Forty of the 300 Nauru refugees who elected to resettle in America are pleading to come back because 'it's the land of the free but there are a lot of catches'

Making clear that they are economic migrants, not refugees

Nauru's President Baron Waqa told The Australian that life on Nauru is much cheaper, allowing refugees holidays to Fiji, healthcare, free housing and jobs.

He said it is not surprising some refugees have asked to come back. 'The US is a difficult place to live with a lot of competition when it comes to work,' he said. 'It is the land of the free but there are a lot of catches.'

Mr Waqa said he takes his role of caring for the refugees seriously claiming the government's mistreatment of the refugees is untrue, as they remain wary of the some refugees' political agendas on the island.

'We try and understand the situation because there are people that want to attack us because of our involvement in the process,' Mr Waqa told the publication.

Revealing his disdain at how the media perceives the treatment of refugees, Mr Waqa said he wants the media to report on the freedom the refugees have.

He revealed they move around the island freely, own businesses, and working for his government.

Refugee Mohammad Noor is using his skills he gained while studying and working in Afghanistan to work as a nurse at the $27million hospital that was built by Australia.

The 37-year-old hopes to one day be reunited with his wife and seven children and is given the option to bring them to Nauru. 

Slamming the Australian-based advocates, Mr Waqa said they have ignited false hope among refugees.

Nauru's police commissioner Corey Caleb concurred Mr Waqa's statement, saying the refugees and asylum seekers were given 'wrong advice' on how to gain attention in hopes of being removed from the island.

Mr Caleb said police officer presence increased from 110 to 130 due to the constant calls to authorities about problems between locals and refugees and asylum seekers.

He said it does not help their case, because police are not finding any evidence based on the allegations and the alleged victims refuse to make a statement.

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School cancels prize giving ceremony so students don't get upset when they're beaten by their friends

A school has cancelled prize giving ceremonies in a bid to move away from ranking systems so students don't get upset when they're beaten by their friends.

Silverdale Primary School, on Auckland's Hibiscus Coast in New Zealand, announced their plans to abolish award ceremonies in their October school newsletter.

Principal Cameron Lockie told the New Zealand Herald handing out awards at end of year ceremonies no longer aligned with the school's beliefs and values.

Mr Lockie said singling out students as 'special' made no sense - especially when the majority of kids are trying their hardest to be the best they can be.

'Try explaining to a child that has tried hard all year with their learning that they didn't get the Commitment to Learning award because someone else was trying harder, this is subjective,' he said.

The principal said schools are supposed to be about 'learning and creativity' to empower children, not 'ranking and sorting', which only rewards high achievers.

'If we continuously tell our children that every single one of them is important to our school, I do not see how end-of-year prizegiving aligns with this belief,' he said.

The decision to change the school's award ceremonies was met with mixed reviews from parents and generated 'a lot of talk' in the community. 

Silverdale resident Tracey Smith questioned the principal's decision, saying if we don't each kids to how to fail, they may struggle transitioning into high school.

But another resident, Theresa Yaroshevich, agreed with Mr Lockie, saying prizegiving ceremonies are outdated and awkward to sit through for those not being rewarded.

The principal explained his reasons for the changes in the October newsletter.

Mr Lockie wrote the changes wouldn't have an impact on certain reward systems, such as sporting activities, inter-school competitions and team awards.

He said prizes would continue for these events as they were 'competitive' and not 'subjective'.

If a student comes first in the cross country race, then obviously they've won and deserve first place and a reward, everyone understands that, he said.

The principal said the way to promote 'lifelong learners' is to provide them with an engaging curriculum in a 'safe, caring community in which to discover and create'.   

He said there is 'abundant research' that show awards can undermine a child's intrinsic motivation to to succeed.

'We are trying to get our children to succeed because they want to succeed and not because of a reward at the end which is subjective at best,' he said.  

