Australian Politics
A double dissolution?
A double dissolution is a unique Australian parliamentary device which enables a government repeatedly frustrated by the Senate to call an election for the whole Senate and the lower house all at the same time. In normal circumstances, only half the Senate seats are up for re-election. The Rudd government is now in a position to call a double dissolution. But will it? Kevvy himself does not seem keen and you can see why. The Senate is elected on proportional representation and with twice as many seats as usual up for grabs, the Greens would almost certainly get seats from every State, many more than they usually get in half-Senate elections. And Greens mostly take seats off Labor. So the new Senate would probably still not have a Labor party majority. And Kevvy is enough of a wonk to know that without being told. And the Greens are just as opposed to Rudd's climate scheme as the conservatives are -- though for opposite reasons. And big Senate gains would make the Greens even more ornery than they already are, so Rudd would have a very difficult Senate to deal with for at least 3 and probably 6 years. One can hear Rudd saying "Aaaargh!" to that. To date, Rudd has preferred to do deals with the conservatives rather than the very self-righteous and obstinate Greens -- JR
An old-fashioned Leftist bemoans the new moralistic (but not moral) Leftism
See here for research on how and why the Left use moral talk
IT'S popular to call Clive Hamilton, the Greens' candidate in the Higgins by-election, a left-winger. In fact, he's further to the right than the Liberal candidate. It's a sign of the decline of Left politics that a reactionary, pro-censorship sexual moraliser who hates the idea of working people enjoying a higher material standard of living could ever be considered left-wing.
Left-wing politics is based on the idea that all wealth is created by working people. However, the means to produce that wealth -- factories, call centres, bulldozers, production lines and so on -- is owned by capitalists, and so working people must work for a living. Different strands of Left thought call for different solutions, from working people having a larger share of the wealth they create, to working people revolting and taking over society and the economy and running it themselves. But all the different types of left-wing thought have one ideal in common: that working people deserve a better life, with more material wealth if they want it, and more freedom to decide how they should live.
Unfortunately that dream, and the word Left, have been captured by people such as Hamilton, who have more in common with old-style Catholic haters of the modern world than with left-wing supporters of an industrial society and all the benefits that it brings working people.
Hamilton was chosen by the Greens as their candidate in Higgins for his views on climate change and his ability to push that point of view forward in public debate. As is well known, Hamilton has said that "emergency" responses such as the suspension of democratic processes may be necessary to stave off what he sees as the threat of climate change.
This is not because, like many left-wingers, he doubts that parliament will respond to what working people actually need and want, but precisely because he does not trust ordinary working people to support the measures he deems necessary. Hamilton clearly is looking for the man on horseback who can save the environment, something that all genuine left-wingers distrust.
Hamilton is also proud of being the architect of the Rudd government's plan to censor the internet. Once again this reveals a deep distrust of ordinary people. By beating up a moral panic about pornography available on the internet, and by denying people have the ability to make their own moral judgments and decisions about what they look at, Hamilton rejects the self-responsibility that real leftists demand for themselves and others, and instead insists that the government do that job for us. This view is far to the right of even most people who vote for the Liberal Party.
He also hates the sexual freedom that was won by breaking down the old, oppressive social structures that existed before the 1960s. In his essay Rethinking Sexual Freedom he claims that the only two choices available to us are a "moral free-for-all" or the "careful exercise of restraint". Like a wowser complaining about the behaviour of others, Hamilton refuses to agree that people need to work out for themselves if they want to be restrained or not.
Hamilton's book Affluenza reveals his contempt for people who want to enjoy a higher material standard of living. We are, he says, in the "grip of a consumption binge" and our " whole society is addicted to overconsumption".
A real left-winger would celebrate the fact that people have more pleasure, more tools and more opportunities opening up to them than ever before. But Hamilton, like someone far more right-wing than a mere Liberal, hates the idea and wants us to retreat to a simpler age.
