Unbelievable: Carelessness about meningococcal disease

What harm would precautionary antibiotics have done? A private doctor who failed to prescribe them in a risk situation would be sued for millions

The first rule to help doctors and nurses identify meningococcal disease is "listen closely to patients and friends", says an educational DVD that calls it the most rapidly lethal infectious disease known to man. But when George Khouzame raised concerns he might have passed on the illness to his girlfriend, Jehan Nassif, he was told he had probably only had the flu, the inquest into her death heard yesterday. Three days later Ms Nassif, 18, was dead.

Mr Khouzame and his cousin Elias had been overseas and both felt ill just before they returned to Australia. George's symptoms eased but Elias Khouzame became weak and had a headache, painful limbs and a fever. During a stopover he noticed red spots on his skin and suspected meningococcal disease. Back in Sydney, Elias went straight to hospital, while George attended a welcome-home party, where he kissed and cuddled Ms Nassif.

The next day a public health officer, Carla Ghezzi, spoke to George and his friends about their contact with Elias, who had been diagnosed with meningococcal disease, the inquest was told. George and his friends claim he told Ms Ghezzi he had had similar symptoms a day before his cousin and wondered whether he had passed the disease on to him. Ms Ghezzi allegedly told him: "If you had meningococcal you wouldn't be here now. You probably just had the flu." The inquest at Westmead Coroner's Court was told Ms Ghezzi also dismissed his concerns about Ms Nassif, though Ms Ghezzi had said she did not remember this part of the conversation.

Ms Nassif later briefly visited Elias in hospital, probably without wearing the prescribed face mask. National guidelines say anyone in close contact with a patient with meningococcal for at least four hours in the previous week should get antibiotics to prevent the spread of the disease, the court was told.

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Friends of Israel dubious about Australian academe

There are fears our universities will produce a generation biased against the Jewish state, writes associate editor Cameron Stewart

The aftershocks of Israel's war against Hezbollah in Lebanon beginning last July are being felt in Australian universities with ugly consequences. Jewish Labor MP Michael Danby and pro-Israeli groups say students of Middle Eastern studies are being fed an increasingly biased and distorted anti-Israeli view of the region by "Arabist" academics.

Their blunt claims, aired in parliament and in the Jewish press, have prompted one of these alleged Arabists, Andrew Vincent of Sydney's Macquarie University, to hit back at his accusers. "(They) are trying to frogmarch not just the whole Jewish community but the whole community in general into supporting a government which not all Israelis support, let's face it," said Vincent, who heads the university's Centre for Middle East Studies, on SBS's Dateline program last month.

This dispute over academic balance in relation to Israel has been simmering for years on Australian campuses but it is the war in Lebanon that has brought it to a flashpoint. It is a clash that raises raw and sensitive questions about the freedoms and the responsibilities of academe as well as the power of the pro-Israel lobby. "Because of public commentaries about Israel's war in Lebanon in July, a lot of Israel's supporters thought that Israel was being unfairly attacked," Vincent tells Inquirer. "So they circled the wagons and attacked the attackers."

Danby entered the fray in August after hearing a radio interview in which Vincent called on Prime Minister John Howard to de-list Hezbollah as a terrorist organisation. It was a provocative comment to make in the heat of the Lebanon war and one that was sharply at odds with both sides of Australian politics at the time. So Danby stood up in federal parliament and let rip: "I grieve for the state of Middle Eastern studies in Australia, and the effect that some poor judgments and poor teaching have had on policy decisions as it affects decision-making in Australia." He was joined by conservative analyst Ted Lapkin of the Australia/Israel Jewish Affairs Council, who wrote a scathing piece in Quadrant magazine saying that Australian academe was a "rogue's gallery of anti-Zionists".

This ideological row might be dismissed as an academic storm in a teacup, except Danby and Lapkin believe it could have very real implications for Australian policy in the years ahead. Danby says Australian universities are guilty of producing "endless one-sided propaganda" that "produces graduates who move into the Department of Foreign Affairs and other organs of government with a one-sided view of the conflict in the Middle East". Lapkin is more blunt, warning: "The best and brightest of Australia's youth are exposed to virulent anti-Zionism throughout their university years. It remains to be seen what effect this indoctrination will have on the next generation of Australian leaders."

But what precisely is the basis for these claims that universities are running courses that are pro-Arab and anti-Israeli? Danby's and Lapkin's criticisms are focused largely on the two best known Middle East study courses in the country: Vincent's Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Macquarie and the Australian National University's Centre for Arab and Islamic Studies, directed by Amin Saikal.

Lapkin accuses Saikal of pursuing an "anti-Zionist agenda" that decrees that "Israel can do no right and the Palestinians can do no wrong". Among other things, Saikal is said to be highly critical of Israel's conduct in Lebanon while praising aspects of Iranian democracy in an Islamic context. Saikal does not dispute this, but says his criticisms of Israel in Lebanon are not unreasonable and they do not mean he is anti-Israeli. "Most of the things we have said in terms of criticising Israel have been voiced by Israelis themselves inside Israel," he says. "But the (pro-Israel) lobby group here cannot tolerate any form of criticism whatsoever. They don't want an objective assessment of Israel in this country and if you make one then they attack you and call you anti-Semitic or anti-Zionist. "I think at times, particularly in the wake of the Lebanese crisis, they have said some things which could be interpreted as crossing the line."

Saikal and Vincent say hostile emails have been sent to their respective university vice-chancellors calling for them to be sacked. However, ANU vice-chancellor Ian Chubb defends Saikal, saying he has been "attacked personally ... because (his) views are unsavoury to others who have closed their mind. This is a fragile period in world relations, the very time when understanding and reason are needed to prevail over prejudice and ideology."

Danby strongly disputes suggestions that he or other pro-Israel advocates are trying to stifle free speech or otherwise censor debate on Israel and the Middle East. "I encourage debate," he says. "It is through criticism of these courses that the public will arrive at a judgment themselves about their worth. My concern is that you are not getting a full range of opinions on campus, you are not getting a wide range of views." Danby says undergraduate students are frustrated by what they see as a pro-Arab bias in these courses. "Undergraduates feel very disadvantaged, their lectures are often very anti-Israel and very anti-American," he says.

Vincent questions this, saying he has not received any complaints from his students about bias despite having many Jewish students in his course. Australia's Jewish community is politically conservative - often more so than in Israel - and it has long been frustrated with the inherently left-wing bias perceived in Australian universities. It hopes that this public challenge to the nation's universities will ultimately lead to less strident criticism of Israel in academe.

But the pro-Israel lobby also risks overplaying its hand and being perceived as using bullying to impose its own agenda. Their complaints inevitably will be interpreted by some as an attempt to muzzle academic debate rather than simply encourage greater diversity of ideas on campus. Regardless of one's views on the war in Lebanon, which ended in August, the reality is that the conflict has done great harm to Israel's international image. This will naturally be reflected in academic studies, just as it has in the media and in mainstream public opinion. The question is to determine when such views go beyond reasoned argument and into the realm of anti-Israeli bias. The answer, like so many Middle Eastern issues, lies squarely in the eyes of the beholder.

Danby accuses Vincent of selectively inviting guest lecturers who are pro-Arab and anti-Israel. "Speakers at Macquarie University this year have included the Syrian ambassador, (left-wing journalist and author) Robert Fisk, former Australian ambassador Peter Rogers and a United Arab Emirates minister, Sheikha Lubna al-Qassimi," Danby says. "All of these people seem to be putting only one side of the debate."

Vincent argues that his speakers have included "a variety of Israelis who are very much in tune with current Israeli thinking". He says that earlier this year he invited Israeli's ambassador in Canberra to speak but the offer was never taken up. But Vincent has been under growing pressure since NSW schools last year dropped a simulation exercise devised by his centre after parents complained it was creating racial tension and painted terrorists in a sympathetic light. Parents alleged the exercise, in which students played Arabs and Israelis, gave positive descriptions of groups such as Hamas's Qassam Brigades and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad without telling students that the groups were listed terrorist organisations.

Tertiary students who take Vincent's course Introduction to Middle East Politics are also asked questions that some may consider loaded against Israeli and US policy in the Middle East. These include: "Israel is sometimes accused of intransigence, why is this?"; "Should local opposition to (a democratic Iraq) be dismissed as terrorism?"; and "What is the neo-conservative agenda, and is it still in place in President Bush's second term?" Yet the same questionnaire also asks: "Do the governments of the Arab world lack legitimacy? Why?" Vincent fears that this debate, if unchecked, could take Australia down the path of the US, where an aggressive website called Campus Watch asks students to expose academics who they believe are anti-Israel. The website, run by influential Israel supporter Daniel Pipes, admits that it pays special attention to those academics who are up for tenure or promotion. "Campus Watch is frightening," Vincent says. "I am sure some people in Australia would like to have Campus Watch here."

But Danby distances himself from Campus Watch, saying there is no parallel with that organisation and the present debate in Australia. "We need to have a balanced view on the issue of the Middle East. As pressure has been on the ABC (not to show bias), so should it be on these faculties of Middle Eastern studies."

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The West is master of slave trade guilt

Europe is becoming an example of how a sense of historical responsibility can mislead present generations, writes Rebecca Weisser. In fact it is Leftist attention-seekers rather than the West as a whole that is ignoring reality

Andrew Hawkins has turned hand-wringing into performance art. In June the youth theatre director took a guilt trip to Gambia, where he donned a yoke and chain, knelt in front of 16,000 Africans in a football stadium and apologised for what he calls the African holocaust. Hawkins claims to be descended from Britain's first slave trader, John Hawkins. "God would consider what Sir John Hawkins did to be an abomination," Hawkins said. "It's never too late to apologise."

The "sorry" movement, which reached its zenith in Australia at the 2000 march for Aboriginal reconciliation across Sydney Harbour Bridge, has gone global. In much of western Europe, the US and Canada, inherited culpability for slavery, colonialism, the treatment of indigenous people and the Palestinian question has merged with modern guilt over Third World poverty in an orgy of muddled self-castigation.

As Britain gears up to commemorate the 200th anniversary next year of the abolition of the slave trade in the former British Empire, it has been difficult to make the point that the anniversary should be seen as the celebration of a great and hard-fought victory. As Patrick West wrote in his book Conspicuous Compassion: "While slavery was not a distinctly Western phenomenon, the campaign to abolish it was. And the West was the first to do so." It is the guilt and shame of the slave trade rather than the triumph of Enlightenment values that has dominated the public domain. Earlier this year, Liverpool councillors debated whether to rename several streets in the city, including Penny Lane of Beatles fame, which had been named after notorious slave traders.

This week, Prime Minister Tony Blair wrote to New Nation newspaper in Britain to express his "deep sorrow" that the slave trade happened. "It is hard to believe that what would now be a crime against humanity was legal at the time," he wrote. "Personally, I believe the bicentenary offers us a chance not just to say how profoundly shameful the slave trade was ... but also to express our deep sorrow that it ever happened, that it ever could have happened, and to rejoice at the different and better times we live in today."

His statement hasn't gone far enough from activists who want "an apology of substance"; in other words, money. "Blair's article is taking a backward step from Britain's official position in 1807 when it abolished the trade and expressed regret for what had happened," says Mawuli Klu of Rendezvous of Victory, a British African-led, and community based lobby group. "This has heightened feelings among people in the African community. We want an apology of substance that addresses the demands for African reparations."

