Another "heatwave" in Australia

The BoM are always trying to pretend that global warming is here.  They are not brazen enough these days to say exactly that but constant talk of heatwaves creates that impression. The weather they refer to is in fact fairly normal -- as they admit further down in the story.

A Brisbane summer extends into March and a normal mid-afternoon summer temperature in Brisbane is 34C.  At mid-afternoon on Monday 11th  the temperature was 32C.  The BoM forecast was 36C.  So the "heatwave" impression is entirely false



Look at the graphic they supply as part of their report.  With all the red ink it looks rather terrifying but all it shows is a normal weather pattern.  Western Australia and Western Queensland (the purple bits) are always extraordinarily hot. The graph is a good example of how you can be truthful but deceptive


Parts of the east coast are set to swelter through extreme temperatures this week due to a post-summer heatwave.

The mercury will hit 36C in Brisbane's CBD on Monday and 39C in the western suburb of Ipswich - around 10C above average for this time of year.

The March record stands at 37.9C degrees for Brisbane and 38C for Ipswich.

The forecast has prompted the Bureau of Meteorology to issue a severe heatwave warning for south Queensland.

Meanwhile, Sydney will reach 28C on Monday and top 34 degrees on Tuesday - before three days of showers bringing 10mm of rain.

Perth will also be hot, reaching 30C on Monday, the same temperature as Canberra.

The south coast will be cooler, with Melbourne and Adelaide peaking at 23C while Hobart will reach 22C.   

Brisbane will on Tuesday cool down slightly but still reach 33C and temperatures will remain in the 30s until at least next Saturday.

Further west, the Darling Downs and Lockyer Valley regions will swelter through the high 30s.

'A trough off the south-eastern Queensland coast has been quite persistent in its location, so the northerly winds will bring warm air to the region over the next few days,' Bureau of Meteorology forecaster Michael Gray told Daily Mail Australia.

Mr Gray said the warm weather isn't unusual for this time of the year in south-east Queensland. 'It's only been a few weeks since summer has ended,' he told Daily Mail Australia.

'Stay inside  in the air conditioning, keep water bottles full and don't go outside in the hottest part of the day between 10am and 3pm,' he said.

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Covert brainwashing of our kids is taking its toll

What are our kids actually being taught? It’s almost impossible to know because students won’t usually tell and their teachers will normally reveal only what they think we want to hear.

If the stats are to be believed, Australia is falling down the international league tables of school performance, despite ever higher levels of government funding. And while a couple of our universities figure in the top 50 rankings, there seem to be more and more students doing variants of lifestyle studies and fewer and fewer doing the hard disciplines.

The book "Reclaiming Education: Renewing Schools and Universities in Contemporary Western Culture" doesn’t exactly contain scarifying tales from the chalkface because its contributors’ concerns are about other teachers’ classrooms, as their own would be models of old-fashioned academic rigour. But while what really takes place across the nation’s schoolrooms and lecture theatres will remain largely hidden (at least until all classes and lectures are freely posted on the web), the authors draw back enough of the curtain to justify real concern about ideological force-feeding at every level.

All credit to editors Catherine Runcie and David Brooks for assembling a range of high-quality contributors and contributions. It’s a timely volume because, if education is tending to degenerate into postmodernist brainwashing, as these authors largely suggest, it’s our material wellbeing that’s at risk, as well as our cultural and spiritual wellbeing.

In their own way, all these contributors testify to the long march of the Left through the institutions, a kind of soft Marxist version of the old Jesuit maxim: “Give me the child for the first seven years and I’ll give you the man.” Our youngsters may well be emerging from educational institutions confident, articulate and affirmed in themselves (unless, of course, they betray signs of “toxic masculinity”), but what have they actually learned except that the traditional belief systems of the West should no longer be taken seriously?

You wonder why the traditional notion of marriage received so little public support in the 2017 vote; why hitherto taken-for-granted understandings of gender have suddenly become so fluid; and why even the hallowed idea of free speech now has to accommodate all sorts of politically correct “safe spaces”. This book helps you to understand. It’s because our kids are being deprogrammed by the teachers and by the curriculums that are supposed to impart the best that’s been thought and said.