It's time that left-wingers stood up for their beliefs, rejected reactionaries like Hamilton and once again proudly said that we support industrial civilisation, the modern world, and more freedom and more material wealth for the working class. Any left-winger voting in the Higgins by-election this Saturday would do well to put Hamilton where he belongs: at the bottom of their preferences.
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Abbott gamble pays off for Liberal Party
LIBERAL Party support has bounced back and Tony Abbott has cut into Kevin Rudd's lead as preferred prime minister within a week of the newly elected Leader of the Opposition spectacularly reversing the Liberals' stand on climate change and rejecting Labor's ETS. As the Liberals declared clear victories in the Melbourne and Sydney by-elections of Higgins and Bradfield, the results were mirrored in Newspoll, which showed Mr Abbott outpointing his predecessor, Malcolm Turnbull, as the preferred Liberal leader.
Mr Abbott exploited the by-election victories and continued his attack on Labor's ETS, calling for the Prime Minister to agree to a series of leadership debates on the costs of emissions trading. Mr Rudd rebuffed Mr Abbott's call and said the Opposition Leader would be better off framing his own climate change policy.
After being Liberal leader for fewer than five days, Mr Abbott was able to claim easy victories in both Liberal-held seats on primary votes on Saturday night while the Liberal Party primary vote across the nation lifted, according to Newspoll.
There were dire predictions that the Liberals could lose the seat of Higgins to the Greens -- Labor did not run a candidate in either by-election -- and that there would be a big swing in Bradfield against the Liberals because of Mr Abbott's opposition to the ETS. After counting continued yesterday, it appeared the Liberals would get a small swing towards them in both seats on a two-party-preferred basis and possibly a small swing against them on primary votes.
The Newspoll survey, conducted from Friday to Sunday, exclusively for The Australian, showed a rise of four percentage points in the Liberals' primary vote, taking the Coalition's support to 38 per cent compared with the government's unchanged 43 per cent. The government still has an overwhelming two-party-preferred vote of 56 to 44 per cent, but Mr Abbott has improved on Mr Turnbull's last position as preferred prime minister and won strong endorsement among Liberal voters.
Support for Mr Rudd as preferred prime minister fell five percentage points last weekend from 65 to 60 per cent and Mr Abbott started on 23 per cent, a rise of nine points compared with Mr Turnbull's 14 per cent the previous weekend. Mr Abbott's standing as preferred prime minister is better than all Mr Turnbull's polling against Mr Rudd since the controversy over the then Liberal leader's use of a fake email from then Treasury official Godwin Grech to attack the Prime Minister.
When Mr Turnbull was first elected, he scored 24 per cent to Mr Rudd's 54 per cent and his best position was 26 per cent to 54 per cent two weeks later in mid-October last year. Mr Abbott's start against Mr Rudd is better than all of the preferred prime minister polls for Brendan Nelson.
Although Mr Abbott has polled well behind Mr Turnbull in leadership surveys, and won the Liberal leadership last Tuesday by only one vote over Mr Turnbull, he outstripped his former leader in almost every category when voters were asked if he would make a better or worse leader than Mr Turnbull. While more people thought the two leaders would be "about the same", Mr Abbott finished ahead of Mr Turnbull 28 to 21 per cent with his biggest lead in demographic groups among women, 26 to 18 per cent, and hose aged 35-49 years, 29 to 21 per cent. But the strongest endorsement for Mr Abbott over Mr Turnbull was among Coalition supporters -- 45 per cent to 10 per cent. The only category in which Mr Turnbull was considered a better leader than Mr Abbott was among Labor supporters, where Mr Turnbull got 32 per cent and Mr Abbott 16 per cent.
Mr Abbott was campaigning yesterday in the coalmining NSW Hunter Valley, and challenged Mr Rudd to a debate on the cost of the ETS. "It will ultimately be up to Mr Rudd, I suppose, (a) to agree and (b) to suggest formats and venues, but I would be very happy to come to the Hunter Valley, Maitland, wherever, Singleton, wherever, and debate this with Mr Rudd. I will not run away from this debate," he said.