There is a broader dimension to the call for reparations. Beth Herzfeld of Anti-Slavery International calls for states that benefited economically from the slave trade to write off the debts of poor countries harmed by slavery. The push to "drop the debt" for Africa, championed by celebrities such as U2's Bono, is driven by the underlying idea that Africa is poor because it has been exploited through colonialism, of which slavery is the most horrific and graphic example. Britain, along with other Group of Eight countries, has responded by agreeing to double aid to Africa by 2010 and write off debts to the poorest countries.

Yet African countries that participated in the slave trade were enriched by it just as European countries were. In his history of the Atlantic slave trade, author Hugh Thomas notes that the trade was possible only because of the participation of many Africans, such as the rulers of Benin and the kings of Ashanti, Congo and Dahomey, as well as European merchants and politicians. Indisputably, African slave traders were enriched not just with the money they earned selling slaves but by the land they expropriated from those enslaved. Thomas quotes King Gezo of Dahomey, who said in 1840: "The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people" and "it has been the source of their glory and wealth".

Britain is not alone in struggling with a guilty conscience. The French have been debating whether Napoleon committed genocide on a par with Hitler, trying to wipe out the adult black population of the former French colony of San Domingo (now Haiti) after a bloody uprising at the start of the 19th century. French historian Claude Ribbe, in a book called The Crime of Napoleon, challenges the accepted view of Napoleon as a military genius and founder of the modern French state and presents him as an anti-Semitic racist who reintroduced slavery after its abolition in 1794, ordered the extermination of the Haitian population and founded an empire that could prosper only through slavery.

Even more contentious is whether French history teachers should be obliged by law to teach the positive benefits of colonialism. A law passed in the French parliament stipulates that French history textbooks should "recognise the positive role of the French presence in its overseas colonies, especially in North Africa". The law sought to acknowledge Algerian Muslims who fought on the French side in the Algerian war but provoked so much ire in France and Algeria that talks on a friendship treaty between France and Algeria broke down. French President Jacques Chirac inaugurated a Slavery Remembrance Day on May 10 this year, the fifth anniversary of the passing of a law by the French Senate recognising slavery as a crime against humanity.

The French and British history wars underline the common themes in a debate that is not limited to former colonial powers. Former colonies such as Australia and the US have been caught up in the same debate that has become part of the great Western guilt complex. And along with the guilt come the apologies. Blair has apologised for the Potato Famine, Bill Clinton apologised to the Sioux people, pope John Paul II apologised for everything from the persecution of Galileo and the execution of Jan Hus to Catholic involvement in the slave trade.

Yet the guilt complex seems to be a Western phenomenon. It is often said that Jews invented guilt and Catholics perfected it, but although Muslims are, like Christians and Jews, "children of the book", there have been few apologies emanating from the Islamic world or, for that matter, other cultures. Arabs, Persians, Berbers, Indians, Chinese and Africans were all involved in the African slave trade from the 8th century through to the present, with few proclamations of public guilt or effective action to eliminate slavery that exists largely in Africa and Asia.

Even using the narrowest definitions that exclude bonded and forced labour and servile concubinage, there are estimated to be 2.7 million slaves in the world today. Including bonded labourers, there are estimated to be 27 million slaves, and including all categories of trafficked women and children there are estimated to be 100 million slaves. The Anti-Slavery Society estimates there are 8000 female slaves in West Africa who are hierodules; that is, religious sex slaves. In West Africa children are kidnapped or bought for $20 to $70 in Benin and Togo, then sold into slavery for sex or domestic labour in oil-rich countries such as Nigeria and Gabon for $350. Hierodules also exist in India despite efforts to suppress the practice. Young women who are trafficked to the Middle East and North Africa from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Nepal are sold for $3000 to $10,000. Imprisoned in a room by their owner for the sadistic use of himself and his friends, these women survive on average for about two years.

In response to such shocking statistics, the contrast between practical assistance and self-aggrandising symbolism is striking. While Hawkins is fundraising for another guilt trip, walking in yokes and chains, the Anti-Slavery Society, one of whose earliest members was William Wilberforce, is raising funds to purchase the emancipation of modern slaves and stamp out modern-day slavery. Wilberforce, a profoundly religious and deeply conservative man who fought all his life not just for the abolition of slavery but against child labour, cruelty to animals and discrimination against Catholics, was on his death bed when the bill he fought for, for so many years, was finally passed abolishing slavery throughout the British Empire. He said, "Thank God that I have lived to witness the day in which England is willing to give pound stg. 20 million for the abolishment of slavery." It was one of the great benefits of colonialism, an achievement of which Britain and the West should be proud, and an inspiration to present generations to continue to fight to eliminate slavery and spread the spirit of the Enlightenment throughout the world.

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Men fight stereotypes

MENINISM is the catchcry of a movement of males who will storm the streets and burn their ties, rallying against the "all men are bastards" image that has an entire sex pigeonholed as violent, heartless and untrustworthy. This is according to a new study saying there is a competing interest to the feminist struggle for equality; men and boys are now the target of negative stereotypes. The research shows almost 70 per cent of social commentary on the male gender is unfavourable - portraying men as violent, sexually abusive, unable to be trusted with children, "deadbeat dads" and commitment-phobic. In the largest Australian study of its kind, Dr Jim Macnamara analysed more than 2000 media articles and programs and found men were mostly positioned as villains, aggressors, perverts or philanderers.

Yes, well, any women's magazine will tell you that. Male-bashing is a vital part of female bonding; it brings us together, gives us a common point of reference as well as something to complain about. And the much maligned male so thoughtfully gives us so much material to choose from.

Affectionate bitching is one thing - the male bashing is now taking a more serious turn where boys are growing up in a world where they are faced with a distinct lack of role models. According to Dr Macnamara, even the positive images of men in the media are delivered as a backhanded compliment with there being only one version of the "good men"; the sensitive metrosexual who is in touch with his feminine side. Not much to choose from really; the unemotional, aggressive commitment freak or the moisturised, dithering doormat.

The media's limiting rendering of men is alarming says the University of Western Sydney academic because social policy works hand in hand with social stereotyping. "Legislation is developed by government and largely driven by what is being said in society - it is already beginning to affect social policy if you look at child access and child custody issues. "There is overwhelming discourse that men cannot be trusted with children - there is a lot of concern about men being alone in the company of a child."

Despite the tide of opinion positioning men as the perpetrators of crime, Dr Macnamara says when it comes to violence against children - women are often responsible. "What we are doing is creating a society that believes 90 to 95 per cent of violence is committed by men and it's not true," he says. "Research shows violence against children is more often committed by women - I'm not trying to push the blame back to women. I'm saying that as a society we need to look at the image that we are creating for young boys."

University of Sydney media department Associate Professor Catherine Lumby was practically waving a Meninism placard along with Dr Macnamara until she heard that comment. "I'm sorry, if you want better statistics on this go to some experts," she says - a touch aggressively. "The statistics are overwhelming; the majority of sexual violence and domestic assaults is committed by men. That is sad, I don't blame men, I don't think they are some terrible, natural force who are evil. "Yes, some women are violent but for most women the problem is they are victims of violence."

A mother of two young sons, Dr Lumby says the media minefield is littered with unrealistic stereotypes for both males and females - and that rather than counter them by censorship, we should be teaching the youth how to navigate negative cliches. "I'm very, very conscious that there is a set of masculine stereotypes; are they a sports brain? Straight? Gay? "My concern as a parent is that my boys are able to find out who they are and (not) feel constrained by these preset, pre-fabricated ideas," she says.

But Dr Macnamara says the problem is more serious than men contending the "boys don't cry" mentality. The lack of good role models in the media is aggravated by a lack of positive role models in real life. He points to the increasing numbers of absentee fathers and the shortage of male teachers. "They are branded as troublemakers in schools - and they often have no role models in the home because of the high rate of single-parent households - and then in the media the role models they see are overwhelmingly negative."

And the trend towards "demonising, marginalising and trivialising of men and male identity" could turn into a tug-of-war with serious mental health consequences for a generation of young boys. "We are probably having a negative impact on young men's esteem and we are definitely having an impact on young boy's self esteem," he says. "Ultimately such portrayals could lead to negative social and even financial costs for society in areas such as male health, rising suicide rates and family disintegration."

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Risky for an Australian professor to criticize terrorists

Three months after accusing university lecturers of dishonestly skewing the study of terrorism to blame the West for carnage wreaked by suicidal fanatics, a senior Queensland academic believes he is the latest casualty of a campus purge. Merv Bendle, an expert on militant religion and a senior lecturer at James Cook University, has been at the centre of a debate over how terrorism, its origins and outcomes are taught on campuses since he attacked fellow academics for what he saw as their anti-West bias. In his writings, including several published in The Australian, Dr Bendle describes a crisis in history education and criticises academic elites for distorting teaching on fanaticism and avoiding "any facts that might disturb (their) comfort zone".

He now suspects his outspoken views will lead to the loss of his position at the university he has worked for since the early 1990s. A proposal, part of a restructure by Colin Ryan as head of the new School of Arts and Social Sciences, would lead to the scrapping of six of the seven subjects Dr Bendle teaches at the Townsville university. "Why strip me of my teaching load? I'm not toeing the right political line. I'm not anti-American and I'm not anti-West," he said. "The main reason for the antipathy against me is my stand on the teaching of history and my anti-terrorist stand. "People should look at terrorists in the same way they look at pedophiles. How many lecturers do you see defending pedophiles? They don't. But they defend terrorism. I have an intense antipathy to the romanticisation of terrorism. I don't see anything romantic about blowing people to bits because of an ideology that a suicide bomber has become fanatical about."

Dr Bendle's concerns over his tenure were dismissed yesterday by the faculty's pro-vice chancellor, Janet Greeley, who said more than 150 subjects were being reviewed for possible deletion to reduce workload. "We have undergone a restructure and reduced some staff, so we have to remove some of the teaching burden for lecturers," said Professor Greeley, who is married to Dr Ryan. "Unfortunately, it happened that a number of the subjects were Dr Bendle's subjects, but it has absolutely nothing to do with what he has published. Dr Bendle will be given every opportunity to teach and be part of research initiatives that the new school will put forward. "He offers so many subjects across quite a range and that's probably why he might have been hit more than others. "I may or may not disagree with all of his positions but that has no influence on the subjects that he teaches." Professor Greeley, who said her husband managed the school at arm's length from her role as faculty head, said she hoped to persuade Dr Bendle that the proposal to take away about 85per cent of his teaching load was not a conspiracy.

But Dr Bendle said he was singled out for adopting a politically incorrect position at odds with the mainstream. He said he had been previously targeted by two colleagues in an "act of bastardry", leading to an investigation, which found insufficient evidence to support complaints that Dr Bendle or others in the sociology discipline at JCU had been bullying and intimidatory. "Townsville is a Labor Party city and the side of the university that I'm dealing with is radical Labor, far left. But I'm not going to go quietly," he said. "I'll scratch and fight the whole way. All I want to do is get back to teaching what I'm well qualified and good at teaching."