All of these essays are challenging, and some are gems. One of the best is by David Daintree, who until 2012 was president of Campion College. “Far too many children,” he says, “leave school never having learned to read, write and think straight, before going on to university to become criminologists, sports psychologists — or teachers! The introduction of continuous assessment from the 70s onwards to take the stress out of exams and, as student numbers soared, to make it easier for the less intelligent to get degrees (that of course was never admitted to be the reason) has contributed greatly to the gravity of the situation. Education can now be chopped up into even smaller units or modules for ease of digestion and subsequent oblivion.” As Daintree points out, until a couple of centuries ago, knowledge needed to be collected. Due to the explosion of publishing, it now needs to be culled, so the challenge is knowing what to keep. His plea is for the continued general study of the works that have shaped the Western mind.

Another fine contribution is from Karl Schmude, the former long-serving librarian at the University of New England. Schmude points out the importance of a common educational tradition as the foundation for the moral and intellectual values that are required for a culture to endure. Like Daintree, he’s scathing of the modern tendency to premature specialisation, which not only produces narrow and unimaginative “experts” but makes any general public conversation hard to maintain.

“The concentration on vocational knowledge,” he says, “does not fully equip students for the experience of life. It does not supply a cultural breadth and depth, nor does it nurture the intellectual flexibility needed in the workplace and beyond, in the way that an educational grounding in the liberal arts can do. A professional degree has no time or capacity to deal with the ultimate realities that affect human beings — love and beauty, adventure, struggle, suffering and death — which inspire or haunt their lives. It focuses on the ‘how’ questions … rather than the ‘why’ questions”, which, of course, are the ones that matter most. “The person who knows ‘how’,” he points out, “will always have a job (but) the person who knows ‘why’ will always be his boss”.

Another contributor, David Furse-Roberts (disclosure: he’s helping to edit a collection of my speeches), cites Sir Robert Menzies’ affirmation that “history and literature must enter into any education; for they are the chief record of man and his ways”. Sir Winston Churchill, likewise, thought that a knowledge of history was essential because “in history lie all the secrets of statecraft”. Yet the study of literature has all too often become the treatment of “identity”; while history is invariably episodic rather than narrative and similarly suffused with identity studies.

What can be done? Politicians don’t get to appoint university and school heads, let alone academics and teachers, or to set curriculums. Our education system is more a reflection of our society than a product of political decision making. All that elected leaders can do is speak up for common sense at every opportunity and be ready for the inevitable push-back from the academic establishments that have let it go.

Recently, some Liberal students asked me what might they do to armour themselves against their left-wing lecturers. My response: familiarise yourselves with the bigger story of which we Australians are but part. And a good place to begin is to read and regularly re-read the New Testament (it’s our core document) and to read cover to cover Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples,because you can’t understand us without knowing that.

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The #MeToo movement’s demand for instant belief is a threat to the ideals of justice

One of they key slogans of the #MeToo movement has been ‘believe women’. It is a challenge to the traditional ideals of justice. It effectively says, ‘You must believe all allegations, even those that are untested and unproven’. The dangers of this mantra were highlighted during a recent court case in Canberra.

In 2014, a former prison guard found himself the target of a false rape allegation. Sarah-Jane Parkinson had been in a relationship with the man she accused of rape for two years. She was engaged to him. She then broke it off and proceeded to stage a violent rape scene, fabricating evidence and accusing her former fiancé of raping her in her home.

The accused was arrested. He spent four months on remand at Goulburn Correctional Centre, a maximum-security prison. He lost his job, his financial security and his reputation. As a former prison officer he was at daily risk of assault while he was incarcerated. Parkinson’s lies were eventually exposed and she was charged with making a false rape allegation. She’s now serving three years in jail.

