testosterone of women and that makes it very tough to cope with decades of monogamous marriage, particularly when sex is offered very reluctantly - "like meaty bites to a dog", as one man put it.

Yet most men are doing a remarkable job remaining true to their women. For all the talk about unfaithful men, most married men succeed at monogamy most of the time. Just look at the statistics. The Sex in Australia survey of almost 20,000 people found just 5 per cent of partnered men had strayed in the previous year. Now admittedly, these tiny numbers can add up over a long marriage or relationship, but while there are men who are compulsive philanderers, this wasn't the case for most of the men taking part in my research who admitted to having had an affair.

The overwhelming majority wanted to be faithful and were succeeding, even though there may have been a lapse along the way - a one-night stand at a conference, a few weeks of illicit pleasure, or even an affair lasting months or perhaps a year or two. But nothing compared with the many years of restraint.

In one of Dan Savage's amusing Q&A sessions with college students now available on YouTube, he argues men should get credit for this. "If you are with a guy for 40 years and he cheats on you three or four times, he is GOOD at monogamy! Not BAD at monogamy. We think of monogamy the way we think of virginity - it exists until you f--- someone and then it's gone forever. We need to think of monogamy the way we think of sobriety - you can fall the f--- off the wagon and still get back up."

All the evidence suggests the urge is hardwired - yet most men find ways of ignoring that itch, or diverting it into harmless pursuits like looking at pornography.

Harmless pursuits? That's not, of course, how porn is presented. We are subject to an endless stream of people, mainly women, warning of the dangers of porn. Witness the recent visit to Australia of British sociologist Gail Dines, who appeared on television panels and at writers' festivals describing in the most salacious terms the horrors of gonzo porn - gagging women, women whose anuses "literally drop off their bodies because of anal prolapses". She claimed mainstream porn was invariably vile, body-punishing, brutal, dehumanising and debasing.

Yet the truth is when men sit in the wee hours staring at their flickering computer screens, the big attraction is willing women, eager women, easy women - easy to bed and easy to please. "Images of women hungry for sex with us, possessed by desire for us. Receptive women who greet our sexual desire not with fear or loathing but with appreciation, even gratitude," wrote David Steinberg in an essay relating sexual scarcity to the male attraction for porn.

A research study looking at porn usage in Australia, published in The Porn Report, found most (98 per cent) of the best-selling porn videos are pretty white-bread and free of violence - in fact, the most popular mainstream internet sites are now the DIY amateur sites where thoroughly ordinary couples bonk for their webcams. My research suggests men turn to porn for good reasons: as a harmless outlet for their sexual curiosity; to control a sexual drive causing conflict in their relationships; to relieve sexual boredom; and as relief from the tensions of trying to please women in real-life sex.

I recently received an email from a 60-year-old woman talking about her "fabulous, amazing, caring, awesome, loving" husband who keeps harassing her to get involved in threesomes and group sex. She's an intelligent, thoughtful woman who is perplexed about how to negotiate this difference in their attitudes. "There is, I believe, a big difference between 'just saying yes' within the confines of a marriage, and agreeing to sexual arrangements that simply fly in the face of everything that you believe that sex is about."

Her husband grew up in a very liberal sexual environment and had previously enjoyed open relationships. He's convinced his desire for sexual experimentation is perfectly natural, but it holds no attraction for her. After much persuasion, she participated in a threesome with a male friend yet the pressure continues, with her husband seeking further get-togethers with other males and even sending a photo of her (clothed) to a potential partner. Naturally she was upset by this, but rather than rant about his behaviour, she wrote seeking simply to illustrate the difficulties of negotiating this divide between men and women.

I suggested she post the letter on my website forum, to generate discussion on this difficult issue. It attracted an immediate response from an angry woman: "NOBODY, and I mean NOBODY (not even hubby) has the right to pressure you into doing anything that makes you feel uncomfortable. A person who does this is not respecting OR loving his/her partner," she wrote, tearing strips off the man for his unseemly behaviour. "If that was my husband, and he continued to harass me over this, it would be grounds for separation and divorce. Red flags going off all over the place for me," she added emphatically.

Naturally that served to shut off any real discussion. Few men would dare venture an opinion after such a tirade. That's what happens all the time. Whenever anyone, man or woman, talks openly about how to accommodate male sexual desire, angry women close down the conversation. It strikes me as odd.

Of course women have a right to say no to such activities but shouldn't men have freedom to ask? Is it so very different from other areas where women feel perfectly free to try to persuade men into life-changing decisions - like buying a bigger house (involving him in an extra decade or two of mortgage payments) or persuading a new husband, a remarried father, to have more children?

A few months ago, ANU women's studies students held a demonstration protesting about a talk I was giving at their university. They objected to me even raising questions about sexual obligation in marriage, suggesting such talk is dangerous for young women.

What nonsense. Closing down the debate on the vexed business of accommodating male and female sexual needs doesn't solve anything. This is mighty tough stuff but it's a conversation we must continue.

More HERE