In a paper titled Don't Mention The Terror, Dr Bendle says academic contributions frequently have a political agenda. Academic forums are used to denounce the war on terror, the US, Israel, Australia and their leaders, while insisting that Islam is a religion of peace and is being unfairly targeted, he says. In response, academics including Macquarie University's Goldie Osuri and Bobby Banerjee of the University of South Australia said in a published article: "Australian academe may be better served by Merv Bendle's silence on terrorism."

However, the University of Queensland's Carl Ungerer and David Martin Jones, who lecture in the School of Political Science and International Studies, said the "polysyllabic howl of outrage" from the academic lobby was predictable. They said Australian Research Council funding of social sciences was skewed "to maintain the fashionable line that, despite empirical evidence to the contrary in the form of attacks on Western civilian targets, it is all our fault". "In this Alice in Wonderland world of ... journals read only by participants in this mutually reinforcing discourse, the focus of study is not Islamist ideology and its propensity to violence, but our own long-repressed responsibility for the cause of Islamist rage," they said.

Professor Greeley denied the university had a position on the controversy that arose from Dr Bendle's published stand three months ago. "I was a bit concerned for Merv because he was harshly criticised in the national media by his colleagues," she said. "We all like to see our staff engage in public debate, but one does not like to see them criticised too harshly."

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Australian universities abandon Australian literature

Academics receive more funds to study Norse poems than Australian novels; Patrick White is unfashionable; creative writing classes flourish while Australian literature courses disappear. Rosemary Neill charts the abandonment of Oz lit

Peter Pierce is the inaugural professor of Australian literature at James Cook University in Queensland's deep north. He may also be the last. As Pierce, 56, prepares to leave James Cook, questions hover over the position he has held for the past decade. The university's school of humanities is being vacuumed up into a bigger department and - at least in the short term - its chair in Australian literature will cease to exist.

Pierce's departure at the end of this month will leave the number of permanent professorships of Australian literature in the country at ... one. The retiring professor is far from retiring about this. "It's a scandal," he says down the line from Townsville, his voice flaring with indignation.

Three decades after we shook off the colonial hangover, Pierce and others claim a new cultural cringe is infesting our halls of higher learning, encouraging the neglect of Australian literature.

A Review investigation has found:

• When Pierce leaves James Cook, the University of Sydney will host the nation's only remaining chair in Australian literature. Sydney is the sole tertiary institution where undergraduates can major in Australian literature. Yet recently, there were moves within the university to undermine the chair and the teaching of Australian literature as a separate subject.


• In recent years, British/European literary projects have claimed a far bigger share of academic research grants than Australian ones. In 2002, one academic was granted $600,000 to produce editions of Old Norse poetry, while a venture to produce new editions of Henry Handel Richardson's novels received $130,000. Handel Richardson is one of Australia's most important early 20th century novelists.


• Students today seem far more interested in becoming writers than studying them: while creative writing courses flourish, the number of undergraduates studying Australian literature has fallen away dramatically on some campuses. Next year, the University of Sydney may have no students taking up the country's only honours program in Australian literature.

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THE decline of Australian literature is also blamed on funding cuts and the inexorable rise of postmodern theory, a charge that supporters of that theory deny strenuously.

The Oz lit crisis is playing out on campus at a time when Australian books outsell imported ones and our first-rank authors punch above their weight in the Pulitzer, Commonwealth and Booker prizes.

Pierce says: "Sometimes it seems to me that a vigorous interest in and enthusiasm for Australian literature, including the teaching and translation of it, is to be found more offshore thanonshore." Australian literature, he says, is studied from China to Hungary, France to Singapore, because "it has always been the standard-bearer for Australian studies and a very important instrument of cultural diplomacy in this country". "If you were travelling the world, you'd think Australian literature is thriving, but when you come home, you find that the literature is without honour (at universities in) its own country."

The professor of Australian literature at the University of Sydney, Elizabeth Webby, like Pierce, is poised to retire. Asked if she can think of other countries whose academics have so little time for their native literature, she says: "Oh no, I don't think it's true of anywhere else." (As an afterthought, she says it might be true of New Zealand.)

Almost nun-like in her unfussy dark clothes, hands folded in front and feet tucked neatly under her, it is hard to imagine Webby's voice - let alone her hackles - being raised. Yet this mild-mannered woman of 65 reveals that at one point recently, she was steeling herself to go public to defend the country's only chair in Australian literature.

Review understands that rival academics saw Webby's retirement, and falling student numbers, as an opportunity to demand that Australian literature no longer be taught as a separate subject at Sydney. The detractors - whom Webby declines to identify - were unsuccessful. She has a successor in the respected scholar Robert Dixon, and Australian literature lives on as a subdiscipline amid the gothic spires and ruthlessly clipped lawns of Australia's oldest university.

Even so, in her office lined with what must be one of the nation's biggest collections of Australian fiction, Webby says ruefully: "That is what Australian literature is up against. It's also up against other people in the discipline." She confesses that after 16 years in her job, she will retire disappointed that Australian plays, poems and novels still are not regarded as a core discipline by most Australian universities.

Indeed, it seems the cultural cringe Webby encountered 44 years ago when she wrote a thesis on a yet-to-be-famous Australian is still flourishing inside lecture theatres. "I wrote my honours thesis in 1962 on Patrick White, which people believed was an aberration. One of my fellow students said to me many years later, 'Elizabeth, we all thought you were mad'," she says with a knowing half-smile.

Webby's thesis on White was written well before the novelist won the Nobel Prize in 1973. Today, Australia's only literary Nobel laureate is unfashionable again on Australian campuses.

But this indifference doesn't just come from the pincer movement of academics - Eurocentric traditionalists on one flank, postmodern theorists on the other - who have pushed Australian literature to the periphery.

With a rueful chuckle, Webby says the majority of her literature students "find it difficult to get through long novels". By long, she means anything over 200 pages, "which disqualifies most Patrick White".

Then again, if you were a fresher and wanted to study White - or indeed any other major Australian writer - at our other leading sandstone university, Melbourne, you wouldn't get very far. This year, first-year literary studies students at Melbourne were offered just two Australian works of fiction (Murray Bail's Eucalyptus and John Forbes's Collected Poems). There were no first-year subjects devoted to Australian literature, and of 31 second and third-year subjects on offer, three were specifically about Australian writing.

Pierce says of this: "This is the university, along with two or three others, that attracts the best students, and almost completely starves them of Australian literature. The danger is that it will become an accessory." At James Cook, things are no better. This year, the university offered 50 literature subjects, yet second and third-year students could study just one subject devoted to Australian literature.

Pierce declares that the tertiary sector's neglect of our literature exposes a disconnect between the public and academics: "It isn't as if people have stopped reading Australian literature. It's a dissociation of the readership from the formal study of Australian literature."

He says the rot set in when academics who "abased" themselves before the altar of literary theory acquired institutional power and "captured literature departments in the '80s".

Postmodern literary theory - and its near-relation, cultural studies - do not accord canonical works, Australian or otherwise, a privileged place. Such theories hold that everything from Big Brother to Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Peter Carey's Bliss is a text, thus diminishing the role of serious literature as a defining cultural force.

The bitter divisions provoked by the rise of theory are well known. Yale University professor Harold Bloom has attacked cultural studies as an enemy of reading and part of the "lunatic destruction of literary studies". In Australia, what remains largely unexplored is the role imported, voguish theories have played in the destruction of our literature.

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PETER Kirkpatrick is president of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, set up in the late 1970s to take on the academy's stifling Anglophilia. Thirty years on, he says the dominance of theory "has put a big dent in Australian literary studies".

Although ASAL's executive now includes fans of literary theory and cultural studies, Kirkpatrick says: "I find cultural studies absolutely excruciating. You can only read so many accounts of the semiotics of shopping malls or Paris Hilton before you think 'Oh, there's got to be more to life than this!"' (He stresses this is a personal view.) Kirkpatrick, who teaches at the University of Western Sydney, explains that as the influence of cultural studies and post-colonial theory grew, Australia's literature was put in the same box as that of other post-imperialist powers.

But there was a crucial - and for Australian literature, a disabling - difference. Former imperialists such as the US, France and Britain had long-established canons that survived the onslaught of theory. But Australian literature, which had only just gained a toehold, was elbowed aside as the new wave of theories washed over campuses from the '80s. The mission to entrench Australian literature in our universities - considered courageous and fashionable in the '70s - was seen as unfashionable and even reactionary a decade later.

Kirkpatrick believes that today the notion that universities should encourage the development of a national canon is "certainly dead". "Canons aren't really very fashionable at the moment," he says. And White? "He's certainly unfashionable." He claims that today there is probably more interest among Australia's academics in "capital-I Indigenous literature than in indigenous literature".

Webby adds that the rise of post-colonial theory - preoccupied with how colonialism impacted on Western and non-Western cultures - has led to a suspicion of nationalism, and so of national literatures, among academics. But John Frow, head of the English department at

the University of Melbourne - soon to be renamed the culture and communications department - says the view that the rise of critical theory has harmed Australian literature "is absolute garbage".

"There is no incompatibility between teaching theory and teaching Australian literature. All our teaching is theoretically informed, and it shouldn't be otherwise," he says.

Frow says it "probably is a scandal" that there is only one chair in Australian literature. And he admits "the University of Melbourne is teaching much less Australian literature than we used to, essentially because student demand has fallen off". "It is a problem that students just seem to be less interested in Australian literature than they were 10 years ago.

"There is an economic imperative there: if student numbers fall off dramatically, we have to respond to that." (In spite of this, Sydney and Melbourne universities plan to introduce a new Australian literature subject from 2008.)

Frow has a point. At a time when universities are expected to be increasingly self-sufficient, academics must compete for students, or rather, for the HECS and other fees they generate. If student numbers fall too far, courses can come under threat, no matter how pivotal they might be to Australian life or culture.

Like Frow, Webby blames the marginalisation of Australian fiction primarily on funding cuts and lack of student interest. She says that at a time when the federal Government spends more money on private schools than on universities, "the main issue, really, is funding".

"When funding is cut, academics have to program for bums on seats, basically, and for various reasons Australian literature is not attractive at the present time to Australian students. The students we have now do not read as much as students did 20 years ago, let alone 40 years ago. That is simply because they've grown up in a culture where there are so many other things competing for their time."

More here





AIDS 'epidemic' among Australian homosexuals

And homosexuals don't seem to care

Forget gay marriage: the real story about homosexual Australians on this World AIDS Day is, once again and shamefully, an HIV/AIDS tragedy. This is because new figures from the University of NSW's National Centre in HIV Epidemiology and Clinical Research confirm a worrying trend. They indicate that 10 per cent to 18 per cent of the inner-city gay population of Sydney is HIV-infected. That means HIV infection rates are still rising.

By comparison, UN figures cited in The Sydney Morning Herald on Sunday claimed that Lesotho, a poor African nation, had infection rates of 20 per cent. That makes Sydney's inner city comparable to an AIDS-ravaged African nation.

But you will not hear homoactivists, medical associations, legal institutes or others, some of whom have been very vocal in their support of gay unions, campaigning for a change in the way the gay community approaches the facts of infection, or arguing for a re-evaluation of the tenets of gay liberation.

They are too busy talking about relationship equality and gay marriage, even though the only reliable study of the intentions of gay men and lesbians, the Private Lives survey conducted by La Trobe University in 2006, found the overwhelming majority of gay men did not intend to formalise their relationships at all and that most weren't even in a relationship of any kind, let alone in a union that would approach the mainstream definition of a marriage.