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NSW One Nation leader Mark Latham has a plan to cut the state’s immigration by two-thirds

NSW’S immigration intake would be slashed by two-thirds to 35,000 a year with all newcomers subjected to “national­ interest” selection criteria to save Sydney “suffocating” from overpopulation and overdevelopment, One Nation NSW leader Mark Latham has said.

The Daily Telegraph can reveal the NSW policy platform of the new state leader of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, which targets population growth, planning and infrastructure as top issues impacting Sydney.

The eight-point plan includes a national interest measure­ for migrants and abolishing leading planning body the Greater Sydney Commission, headed by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s wife, Lucy.

“Let’s save Sydney from suffocating overpopulation and overdevelopment,” Mr Latham (pictured) told the Telegraph.

The policy document, titled Saving Sydney, would involve cutting immigration numbers by roughly two-thirds — nationally­ this would be from 190,000 to 70,000 and for NSW it would be from 100,000 to 35,000 — and scrap the “special refugee” program, which placed 6000 refugees into Fairfield in 2015.

It comes after Premier Gladys Berejiklian last month called for a “breather” on migration­ in NSW, saying the numbers needed to halve from last year’s intake of 100,000 net migrants.

LATHAM’S 8-POINT PLAN

1. Our immigration program must be framed in the interest of the people who live here now. This is especially true of policies impacting on an over-crowded, increasingly dysfunctional city like Sydney.

2. Permanent immigration numbers should be slashed, bringing them closer to their 20th Century average of 70,000 per annum (down from 190,000 currently). Temporary visas must also be cut back.

3. NSW should not take any more special refugee intakes, given the mismanagement of Syrian refugee settlement by the Baird Government.

4. Sydney’s planning laws must be overhauled to make the city more efficient and sustainable. An urban containment strategy is needed. For existing suburbs, One Nation supports development and density restrictions in under-serviced, over-crowded LGAs. The Government should publish a comprehensive report identifying these suburbs (most likely, most of the city).

5. The release of greenfields residential land also needs to be limited to prevent further urban sprawl. Priority should be given to the development of employment land in Sydney to reduce commuter-travelling times, especially in the city’s outer suburbs.

6. The Greater Sydney Commission should be disbanded (at an annual cost saving of $18 million) as it has become a mouthpiece for Big Australia immigration and unlimited population growth in Sydney. Political appointments and unrealistic planning strategies have dominated the Commission’s work.

7. The Greater Sydney Commission’s excessive housing and population growth targets should also be abandoned. NSW Planning should be given the task of containing the city’s growth to reasonable lifestyle, infrastructure and environmental limits. Local Councils, as the level of government closest to the people, also have a critical role to play in limiting densities and development in line with local infrastructure/service capacity. One Nation respects this vital local government urban planning role.

8. The State Government should scale back the responsibilities of the so-called Western Sydney Aerotropolis to focus on employment creation in the immediate vicinity of the new Badgerys Creek Airport, rather than land acquisition and development for residential purposes. In the fair treatment of existing property rights, affected landowners should be bought out at enhanced (rezoned) land values, rather than current unimproved rates.

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How would you close the gender pay gap?

Once again, we’ve been told women are being paid less than the “bloke sitting next to them” doing the same work. Sorry, but that’s just not true

In 1961, American historian Daniel J Boorstin coined the phrase “pseudo-events” to describe a growing trend in journalism and politics.

An actual event, the sort of thing that used to fill newspaper columns, may be a plane crash, a shooting or a fire. A pseudo-event, by contrast, is a staged event produced solely for the purpose of generating media coverage — think press conferences, pre-planned protests or the release of a research report.

Yesterday, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency released its annual gender equality scorecard, announcing the “gender pay gap” had fallen by 1.1 per cent but that men still earnt 21.3 per cent more than women on average. This was a pseudo-event about a pseudo-problem.

But every single media outlet (including news.com.au) dutifully reported on it as they do year after year. “Pay gap narrows as employers work towards equality,” one headline read. “Gender pay gap still depressingly wide,” another said.