This isn’t the only questionable case that has played out in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) recently. There have been trials of Australian Defence Force cadets, in 2017 and 2018, that have raised serious questions about how rape allegations are handled. Again, two men had their lives, careers and futures put on the line, only to be acquitted later on. The acquittals made the #MeToo crowd angry. They seem to believe that every allegation of sexual assault should be taken as true.

The ACT police and courts have had serious questions to answer in relation to these cases. Yet politicians seem keen to keep on watering down the legal definition of sexual consent, which means that more men could find themselves falsely accused of serious crimes.

Consider Caroline Le Couteur, the Greens’ member of the legislative assembly in the ACT. Le Couteur is a vocal advocate of reforming the criminal law around consent. Her proposal, made to the ACT assembly, is for a ‘more affirmative definition of consent’, in order to ‘shift the focus from no means no to yes means yes’. Sexual encounters would require ‘enthusiastic consent’. In short, it wouldn’t be enough for men to say that the woman they slept with did not say ‘no’ and actually consented – they would have to show that she consented enthusiastically. How many sexual encounters could be swept up in this new definition of sexual crime?

The ACT’s director of public prosecutions dismissed Le Couteur’s proposal. It was a very welcome dismissal, because the proposal, if enacted, would effectively have institutionalised ‘believe women’ into law. Undeterred, Le Couteur continues her crusade to bring the patriarchy to heel, as she sees it.

Not content with using social media and public forums to trash men’s reputations, now some supporters of #MeToo want to bend the law itself to the insistence that we believe all women who make accusations. We have to resist this. The right to a fair trial must be defended.

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Australians claiming to be Aboriginal will be forced to undergo DNA testing to prove it under a One Nation proposal to crack down on welfare fraud

One Nation's New South Wales leader Mark Latham has taken aim at people who identify as indigenous, when they are not of Aboriginal heritage. 'Everybody hates a welfare rorter, especially in Aboriginal affairs,' he said.

'Australians are sick and tired of seeing people with blonde hair and blue eyes declaring themselves to be indigenous, when clearly they have no recognisable Aboriginal background and are doing it solely to qualify for extra money.'

In Australia, people can identify as indigenous to be given special treatment when applying for jobs in the public service or the ABC, as part of an affirmative action policy designed to promote one minority group.

They also qualify for special benefits, including Abstudy to fund university study or an apprenticeship, and can join an Aboriginal land council.

Mr Latham has proposed a law which would require Aboriginality to be determined by a DNA test showing someone has at least one full-blood Aboriginal grandparent, ending a system where Australians can self-identify as indigenous.

'The system of indigenous self-identification, declaring Aboriginality without any bloodline or DNA proof, has been open to widespread abuse,' he said. 'It is being used as a fraudulent way of cashing in on welfare benefits, special Aboriginal programs and land council largesse.'

Mr Latham said genuine indigenous people continue to live in poverty. 'Any waste of taxpayer funds in this area is highly disrespectful to genuine indigenous,' he said. 'It weakens the integrity of their racial group and takes money away from people in genuine need.

'We believe in an honest and fair welfare system. 'First Australians deserve the respect of stopping rorters and opportunists from masquerading as indigenous.'

While indigenous recognition is largely a federal issue, the NSW public service has an Aboriginal employment strategy and administers indigenous land councils.

As federal Labor leader in 2004, Mr Latham backed then Prime Minister John Howard's dismantling of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

Almost 15 years later, as One Nation's leader upper house candidate in the NSW election, he has savaged his former party for failing to tackle fraudulent claims of being Aboriginal. 'It's surprising that Labor and The Greens, who pretend to respect Aboriginality, have not introduced this policy already,' Mr Latham said.

Indigenous people were not counted in the Census or even regarded as citizens with voting rights until a 1967 referendum passed with 90.77 per cent support. A few years later during the early 1970s, Gough Whitlam's Labor government introduced a policy of indigenous self-determination.

Indigenous land rights activist Noel Pearson has criticised the prevailing system of 'passive welfare' which originated under Mr Whitlam, who Mr Latham worked for as a former prime minister during the 1980s.

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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