It is time, then, that ordinary Australians - whether same-sex attracted like me, or otherwise - stood up and demanded more from leaders and activists. It is time to clear away the politically correct nonsense, to stop focusing on fripperies such as gay marriage and other diversions and start focusing on something that will really assist gay men and the wider community: an intense campaign aimed at HIV/AIDS prevention.

Twenty five years after Gay Men's Health Crisis, ACT-UP and Australian-based anti-HIV activism first kicked off, someone has to take the blame for this outrageously long-lived, unbelievably reviving, preventable epidemic. It is time to state that a reasonably well-educated, Western gay man who contracts HIV in 2006 because of sex is at least a reckless fool, and if he deliberately brings it upon himself, at best a suicidal sociopath.

Yes, believe it or not, there is a whole gay subculture that rests upon "bug-chasing", or the despicable sport of actively seeking out or passing on HIV infection for the satisfaction of sexual or other perverse fantasies.

A great effort from within and without the gay community is needed to counter these rising infection rates and the lifestyles and political ideas that support them, not least because of the strain they put on the health system. It is time the love got tough.

The situation has become so bad that you won't even hear the local AIDS councils and other prevention or support organisations raising outraged cries or calling for more funding from UNAIDS or other bodies. They long ago resigned themselves to the fact that global and government AIDS organisations with finite resources and a substantial commitment to the African tragedy, have little time and less money for affluent idiots at risk inthe West.

Who can blame AIDS officials, however, for their pragmatic allocation of tight resources, especially if the choice is between more eduction for a fool who ignores 25 years of the same and an innocent African child who is at risk of acquiring the illness via her mother?

What a miserable situation. It must, at the very least, force a rethink of the way governments and citizens, inside and outside the gay community, approach the rising HIV infection rates.

We could start by throwing off the notion of gay pride, for there is nothing to be proud about given Sydney's HIV infection rates.

This would involve a more sober evaluation of the plight of infected gay men. AIDS victims should, rightly, be spared the stigma that too often attaches to their disease. However, unlike the early days of the epidemic, individual responsibility is, often, the key now to whether or not a man becomes infected.

Some AIDS patients are no longer, and have not been for some time, purely blameless victims of this terrible affliction. It may sound harsh to say so but it is the truth. Recognising as much could save lives.

Perhaps it is time, in 2006, to encourage the return of a proper sense of personal and collective shame, for the sake of all of us, or at least to insist upon a more public accountability for the private decisions that are too often the cause of such increases in HIV infections. Because, no matter how one looks at these miserable figures and their depressingly familiar reflections in the infection rates of New York City, San Francisco and other Western cities, pride may literally be killing us.

Source

The above guy talks some sense but still will not name the two things that are needed if any improvement is to happen -- persuading homosexuals to keep their penises out of so many different behinds and quarantining AIDS sufferers




Physiotherapy students victimized by a near-bankrupt health system

Pressure on public hospitals has become so extreme that [Queensland] physiotherapy students are being forced to travel thousands of kilometres at their own expense to secure clinical training. Gold Coast students Lauren McLune and Emma Armfield have spent the past six weeks sharing a cramped room in a Hobart backpacker hostel because Queensland's public hospital system cannot afford to provide the practical training they need to graduate.

The pair had only four days' notice of their Hobart placement - the closest available to Griffith University's Gold Coast campus. They estimate they have each spent at least $2000 on accommodation, food and travel while also maintaining their homes on the Gold Coast. Ms Armfield, 28, had to quit two of her three part-time jobs to take the Hobart placement. "We didn't know whether to laugh or cry," Ms McLune, 25, said. "We entered into this degree knowing that this could happen. However, four days' notice is a bit different to the month that people usually get given."

The students' plight reflects the growing pains afflicting the nation's medical workforce. And it is not just physiotherapy students. Australian Medical Association national president Mukesh Haikerwal said medicine and all allied health professions suffered similar problems because poorly funded public hospital resources were straining to provide patient care, leaving no money for training. "The universities are cash-strapped, the hospitals are cash-strapped and the quality of education is at risk," Dr Haikerwal said. "If you are looking at having 10 students standing around a bed, it's more difficult than having two students. And it wears out the goodwill of both the educators and the patients."

The commonwealth and states agreed to boost medical students numbers this year. Within a few years, the number of graduates will climb from about 1500 to 3200. "But where will they train?" Dr Haikerwal said. He said the inter-governmental agreement was "a furphy" because no consideration had been given to boosting the capacity of hospitals to provide hands-on training and internships.

While politicians had claimed credit for funding more university places, universities were stumped over how to turn out doctors and other professionals with adequate practical experience. Australian Physiotherapy Association president Cathy Nall blamed the commonwealth for under-funding university courses. "There's no subsidy provided for accommodation for physiotherapy students in the way that there is for medical students and no assistance with travel costs," Ms Nall said. She agreed it was common for students to take practical placements in Tasmania because it had no university physiotherapy course. But they usually came from South Australia or Victoria and were given months of notice.

Source

WARNING: ONE OF TODAY'S POSTS MAY NOT BE "WORKSAFE"




The latest excuse for cancelling Christmas: It "creates pressure"!

There are some miserable bitches in the world

A pre-school has "cancelled Christmas" because it believes traditional pageants put too much pressure on young children. Parents received a letter last week informing them the annual Christmas celebrations at the Maitland Nursery School would not go ahead. The pre-school's director, Megan Filis, blamed the Department of Community Services for acting like a scrooge. In a letter to parents, Ms Filis wrote: "Due to concerns about the amount of pressure put on young children, our funding body, DOCS, has directed all early childhood services to avoid the more traditional types of group performances that we have been used to."

DOCS denied it had made such a directive, but the damage was done. Children were upset and parents were angry. "It's appalling," said Rebecca Crebert, whose daughter, Isabella, had been practising for the December 15 concert. "It's a finale of the work done all year, all the songs and all the actions."

A DOCS spokeswoman said Ms Filis had misinterpreted comments that were made at a recent meeting with DOCS officers. "In this case, DOCS staff were asked whether concerts were too stressful for young children. DOCS advised that the key to a successful end-of-year function was to ensure they were fun and child-focused and not to go over the top," the spokeswoman said. "They're only little children, and it's meant to be about having fun." The spokeswoman said DOCs "encourages centres to enjoy the festive season".

Ms Filis said last year's Christmas concert had "created pressure for children". "We were trying to bring it back to children having a fun day, rather than doing a big performance," she said. Instead of a pageant, Ms Filis will hold three drop-in days, enabling parents to visit their children for an hour. "Our last day will be more relaxed and informal without the group performance," she wrote in the letter to parents.

Ms Filis said Santa Claus would make an appearance, but Mrs Crebert said this was not good enough. "Isabella loves to perform. She was just so disappointed and said: 'Oh, Mum, what's happened? Why won't they let me sing our songs?"' Many of the 120 children, aged three to five, had also invited their grandparents. "It's a kick in the guts for the kids, their parents and their extended families," Mrs Crebert said. "We were looking forward to this, and there's really no pressure involved."

Source





Women pay the price of abandoning all standards

Feminism attacked traditional standards of female behaviour and young women have embraced that with a vengeance. So women are no longer treated with the respect that went with those traditional standards. Men now often describe all women as "Ho's" (whores, prostitutes) -- with the accompanying attitudes implied by that

Paris Hilton, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan are the stars of a new slew of internet gossip sites, fondly known as the "slagosphere", which run video of celebrity airheads and reams of paparazzi photographs that never make the magazines. Lately the on again, off again gal pals - or "frenemies" as they are sometimes called - have been plumbing new depths of banality and bad taste. They wear no underwear when they go out in their finery and keep accidentally-on-purpose flashing their shaven crotches to assembled cameras as they alight from Hilton's car or some limo. The gynaecological photos, complete with fresh caesarean scars in the case of recently single mother-of-two Spears, have become the talk of the internet.



But they have also unleashed a torrent of misogynistic abuse that is disturbingly violent and unhinged. The words are unprintable but the mouth-frothing hatred is startling. In site after site, from Egotastic! to The Superficial, anonymous writers tell the girls to "put it away" with a harshness that makes your toes curl. In one clip on the website X17, a male friend of Hilton's spews forth the most disgusting comments about Lohan's vagina to the paparazzi, now armed with video, while Hilton laughs up a storm at her frenemy's expense.

There is a terrible misogyny abroad at the moment - that has men walk up to attractive female strangers in nightclubs and hit them - not hit on them but punch them in the head with their fists. During schoolies week on the Gold Coast last month, for example, a 19-year-old man walking down Cavill Avenue king-hit pretty 18-year-old Natalie Montoya in the face, out of the blue, as she was standing on the corner with a group of girlfriends. "F--- off, slut," he said, knocking her to the ground and leaving her with a swollen nose and bleeding face.

After the shootings this year at an Amish schoolhouse in Pennsylvania and a high school in Colorado, The New York Times columnist Bob Herbert pointed out, "the killers went out of their way to separate the girls from the boys, and then deliberately attacked only the girls". Herbert describes the attacks in Colorado and Pennsylvania as "hate crimes" against women, "part of a devastating continuum of misogyny that at its farthest extreme touches down in places like the one-room Amish schoolhouse".

From the extreme pornography so easily available on the internet, to rap lyrics that glory in violence against "bitches", to Big Brother's male contestants holding down a woman and "turkey slapping" her, to pedophile fantasy fashions for little girls, the effect is the same. It dehumanises and disrespects women so that any degrading treatment becomes acceptable.

But there is no point in simply demanding that men change their attitudes. It is no coincidence that the rise in misogyny seems to coincide with some women's rejection of any self-respect or modesty. Underwear-eschewing paparazzi favourites such as Hilton, Spears and Lohan have become role models for young girls all over the world, as Shelley Gare points out in her new book, The Triumph Of The Airheads.

When you think about it, the misogyny sparked on the internet by the It girls' latest antics makes a sort of sick sense. Why would a man respect a woman who doesn't respect herself, when most of society's traditional protections for women have been torn down, often by women themselves, in the name of freedom? But freedom to flash your genitalia to the world is not liberating. It's just sad and ugly, reducing womanly allure to the level of a baboon and giving men no reason to behave well.

Source




"CARING" PUBLIC HOSPITALS

Three stories from the one day in one State:

Kicked out (1)

A distressed woman was found close to collapse on a highway after hospital staff who treated her for a suspected heart attack refused to help her get home. The woman, 52, tried to walk the 20km from Atherton Hospital to her home near Yungaburra after explaining to staff she had no money and no one to pick her up. A Good Samaritan picked her up as she stumbled along the highway in her slippers and nightclothes in 30C heat. "They just don't seem to care any more," said the woman, who did not want to be identified. "The philosophy seems to be to get people in and get them out as quickly as they can."

An ambulance took the woman to Atherton Hospital after she woke with severe chest pains at 1am on Saturday, November 4. Doctors ruled out a heart attack, but could not identify the cause of her illness. She was told to go home later in the day.

"I went to the emergency counter and asked if they could help me get home," the woman said. "I didn't have any money on me for a taxi, my brother and daughter were overseas and my son was in Iraq. "I asked if an ambulance could take me, but she told me, 'No, the ambulance service is not a taxi service, madam'. I said I would just have to walk home. She shrugged her shoulders and turned her back."