One columnist argued the gender pay gap was a “crisis we can no longer ignore”. Another journalist wrote that the data showed women were being paid less than “the bloke sitting next to you”.

Except that is completely untrue. It points to the persistent myth that women are paid less than men “sitting next” to them for doing the same jobs.

The WGEA even admits this, noting that its data “does not reflect comparisons of women and men in the same roles — that is, like-for-like gaps”.

While there may be individual cases where women are found to be earning less than male colleagues for the same work, there is no widespread, systemic “gender pay gap” defined in this way — it’s illegal.

Equal pay for equal work has been law in Australia since 1969.

The headline gender pay gap compares average full-time weekly earnings for men and women across the entire population.

It doesn’t take into account industry, experience, education, hours worked, or any of the hundreds of other fairly relevant factors that determine how much people are paid.

In other words, it’s an entirely meaningless statistic.

Critics of the gender pay gap argument say it all comes down to choice — women choose to take time out of the workforce to raise a family, for example, or choose to work in nursing rather than finance.

The counterargument is that many of those “choices” aren’t really choices — not only is there a glass ceiling, there are “glass walls” preventing women from entering higher-paying, male-dominated industries.

According the WGEA, factors influencing the gender pay gap include “discrimination and bias in hiring and pay decisions” and “women’s disproportionate share of unpaid caring and domestic work”.

The left and the right have argued for years about not only whether the gender pay gap exists but even if it did, whether anything should be done about it.

The real question worth exploring is this — when groups like the WGEA talk about closing the gender pay gap, how are they proposing to do it?

It’s safe to say no one believes women should be discriminated against based on their sex when employers are negotiating individual contracts or considering candidates for senior management roles.

There’s also an obvious argument for employers to offer greater flexibility and support so women aren’t forced to choose between career and family.

But eliminating those kinds of biases would only account for a very small percentage of the observed difference in earnings between men and women across the entire population.

That is, CEOs and senior company executives make up a tiny sliver of the entire workforce, meaning even if there were 50-50 representation, the difference to the overall “gender pay gap” would be immeasurable.

The WGEA is very focused on the glass ceiling issue but conflates barriers to women in upper management with the broader pay gap — and they don’t appear to have actually answered how they propose addressing the remainder.

So taking the “closing the gender pay gap” argument to its logical conclusion, how could complete gender parity be achieved?

Should men be forced out of male-dominated industries and into female-dominated industries en masse, and vice versa, until the ratio is exactly 50-50?

Or should the federal government step in and mandate equal pay rates across industries, so that a school is forced to pay a female schoolteacher the same as bank pays a male stockbroker — and conversely, should a factory then be forced to pay a male worker the same as a female GP?

Within workplaces, should employers be required to pay female employees more than their male counterparts doing the same work, to make up for their shorter overall time in the workforce?

All of these utopian solutions would require some kind of drastic, Soviet-style state compulsion and a massive reduction in individual liberty.

The reality is there are innate differences in interests that are always going to result in uneven distribution of men and women across industries.

Often raised in this context is the “Nordic gender equality paradox” — the more “equal” the society, the greater the tendency of men and women to gravitate towards traditional gender roles.

As University of Michigan economics professor Mark J Perry writes, there will always be a gender earnings gap “unless and until there are equal numbers of each gender working in the same occupations, for the same number of hours and with the same years of continuous experience”.

“The only way to close that gap is to get to a point where men and women are completely interchangeable in their family and work roles, and getting to that outcome is probably impossible,” he said.

“And (it’s) an outcome that even women apparently don’t want, given their current demonstrated preferences for career options, work hours, commute times and family responsibilities.”

Or as former UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher put it in 1975, “We are all unequal. No one, thank heavens, is like anyone else. We believe that everyone has the right to be unequal but to us every human being is equally important.”

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 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here