The woman had walked for more than an hour when passing motorist Gail Fleming saw her in distress and offered her a lift. Ms Fleming, 58, from Atherton, said the woman was clutching her chest when she saw her walking up a hill about 4pm. "It was very hot and she was in a lot of stress," Ms Fleming said. "She just started crying straight away."

One Nation MP Rosa Lee Long raised the case in State Parliament last week to try to get more resources for hospitals in her Tablelands electorate. "She would never have made it home," Ms Long said. "These kinds of events cry out for an urgent roll-out of the promised extra funding, not in four or five years or even longer, but immediately."

Source




Kicked out (2)

Grandmother Gaynor Ralph was kicked out of Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital with no shoes, no money and nowhere to go. Mrs Ralph, 75, was put in a taxi in only a hospital gown and her nightie despite telling staff she didn't know her son's new address. She had to be taken to a police station until officers could contact her son Charles. "I was appalled," he said yesterday. "She was told she had to go, even though they knew she had nowhere to go to." Mr Ralph was so stunned by his mother's treatment that he took pictures of her in the hospital gown after picking her up from the police station.

His mother had been in Europe when a medical emergency forced her to return to Australia for immediate treatment. She was flown to Brisbane because that's where her son lives. Mrs Ralph spent 60 hours in transit before being taken to the PA Hospital in a wheelchair with suspected deep vein thrombosis on Saturday, November 4. She was kept in hospital overnight, but a doctor examined her the next morning and told her to go home. Hospital staff gave her a taxi voucher and sent her packing.

"I had moved house and she didn't know where I'd moved to," Mr Ralph said. "Her mobile phone (battery) was flat and she didn't have any money because the hospital told us not to leave her with any valuables for security reasons."

Hospital staff said they were unable to reach Mr Ralph on his mobile phone, but police had no such problem. "I left late the night she was admitted, telling them I'd be back in the morning," Mr Ralph said. "As I arrived at the hospital I got a call from the police station to say that she was there. "I arrived at the station to find her in an ill-fitting hospital gown with no footwear."

His mother was in need of further treatment and should have been allowed to stay in hospital at least until he arrived, Mr Ralph said. "They knew I was coming and they still kicked her out," he said. "They will claim she agreed and she was willing to go. But they told her she had to go. "All she did as a frail old lady was comply to their demands." Mrs Ralph recovered at her son's home until she was well enough to return to her home in Tasmania.

State Opposition Health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek, who has been seeking answers for the Ralph family, said lives were being put at risk because under-funded hospitals were evicting patients too early. "It all comes back to 'bedlock'. Doctors are feeling pressure from above to clear the beds," he said.

Source




Wrong kneejoint fitted -- deliberately

An Ipswich grandmother who waited five years for a knee replacement has been told she needs the operation again -- because surgeons fitted the wrong joint. Marilyn Hohnke, 62, has been suffering pain in her left knee since 1999, when she was first put on the waiting list for surgery at the Royal Brisbane Hospital. She expected the operation in December 2004 would fix her problem, but was disappointed to find it made no difference. Now an examination has revealed her knee joint will never work properly because it is too big for her.

Mrs Hohnke is furious to be back on the waiting list for a second time, and says she feels let down by the health system. "It was terrible having to wait five years for this operation in the first place, but finding out that it was a complete waste of time is just so discouraging," she said. "I don't know how the doctors could have made such a mistake. "I was shocked when they told me that it was the only joint available on the day of the operation so they had to use it. "I am now at the back of the queue again and don't know how long it will be before I get it fixed. "In the meantime, I can't walk properly because it causes me great discomfort."

She has now opted to have the second knee operation at Ipswich Hospital and has been on the waiting list since May. Bosses at the Royal Brisbane Hospital said Mrs Hohnke was considered too young for the knee replacement in 1999, even though it was causing her pain. They said the operation had been a success...

Source

Government "Child Welfare" system leaving young children to die

One hundred and seventeen children, most of them too young to speak or even crawl away from the horrors of their miserable lives, died last year because our society had more important priorities. All but eight of these children of drug addicted, alcoholic, violent or just plain neglectful parents had been reported to the Department of Community Services by people who cared about them. But in a scathing review, the NSW Ombudsman this week found that these children were left to die by a system where reports of abuse were either never followed up or neglected. Here are just a few examples that make you despair about just what sort of society we have now become:

A SEVEN-month-old baby died in suspicious circumstances because she was left in the care of a drug-abusing mother who ignored a DOCS agreement to stop using drugs and take the child to paediatric appointments;

AN 18 month old died because DOCS took six days to respond to an urgent request to intervene because the parents were refusing to take the sick baby to hospital;

THREE children died from methadone poisoning; and

A NINE year old was skipping school to care for a younger sibling when their mother was drunk and drugged. The younger sibling died.

These children were left in the care of their mother even though DOCS histories showed the mother was mentally ill, attempted suicide and overdosed several times. Half the children who died had parents who were drug and alcohol abusers. Most of the children were under five when they died and two thirds of them were babies not even one year of age. They are stories so horrible and tragic it makes it hard to believe they could occur in a country like Australia. They are stories that underline the failure of a welfare system so obsessed with not repeating the mistakes of the stolen generation [i.e. Most of the kids were black] that it is prepared to let children die rather than remove them from clearly unsuitable parents.

And it shows how the Federal Government's bold new policy to quarantine up to 40 per cent of the welfare payments of drug, alcohol and gambling addicted parents so they can be spent on food and clothing for their children attacks the problem from the wrong end. In many cases these children should never have been left in the care of these parents in the first place.

Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia chief Donna Bull says drug users driven by their addition will not spend welfare vouchers on food and clothes for their kids but will trade them with their drug dealers for drugs. And if they can't do this their drug addiction won't disappear simply because the money dries up, they'll just turn to crimes such as bag snatching, shoplifting and burglary.

While taxpayers are understandably keen to see the $28 billion they contribute to family payments every year is actually spent on children and not drugs, alcohol or gambling, Brough's policy won't deliver the results they want. What's right about the Brough approach is its demand that parents exercise some sense of responsibility in return for their money.

Its true many of these parents are themselves victims of appalling childhoods, but until we demand that they shape up instead of indulging them as victims we'll never break this vicious cycle. Good welfare policy is like good parenting. There needs to be clear boundaries on what is acceptable behaviour and if the rules are breached there must be clear, consistent and sensible consequences. If parents can't quit drugs, alcohol and violent behaviour towards their kids then the children must be removed from their care for their own safety. The NSW Government's new parent responsibility contracts go some way to enforcing such a policy but they are not enough on their own.

The Ombudsman's report shows a lack of staff and resources in DOCS is one of the main reasons many child abuse cases aren't investigated. He says poor judgment by the DOCs officers who get around to investigating these cases means often nothing sensible is done to protect the children. Even when these cases are followed up there's not enough public housing or health and welfare workers to provide the care these kids need.

Donna Bull says the lack of resources doesn't stop there. Even when these drug addicted parents want to turn their lives around, one third of them can't because of a chronic lack of places in drug rehabilitation programs. Forcing parents to spend welfare vouchers on food and clothes won't save these children - they need something much more important than money - they need someone to love them and care for them.

Source







The Australian aristocracy is IQ based

Australia has a new upper class based largely on IQ. It comprises a larger proportion of all people than the old upper class but its members have many similarities with that class, in both their lifestyle and their separation from the rest of the country. The reason for the rise of these "aristos", as I'll call them for want of a better word, has been the development of an economy where IQ is more directly rewarded with high income than ever before. These days you simply won't get into a big firm of accountants or lawyers, or a merchant bank, or the upper reaches of any successful corporation, unless you're smart, as measured by the education system. Family background matters less to advancement than ever before. We live in a meritocracy, a word coined by the British author Michael Young in his satirical 1958 novel The Rise of the Meritocracy.

The wealth of the aristos has been well-documented and is reflected in statistics showing the growing inequality of income in Australia. Less noted is the lifestyle the aristos have been able to adopt with all that money. Many of the following traits are shared by lots of other Australians, but the aristos possess them to a far, far greater extent. The crucial element in the aristo lifestyle is the outsourcing of domestic chores. The new aristos have lots of servants, they just don't employ them directly. They outsource a great deal of the care of their children, their houses and gardens, and their cooking (by eating out a lot). The aristos' lives depend on an army of low-paid child-care workers, dishwashers, cleaners, gardeners, car valets, security guards and drycleaners. Not to mention caterers, tutors, fitness coaches, life coaches, dressmakers, children's entertainers, psychologists and financial advisers.

One of the biggest social changes in my lifetime has been the rise of a group of people (I'd guess up to 5 per cent of the total) whose lives depend on servants in a way that was unimaginable a generation ago. I recall older people telling me in the early 1980s that cafes would never become popular. They couldn't see why people would want to just sit around and drink expensive coffee, and in any case, they believed Australians would feel uncomfortable being waited upon by their fellow citizens. In retrospect, these people were living in an egalitarian Dreamtime that has pretty much passed - although most of us don't like to admit it. Few wealthy people bemoaning child-care difficulties like the suggestion that this is a modern equivalent of the Victorian middle class's "servant problem".

The parallel universe for the wealthy is most obvious in the expansion of private health care and education. Leisure is also important. Thirty years ago, most Australians spent their time off doing the same sorts of things, and where it involved public space or travel, the classes tended to mix. Now the rich live separate lives. That old British feature, possession of a place in the country, is common among the new rich, as is the local variant, a place on the coast.

The aristos are keen on expensive trips abroad, and considerable ingenuity has gone into ensuring they need not mix with ordinary Australians on these occasions. Educated people's disdain for the package tour has been overcome by the development of cultural travel tours, of no appeal to the masses. It's a neat way of social organisation. Well-educated Australians today have more in common with well-educated people from other countries than with other Australians. Was it ever thus? On the whole, no.

We might be acquiring a new upper class not just of money, as in the old days, but of genes. Wealthy men are not only more likely than before to be highly intelligent, they are more likely than before to choose a wife who is also smart, partly for financial reasons (she'll be good earner, too) and partly to give their children the best chance they can of being intelligent, too. So high IQ is being sucked into one small group.

Because IQ tends to revert to the mean (that is, most children of really smart parents will be less smart than their parents, although still above average), the new aristocracy will have to replenish its gene pool from time to time by marrying outsiders, just as the old aristocrats had to boost their money pool by marrying the occasional merchant's daughter. As a consequence, these days poor people with brains and energy are quickly assimilated into the establishment. Today, a young Ben Chifley would not have to leave school early and languish as an engine driver. As an emotionally stable youth of high intelligence, he would almost certainly finish school, study law at a good university and get a job as research officer with a union, or with Macquarie Bank.

Source





No substitute for new dams

As any engineer will tell you, when it comes to water infrastructure, Sydney cannot avoid building a new dam indefinitely. Everything else - desalination, recycling, stormwater retention, rainwater tanks, reducing demand, water trading, ruining irrigators - is tinkering at the edges, buying time until the inevitability of a new dam sinks in, as a growing population outstrips supply. Yet for 30 years politicians of all stripes have been loath to utter the "D" word, for fear of antagonising the green vote.

Debnam [conservative leader] is no exception, refusing to mention dam building as part of any water strategy. Morrison confirmed yesterday that Debnam's shadow cabinet this week ruled out building a dam at Welcome Reef, the Shoalhaven River location identified by water planners of a previous generation. "It is definitely not on the Liberal agenda." By deleting Welcome Reef as an option, Debnam has endorsed a ploy of the former premier Bob Carr to lock up 6000 hectares of land that had been set aside for the dam by our more foresighted forebears. Rather than promising to reverse that shameful decision, Debnam has legitimised easily contested green propaganda which claims Welcome Reef is in a hopeless rain shadow and would destroy endangered species.

The Queensland Premier, Peter Beattie, has shown that advocating a new dam, or even two, does not have to be the electoral poison of conventional wisdom. This week he began to make good his election promise by selling the power retailer Energex to raise $300 million towards the cost of new dams.

Even the NSW Premier, Morris Iemma, bowed to the inevitable last month when he announced the first big dam in 20 years would be built at Tillegra, north of Dungog. Existing dams serving the rapidly growing Central Coast are down to a critical 15 per cent. Debnam's response was to dismiss the dam as a diversionary bluff.

At a national level, the Prime Minister, John Howard, and his water tsar, Malcolm Turnbull, have given the appearance of taking water management seriously, with a new Office of Water Resources and the $2 billion Water Fund to deliver infrastructure. But, again, policy appears to be heavily influenced by the Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists, which was founded and funded by the green group WWF (formerly the World Wide Fund for Nature) and is opposed to dam building. While Turnbull has stressed "no option should be pre-censored", last month he released a discussion paper, Securing Australia's Urban Water Supplies, which effectively ruled out dams as an option.

The paper, prepared by the financial and economic consultancy Marsden Jacob Associates, cites the Wentworth Group as its authority, talking at length about why the construction of major dams is "unlikely in the future". It cites environmental damage and cost, claims the "best sites are taken" and says climate change makes dams less reliable. Meanwhile, dissenting voices in water management are being ignored.

Take Peter Millington, who was the director-general of the NSW Department of Water Resources from 1986 to 1995 and now works as a consultant on water management with the World Bank. While not billing himself as a dam fanatic, he says governments need to acknowledge that "probably" dams have to be part of the solution. "We don't want to stuff up the rivers but people want balance . Sooner or later we will have to build Welcome Reef Dam." Millington spends time in developing countries advising on long-term water planning and then despairs when he comes home "and we're doing nothing". He says there has been "no long-term rational water planning here for at least 15 years". The policy he sees is "Band-Aid, ad hoc stuff".

Then there are the Tamworth engineers and dam advocates Michael Firth and Colin Joyce, who managed to get a meeting with the Prime Minister earlier this year to present their ideas for vast projects across Australia, including more than 10 dams, pipelines, weirs, river diversions and recycled water schemes. Buoyed by what they saw as his enthusiastic response, they travelled around the country at their own expense surveying sites for water infrastructure projects - from the Welcome Reef Dam to an ambitious and probably impossibly controversial inland diversion of the Clarence River. The result is an 83-page document they hope will be taken seriously. They say private companies are keen to get involved in building the infrastructure. All it would take is someone in government to acknowledge dam building as part of the solution to Australia's water problems. "There is plenty of water," Joyce says. "We just need to catch the floodwaters and store them. No one has yet found a better way than a dam."

With an election looming, Debnam had a chance to be bold like Beattie, to show real leadership on the state's most pressing problem. But it seems he has squibbed it, and no amount of clever strategy from Morrison will hide that fact.

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Australian education: An amusing but revealing rant from a Leftist

He points out that poor kids do particularly badly out of an Australian education but neglects to say why: Because the kids of poor parents go to Left-dominated and dumbed-down State schools. Any Australian with a cent to spare (40% of the population) sends his/her kids to a private High School -- where there is some survival of traditional standards

It is not that schools are turning out dumbos. On the contrary. Our students in general are high performers. Of children from 27 countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), Australian 15-year-olds on average ranked second in literacy, sixth in mathematics and fourth in problem-solving in international tests in 2000 and 2003. No, the problem is the system lets down youngsters from disadvantaged backgrounds. For all our pride in being egalitarian, our education system and the way it is organised and financed is unfair compared to many others.

Unpicking the test results reveals that who your parents are and how well off your family is counts for more in Australia than elsewhere. School systems in Canada, Ireland, Finland, Korea, Iceland, Sweden, Austria, Norway and Japan have managed to ameliorate the effects of class and social background much better than the Australian system. And they have done so without sacrificing high performance, says Professor Barry McGaw, a former director of education at the OECD, now at the University of Melbourne. While the average Australian student is almost as clever as the average Finn (who topped the literacy test), the Australian from a disadvantaged background is 1« years behind a Finn from similar poor background. (The US is an example of the worst of both worlds - poor-to-middling results on average and inequitable.)

So while our attention is diverted by the latest education furore - a Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare, or the paucity of dates to be memorised in history - the real problem has slipped under the radar. We spend too much money on the elite students who do well, and not enough to lift the disadvantaged who tend to drop out in alarming numbers.

While we were dotting the land with flagpoles, our year 12 retention rate was flagging. It is low by internationals standards, stuck at about 75 per cent for a decade, and falling in some states. Meanwhile, 17 comparable countries surpassed the 80 per cent retention rate years ago. One OECD measure shows our upper secondary school retention has slipped to 20th position while Canada, for example, directly comparable to us, is seventh.

As a result, Australia has a large underclass of alienated early school leavers who can't get full-time jobs. Our teenage unemployment rate is worse than the OECD average. In the midst of a boom we have more than half a million teenagers and young adults neither in education full-time nor working full-time. They are on the dole, or in part-time jobs in retail and hospitality. Employers don't want to hire them full-time, however pressing the skills shortage, because they lack adequate education and training.

The Brotherhood of St Laurence and Mission Australia have both drawn attention in recent reports to the huge economic and personal waste of this pool of alienated youth. As Richard Sweet, a former OECD analyst, has pointed out: "Australia seems to have the worst of both worlds: both a relatively high number of young people without an upper secondary qualification or better, and these young people being at a significant disadvantage in the labour market. The result is that Australia's penalty for not completing year 12 or its equivalent is one of the highest in the OECD."

School has to be interesting to keep more youngsters there [And there is nothing more boring than Greenie and politically correct preaching]. What is taught and how it is taught are crucial though I doubt more rote learning of historical dates will do the trick.

But money is crucial, too, and here, Australia does poorly. In 2003 Australia ranked 18th out of 30 OECD countries for education expenditure as a proportion of gross domestic product. It spent 5.8 per cent compared to 7.5 per cent in Korea and 7 per cent in New Zealand. Government expenditure is actually lower - the 5.8 per cent includes private expenditure, which is the third highest in the OECD. Low government expenditure and high private expenditure have delivered a mixed result - high-performing students at one end and a forgotten ill-educated and underemployed class at the other. We could do better if we directed more resources to those who need it. The nation's failure to spread education's bounty to all is a more serious lapse than a student's inability to explain why the Union Jack is on our national flag.

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Labor Party Corruption

Centenary House, the notorious Canberra office building leased by Labor to a federal agency in a massively inflated rent deal brokered by the Keating government, has been re-let for a third of the previous rate. The 15-year lease over Centenary House, which was negotiated in 1992 and has been the subject of two royal commissions, expires in mid-2008, ending a scandal estimated to have cost taxpayers $42 million more than the market rate.

The current owner of the building, Brisbane-based Cromwell Corporation, has negotiated to lease the property to long-term government tenant the Australian National Audit Office frommid-2008 at $385 per square metre - less than a third of the $1300 per sqmrate charged under the original ALP contract. Centenary House was built by the Labor Party for $22 million and leased to the ANAO under a deal that guaranteed rental rises of 9 per cent a year, regardless of market value. The ANAO is currently paying about $1100 per sqm to lease 90 per cent of the building in the suburb of Barton, and that figure will rise to about $1300 per sqm by mid-2008.

Cromwell Corporation bought Centenary House for $35.5 million last year, ending a 13-year thorn in the side for federal Labor. Cromwell national asset manager Paul McDonnell said the group understood when it bought Centenary House that it would be unable to continue charging the ANAO those "well over-market" rents after mid-2008. "We were aware when we bought the property there was going to be a large rental flow for a period of time, and then that would cease when it went back to market levels," Mr McDonnell said in Canberra yesterday.

The original agreement has been the subject of two royal commissions amid Coalition accusations that Labor was fleecing the public service tenants and in turn the taxpayers. Both times Labor was cleared of any wrongdoing, despite royal commissioner David Hunt calculating that the 15-year lease was more than $42 million above market rates.

In a twist to the story, yesterday's Centenary House lease will leave the ALP searching for a new headquarters. Under the new leasing deal, the ANAO will lease all of Centenary House for 10 years, forcing out the ALP which currently leases about 570sqm, or 8 per cent of the building, on a contract that expires mid-next year. Mr McDonnell said the ALP had the option to extend its current lease by one year to mid-2008, but the party had not been given the option of extending that lease further.

ALP national secretary Tim Gartrell said yesterday the party no longer owned the building, but he would not comment further. At the 2004 inquiry into the Centenary House scandal, former ALP national secretary Bob Hogg said the ALP had not received a windfall on the $68million deal. He said high interest rates in the early 1990s led the ALP to lock in a 10-year fixed interest rate deal with the banks at 13 per cent, so the party was unable to renegotiate the rent with the ANAO.

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Mainstream clergy often prefer Greenie faith to God

By Christopher Pearson

Last Saturday's column was devoted to eco-fundamentalism, the new deep-green religion. It may have come as a surprise to some readers who had imagined themselves sceptical agnostics or atheists to learn that they were in the grip of an essentially religious enthusiasm. Some have written in to deny it and others have wondered whether I may have been carried away by a metaphor or trying to taint the greenhouse hypothesis by associating it with superstition.

To answer the last point first, I'm not remotely anti-religious and use the term fundamentalism in a diagnostic rather than a dismissive way. There is a vast gulf fixed between the sceptical, rational approach and a religio-magical view of the world. The crucial distinction is that scientific propositions have to be falsifiable, to be capable of being proved wrong. Religious conceptions of what is true come from one or other form of higher authority (gods, prophets, the zeitgeist) and have to be accepted at face value, without question. They are, by definition, unfalsifiable.

The conviction that greenhouse gas-induced global warming is about to endanger mankind's survival is an article of faith rather than an assertion of science. The parallels with previous apocalyptic movements are readily apparent in Norman Cohn's classic, The Pursuit of the Millennium. That the greenhouse scaremongering is endorsed by so many people with science degrees says more about the state of contemporary scholarship than anything else. For, as Nigel Lawson so powerfully reminds us, the science is not settled and it is dishonest to pretend otherwise. Not only is it dishonest; it's also a betrayal of the West's tradition of reason and tolerance and a retreat into irrationality and dogmatic thinking.

How is it that people with no conscious sense of religious convictions should find themselves enthralled by unexamined and, prima facie, outlandish beliefs? It happens quite easily over time if most of your friends and family take what they see on television or learn at school for granted. Anyone beguiled by ingratiating invitations to help save the planet has a primary responsibility to reinforce the fear that, in one way or other, it's at risk.

Lawson says: "It is not difficult to understand the appeal of the conventional climate change wisdom. Throughout the ages something deep in man's psyche has made him receptive to apocalyptic warnings: 'The end of the world is nigh.' Almost all of us are imbued with a sense of guilt and a sense of sin, and it is so much less uncomfortable to divert our attention away from our individual sins and causes of guilt, arising from how we have treated our neighbours, and to sublimate it in collective guilt and collective sin."

There is a further refinement of bad faith that is worth mentioning here. Those most inclined to assertions of collective guilt and sin are usually those with the least to reproach themselves about. So they can enjoy the catharsis of self-denuciation and the inner certainty of being relatively blameless.

Lawson points out the role of weather in religious meta-narratives from the flood onwards. "In primitive societies it was customary for extreme weather events to be explained as punishment from the gods for the sins of the people, and there is no shortage of examples of this theme in the Bible either, particularly but not exclusively in the Old Testament. The main change is that the new priests are scientists (well rewarded with research grants for their pains) rather than the clerics of the established religions, and the new religion is eco-fundamentalism. But it is a distinction without much of a difference. And the old religions have not been slow to make common cause."

How, you may be wondering, could the old religions and Christianity in particular, make common cause with a pagan apocalyptic cult? Are they not completely antithetical? Where even 30 years ago the answer to that question might have been a resounding affirmative, Australian Christianity has undergone a sea change. Readers looking for a timely account of matters should get themselves a copy of Michael Gilchrist's Lost! Australia's Catholics Today (Freedom Publishing). It is especially instructive about the process by which fashionable add-ons such as socialism, environmentalism and feminism have come to colonise Catholicism's religious orders and eventually the church at large. Gilchrist's analysis is also sufficiently broad-brush so that it can be applied pretty much across the board to the other denominations.

Considering the same phenomena, I'm inclined to an explanation that is rather more radical than Gilchrist's. Where he sees mostly bewilderment and educational or leadership failures, I see an explicit collapse of faith. There has been a problem, at least since the Enlightenment, of ostensibly Christian priests and teachers who - with varying degrees of furtiveness - shared a gnosis, a hidden understanding. Their secret conviction was that Christianity wasn't ultimately true and that the best that could be done was to turn it into an engine of political change, redistribution of wealth and even revolution.

The theological modernists the Vatican tried to suppress at the turn of the 19th century went underground until the 1950s. The de-mythologisers in the Protestant churches were far freer to pursue the modernist project, especially in the groves of academe. It wasn't until the "God is dead" ructions in the '60s that it became suddenly clear how many senior theologians in all the churches no longer believed in the resurrection but still thought themselves entitled to their benefices and to speak in the name of the church on anything that took their fancy.

Apart from those Catholic and Anglican bishops who decline to affirm the Nicene Creed when asked, I have no way of knowing which of them are wolves in sheep's clothing. The charitable thing to do is to assume the best. Perhaps the conversion of so many of them to eco-fundamentalism betokens nothing more than theological lapses, scientific ignorance, susceptibility to pagan superstition or the zeitgeist and perhaps the frailties of age.

It is in these terms, rather than bad faith, that we ought to view last year's position paper on climate change on behalf of the Catholic bishops. It was endorsed by archbishops John Bathersby and Adrian Doyle and bishops Christopher Toohey, Christopher Saunders, Eugene Hurley and Patrick Power. It began with a false assertion: "Rapid climate change as the result of human activity is now recognised by the global scientific community as a reality." It concluded that the least the federal Government could do was to sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Had the bishops considered Australia's national interest and the relative equity of Kyoto's allocated emissions targets? Had they pondered the possibility that Kyoto may have capriciously or corruptly favoured some classes of nations at the expense of others? Had they reflected on the almost entirely symbolic character of signing up in the face of general non-compliance? We can safely conclude that in each case the answer was in the negative and that they were carried away by posture politics. More recently Bathersby told a Brisbane Walk Against Warming rally: "I don't think we can be Christian unless we are ecologically converted." In terms of sheer fatuity and presumption, it was on par with the former Anglican primate Peter Carnley announcing that he didn't think it was possible to be a Christian and a conservative.

The Anglican communion has no shortage of eco-fundamentalists, but the most egregious is the Bishop of Canberra and Goulburn, George Browning. The bishop, who was obliged to resign his see over a sexual affair but was in short order forgiven by a broad-minded diocese where matters of that kind are nowadays deemed not so serious, is, if anything, even more sanctimonious than he was before his lapse became public. In early November he wrote to John Howard and Kim Beazley, telling them that "Australians could not morally vote at next year's federal election for a party that did not have a comprehensive policy on climate change. This is the most serious issue facing global humanity ... We desperately need leaders who can act on this imperative with courage, vision and passion ... We now know that what we are doing is harming the Earth; our living is tilting the balance against life with catastrophic and immediate consequences. We have no mandate to ruin what does not belong to us and our actions are nothing short of apocalyptic." If this is how the bishops talk in public forums, just imagine how much twaddle the average family in the pew must have to endure from younger and less educated clergy.

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The pain of a Greenie judge

Justice Nicola Pain's ruling that the NSW Government must consider the greenhouse gas impacts of all new developments before approving them will be recorded as one of the most ill-considered decisions of the state's Land and Environment Court. When she took up her appointment to the bench in 2002, Justice Pain brought with her baggage stacked with green credentials. The judge's background is as an environmental activist lawyer. She was the principal solicitor with the non-government Environmental Defender's Office, effectively the green movement's legal wing, from 1987 until 1992 and a member of its board for seven years up to 2001. When former premier Bob Carr appointed her to the court, Justice Pain was the EDO's acting director. The move made headlines within the international green movement. This is not the first of Justice Pain's rulings that appear to defy common sense. In September, she approved the development of a brothel in western Sydney despite police evidence that one of the brothel's managers was "unfavourably known" to them. The judge said that "the reputation of a person seeking development consent is not generally a matter for the court to consider in an application of this nature".

On Monday, Justice Pain laid her green credentials on the line in a ruling that could prove devastating for the state's coal and many other industries and pose a giant headache for the Iemma Government in the countdown to the March 2007 election. In a far-reaching decision, the judge found that the director general of the NSW Department of Planning had erred in accepting the environmental impact statement for a new mine proposed for the Upper Hunter. This was because the EIS did not consider the greenhouse impact of burning the 10,000 million tonnes of coal expected to be extracted from the mine each year. Justice Pain fell short of rejecting the application for Centennial Coal's Anvil Hill mine. But in an extraordinary move she then proceeded with a landmark ruling that means all planning approvals in NSW may have to include an assessment of a development proposal's future greenhouse emissions. The court's review of the EIS approval followed a challenge by Newcastle student Peter Gray, a member of the climate change group Rising Tide. Mr Gray's applied to the court to overturn the director-general's approval on the grounds that there was no consideration of the mine's climate change effects.

Justice Pain's ruling is problematic from whatever angle it is examined. Does the judge really imagine that one iota less coal will be burned around the globe or one gram less carbon emitted into the atmosphere if her decision makes it harder for NSW to open new coal mines or expand existing operations? Indonesia, one of the fastest-growing exporters of thermal coal in the world, or South Africa will happily fill any contracts Australia is unable to supply. Recognising this reality, the International Energy Agency has reported that fossil fuels will still be the dominant source of world energy in 2030, with global consumption of coal, oil and gas predicted to increase by about 1 per cent a year. Even more concerning is Justice Pain's apparent use of her judicial authority in what looks like an attempt to dictate government policy from the bench. Climate change is a serious global issue exercising some of the brightest minds of governments, industry, science and environmental experts. The debate has long since advanced from alarm to finding solutions to complex problems. Narrow ideological decisions of the kind produced by Justice Pain aimed at closing down the coal industry mine by mine, pit by pit, contribute nothing to finding the solutions.

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Australian wheat sales to Saddam were no scandal

If anything, the Cole inquiry has shown that our diplomats, far from being crooks, are heroes, writes foreign editor Greg Sheridan

What a load of nonsense this whole non-scandal about AWB [The Australian Wheat Board] is. The Howard Government deserves serious criticism for its one real mistake in this business: setting up the Cole inquiry. That is no criticism of Terence Cole. He has conducted his inquiry forensically and thoroughly. But the process of a commission of inquiry meant that a minor matter became conflated into the greatest scandal in human history.

Let's get a few basic facts clear. The UN Volcker inquiry into the oil-for-food program found that 2250 companies from 66 countries paid commissions to Saddam Hussein's government as part of the program. Much of this has been characterised as corruption. But those very few individuals around the world who lost their jobs over it were accused of real corruption; that is, illegally putting money in their own pockets as part of the scam. No one in Australia has been accused of this.

Not one other country of the 66 named has set up a full, open, judicial inquiry into the goings-on of its corporate and government entities involved. At one level, as The Wall Street Journal editorial page has pointed out, this reflects well on the Howard Government. Alternatively, it could suggest the Government was profoundly ill-advised to set up Cole.

When the UN set up oil-for-food, it understood that the Iraqi government would get some money out of it. The UN could have set up a system in which it took Iraq's oil, sold it internationally and used the money to provide Iraq with humanitarian goods. But Saddam would not wear such a system. He was happy for his people to suffer under international sanctions unless the system allowed his government to get some money. So the UN set up this system in the full knowledge that the Iraqi government would cream off some money. As Jeremy Greenstock, the former British ambassador to the UN, put it: "It was realised that a certain amount of misbehaviour on the Iraqi side was going to happen if they were going to accept this. But the Iraqi government had to agree or it wouldn't work."

The primary responsibility for vetting the contracts under the program lay with the UN. All of which illustrates that too intimate an involvement with the UN is inevitably corrupting. As the war clouds gathered, nobody, on any point in the Australian political spectrum, suggested we should sacrifice our wheat trade with Iraq. This was not an immoral position. The public thought there was nothing inherently wrong about selling wheat. And if we didn't sell the wheat someone else would, therefore our wheat farmers might as well participate in the market as anyone else. This was an entirely pragmatic, sensible approach, utterly characteristic of the Australian people and not remotely anything to be ashamed of. That 2250 other companies from 65 other countries also paid commissions to the Iraqi government suggests it was nearly the universal method of doing business there. Therefore the Howard Government should have referred the matter to the Australian Federal Police to see if any Australian laws were broken and left it at that.

So far the damage to Australia from the AWB scandal has been slight. We have opened up an opportunity for cynical American politicians, themselves the progenitors of almost infinite corruption of the global wheat market (this is another common use of the word corruption, to mean in effect selling subsidised wheat into our markets) to have a shot at Australia. It is highly unlikely that this will amount to anything concrete. Australia has also lost its traditional position in the Iraqi wheat market and AWB has lost some of its share value. But all of this damage has come from the hysteria and wild allegations surrounding the Cole inquiry (which is of course not the fault of commissioner Cole) and not from the actions of AWB itself in the oil-for-food program.

It is important that the Howard Government not rush to structural change of the wheat market in this atmosphere of political hysteria. The fact Labor dropped off AWB after just a couple of questions in parliament yesterday shows the issue has really run its course. The Government should move slowly, deliberately and carefully in reforming wheat marketing arrangements and not let a confected scandal produce bad policy.

Much of the analysis of this business has been wildly unrealistic and often internally illogical. There are many parts of the world where companies cannot do business without paying some form of local commission. Australian companies are obliged to obey Australian law and the laws of the countries in which they operate. It is an extremely bad principle for countries to legislate beyond their jurisdictions.

Would we like the European Union, say, to make it law that European companies operating in Australia must not co-operate with the Australian Defence Force because of its role in stopping refugees from coming here? It's an unlikely scenario, I agree, but it's a truly rotten principle to legislate for other peoples' countries.

The most mistaken comments of all have concerned the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. Over 30years in journalism I suspect I have had as much experience with DFAT as just about anybody. I find them to be an almost universally dedicated bunch. The policy people are nearly uniformly workaholic, obsessively informed about their areas, and the consular people are authentic heroes. As bureaucrats go they are reasonably well paid and they work hard for it. They often work in dangerous and difficult circumstances and I've hardly ever met a career DFAT officer not dedicated to promoting Australia's interests. Think of Lyndall Sachs in Beirut getting nearly 5000 Australians evacuated in a fortnight. Think of the mid-rank Bali consular officer coping with the second Bali bombing, working frantically all night to get Australians evacuated, to make sure they got medical attention, to help in any way he could. Think of the former Australian ambassador to Jakarta, John McCarthy, taking a bullet in his car as he drove around Dili picking up stranded Australians, then not making a diplomatic incident out of it but phlegmatically continuing with his work.

Cole exonerates DFAT. DFAT had every reason to believe AWB was a reputable company behaving properly. DFAT is not an investigative, law enforcement agency. What do the critics really want: that DFAT should pre-emptively investigate in minute detail every Australian company operating anywhere in the world before it gives them any support?

The Howard Government has erred in leaving DFAT grievously understaffed and overworked, and in abolishing too many of the thinking positions within the department, which makes it harder to offer creative policy advice. At a petty level, DFAT can drive you mad with bureaucracy (try getting a single page of a publication from a section of DFAT not involved in its production), but while it's unfashionable to say so, overall DFAT is a magnificent national resource. Slandering it over AWB is absurd. But then this whole AWB saga has been theatre of the absurd from the first. Mercifully, the performanceis now over.

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Don't call us Poms, say Poms

The English sometimes refer to Australians as "Colonials", which is clearly derogatory, but now some of them object to being called "Poms", which has no obvious independent meaning

It is the Don Bradman of whinges. A group of thin-skinned English expats wants the word Pom banned, claiming it is a racial slur on a par with the most appalling insults. British People Against Racial Discrimination has gone to the Advertising Standards Board in an attempt to derail the latest Tooheys campaign which mocks the warm-beer-drinking Brits. The ads claim Tooheys' supercold brand is "cold enough to scare a Pom".

The Aussie brewer will fight the complaint, saying BPARDs gripe is as wide of the mark as Steve Harmison's first ball in the Ashes series. "The Oxford Dictionary classes Pom as being derogatory just like wog, wop, dink, dago, coon and abo, it's every bit as bad as the term nigger," BPARD spokesman David Thomason said yesterday.

BPARD, which has a committee of 14 and branches in Perth and Melbourne, does not want Pom banned from general usage but Mr Thomason believes there is an agenda in the media to take the insult to new heights. BPARD has some well-heeled backing from the mother country in the form of the notoriously stuffy English and Wales Cricket Board. ECB chief executive David Collier said in a letter dated October 10: "The ECB continues with our position that we would prefer the terminology not be used".

The Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission disagrees however, saying it is only the descriptive language used in tandem with Pom that carries offence. "The prospect of the use of the word 'Pom' itself inciting hatred against a group appears more remote than the use of words used to describe other racial groups," commission spokesman Paul Oliver said.

The stink is unlikely to deter Australian cricket fans from roasting their English rivals when the second Test begins in Adelaide tomorrow. But even that battle is skewed against the Poms, according to Mr Thomason. "These songs that the Aussie supporters sing talk about we can't get near you because of your smell, your body odour, your bad breath, your buck teeth, your whingeing, have you got some soap," he said. "The worst you hear from the Barmy Army is that Aussies are sheep shaggers and you all live in a penal colony."

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Protecting your right to mock

By Philip Ruddock, Federal Attorney-General

Australians have always had an irreverent streak. Our cartoonists ensure sacred cows don't stay sacred for very long and comedians are merciless on those in public life. An integral part of their armoury is parody and satire - or, if you prefer, "taking the micky'' out of someone.

However, our copyright laws have until now done very little to protect the way people use others works or images to parody and satirise others in the name of entertainment. I have a bill currently before the Senate which will ensure Australia's fine tradition of satire is safe. There will be a parody and satire exception for what the law calls "fair dealing''. In circumstances that are fair, it means that groups like The Fanatics will be able to parody popular songs in response to the Barmy Army. It will mean they can encourage cricketers representing Australia by making a fair parody musical works such The Monkees' Daydream Believer and adding some clever lyrics. I understand the Village People's Go West and Robbie Williams's Rock DJ get the same treatment.

There are other elements to the Copyright bill, that are aimed at ensuring consumers are not treated like copyright pirates and copyright pirates are not treated like consumers. They include:

- Making it legal for people to record TV or radio programs in order to play them at a more convenient time.

- Legalising 'format shifting' of material such as music, newspapers, books - meaning people can put CD's they own onto their iPods or MP3 players;

- Giving schools, universities, libraries more flexibility to use copyright material for non-commercial purposes; and

- Helping people with disabilities access copyright material.

The new provisions in the Bill for consumers and for parody and satire will commence after Royal Assent in mid-December. For parody that will be too late for the second Test, which starts in Adelaide tomorrow, but in time for the Boxing Day test in Melbourne. That means the first place that The Fanatics and other supporters will be able to act without impunity is the Melbourne Cricket Ground. They should be in full voice by the Sydney Test, which starts on January 2. I imagine a few people will be armed with their songbook too.

Given the way the first Test went, the series may be over by then. Either way patriotic Australians will be free to mock the British team without the threat of lawsuits. The Government has ensured the use of copyright material for the purposes of parody or satire will be protected. To retain the law in its current form just wouldn't be cricket.

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AUSTRALIA'S CONTEMPTIBLE POLICE

Three current reports about them below




Police immunity again

Police get kid-glove treatment for their misdeeds

Two policemen have not been prosecuted for shooting a dog after tying it to a tree. An inquiry recommended the men be summonsed under the Animal Welfare Act. But police last night said the officers had been subjected only to "internal disciplinary action".

The first officer fired at the family pet from close range but missed. A shot from the second officer passed through the dog's neck - depriving it of the ability to bark - and cut the rope. The animal ran home to its master with blood pumping out of the entry and exit bullet wounds.

Ombudsman Carolyn Richards, who investigates complaints against Territory Government departments, said she was "appalled". Dog-owning Police Minister Chris Burns said he was also appalled.

The incident happened after police in an unnamed "remote locality" went to a house to arrest a man's son on an outstanding warrant. A struggle started and the family dog bit one of the officers. The police decided the dog was a "vicious animal" and should be put down. The owners said the officers did not fully explain that they were going to kill the animal and they were "coerced" into letting them take it away. The dog was taken into the bush, tied to a tree and shot. After the first shot, the pet was "jumping all over the place". The police found out that the dog had returned home, but decided against seizing it again.

The Joint Review Committee - made up of police and staff from the Ombudsman's office - investigated the case and found the officers had made "misleading" statements and been inhumane. It recommended internal disciplinary action and prosecution.

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Police try to gag Brimble witness

South Australian Police Commissioner Mal Hyde has tried to block a key witness from making claims of corruption within his police force when he testifies at the inquest into the death of Dianne Brimble. The witness, codenamed Mr White, is expected to raise allegations that one of the eight "persons of interest" in the 42-year-old Brisbane woman's death was a drug dealer who was protected by police officers and an outlaw motorcycle gang. Mr White, who is scheduled to give evidence in Sydney today under tight security, is also expected to claim that seven of the men of interest were involved in drug dealing in Adelaide nightclubs, some of which were "often" frequented by police.

Lawyers from the South Australian Crown Solicitor's Office wrote to their NSW counterparts after the corruption allegations became public on Monday and said the claims were "irrelevant" to the inquiry being conducted by Deputy NSW Coroner Jacqueline Milledge. They sought an undertaking the allegations wouldn't be raised in court. "We have no reason to believe that the allegations have any foundation in fact," the letter said. "The Commissioner of Police in South Australia is most concerned that the court proceedings may be used as a forum to spread baseless allegations or allegations based on speculation. "Could you please confirm that any witness statement that makes allegations of police corruption will not be placed on the court record and that (counsel assisting the coroner Ron Hoenig) will not lead such an allegation."

Mr Hoenig objected strongly to Mr Hyde's request to suppress Mr White's evidence, describing it as "impertinent" to the court. "I take exception to the suggestion that your honour has no jurisdiction in dealing with a particular matter when there are methods in place to do so," Mr Hoenig told the court.

Brimble died on the P&O cruise ship Pacific Sky in September 2002 from a toxic dose of the drug gamma hydroxybutyrate, also know as fantasy. The mother of three was photographed having sex with one of the men shortly before she died. It has been alleged her drink may have been spiked with fantasy.

Mr Hoenig foreshadowed parts of Mr White's evidence in court on Monday and said the witness would give evidence "that Matthew Slade had the protection of the Jokers motorcycle club and police officers". Mr Hoenig said Mr White would allege that Mr Slade, Peter Pantic, Mark Wilhelm, Dragan Losic, Luigi Vitale, Letterio Silvestri and Charlie Kambouris were involved in drug dealing in Adelaide nightclubs. Mr White had allegedly seen the eighth man, Ryan Kuchel, "self indulging" on ecstasy in an Adelaide nightclub.

Lawyers for Mr Pantic also tried to delay Mr White's evidence and asked for a suppression order to be put on parts of it. Barrister Peter Hayes said Mr Pantic faced being "pilloried before the press", based on untested evidence that might be "double or triple hearsay".

Mr Hyde said yesterday he wanted to hear the details of any claims of police corruption and determine if they needed to be investigated. South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson told The Australian the Crown Solicitor's Office and Mr Hyde were not trying to prevent Mr White from giving evidence. He said that if the allegations were relevant, there was a "proper forum in which to make those allegations".

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Police union boss to face court

Queensland Police Union president Gary Wilkinson will face contempt charges arising from comments he made in March about the Palm Island inquiry's findings. Mr Wilkinson labelled Queensland's Deputy Coroner Christine Clement's findings into a death in custody as a "witch-hunt".

Ms Clements handed down her report into the death of Palm Island man Mulrunji on September 27, finding police officer Sen-Sgt Chris Hurley was responsible for his fatal injuries.

At a press conference, Mr Wilkinson launched a scathing attack on the findings. Two weeks later Mr Wilkinson apologised, emphasising he had not meant to question the impartiality or personal integrity of Ms Clements or to reflect upon the Magistrate's Court. However, earlier this month the Queensland Attorney-General Kerry Shine initiated contempt charges charges against Mr Wilkinson. In a brief Supreme Court application yesterday, Solicitor General Walter Sofronoff QC, appearing for the Attorney-General, and solicitor Michael Quinn, for Mr Wilkinson, agreed on a consent order for an exchange of documents and outlines of their cases. Justice George Fryberg set the hearing down for two days on March 19 and 20 next year.

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