In Canberra, Mr Rudd responded to the challenge, saying Mr Abbott had no policy on climate change. "You know, here we are in Australia, one of the hottest and driest continents on Earth. Climate change is the great challenge of our generation," he said. "Despite our differences, Mr Howard had a policy on climate change, as did Mr Turnbull. It was called an emissions trading scheme. I have a policy on climate change. It's called an emissions trading scheme. "Mr Abbott, the current leader of the Liberal Party, does not have any policy on climate change. I'd suggest the current Leader of the Opposition calms down, puts in the hard yards and actually develops a policy on climate change."
Greens leader Bob Brown called to be involved in any debate after the Greens' strong showing in the by-elections, which Labor did not contest. After yesterday's count in Higgins, on a two-party preferred basis, Kelly O'Dwyer, former Treasurer Peter Costello's former chief of staff, increased the Liberal margin from 2007 by 1.6 per cent.
"The public think something is happening to our climate, and they think the government should be doing something about it -- and that's right, we should -- but they are very concerned about this tax," Mr Abbott told the Nine Network.
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Climate backlash hits a government in denial
When Julia Gillard faced the media outside Federal Parliament in Canberra on Wednesday she looked shell-shocked. She then proceeded to give the most jittery, hollow, nonsensical performance of her career. It was pantomime of the lowest order. "Today the climate change extremists and deniers in the Liberal Party have stopped this nation from taking decisive action on climate change," the Deputy Prime Minister said, deadpan, into a thicket of cameras and recorders.
Extremists and deniers. In case anyone had missed the point, she repeated the phrase five times. "Now [we] have been stopped by the Liberal Party extremists and the climate change deniers. This nation has been stopped from taking a major step in the nation's interests by Liberal Party extremists and climate change deniers." This is clearly going to be the mantra the Rudd Government uses to describe anyone who opposes its pointless legislation on an emissions trading scheme.
Gillard used the terms "denier" or "denial" 11 times, pointed words because they carry the connotation of Holocaust denial. The last time that tactic was used in the national debate, after the release of the Bringing Them Home report, it exploded on those who used it.
So this is going to get interesting because the political ground has shifted in the past six months. It is now the Rudd Government that appears to be in a state of denial. And not just the Rudd Government. The election analyst Malcolm Mackerras told The Australian on Friday: "I think there will be a big swing against the Liberal Party in both Bradfield and Higgins [byelections on Saturday]. The effect of that swing will be that the Greens will take Higgins from the Liberals … Higgins and Bradfield would be the electorates in which people most strongly feel resentment at climate change denialists. That is why electing Abbott was a complete disaster. They will get a terrible shock on Saturday night, they really will."
In contrast to this nonsense, Australia's top election expert, Antony Green, predicted on his ABC blog that the Liberals should win both races comfortably. After the results were in, Green found no discernible swing to the Greens. So who is in denial now? Tony Abbott's political manifesto, Battlelines, published on July 28, confronted the subject of climate change. He quoted and supported the Swedish climate dissident, Bjorn Lomborg: "Natural science has undeniably shown us that global warming is man-made and real. "But just as undeniable is the economic science, which makes it clear that a narrow focus on reducing carbon emissions could leave future generations lumbered with major costs, without major cuts in temperatures."
Abbott reiterated this position at his first press conference as leader on Wednesday: "I think that climate change is real and that man does make a contribution … [But] the last thing we should be doing is rushing through a great big new tax just so that Kevin Rudd can take a trophy to Copenhagen."
Abbott is thus neither an extremist nor a denier on climate change. He is a sceptic about emissions trading schemes. It is a defining difference, because there is much to be sceptical about. The Greens, in voting down the legislation, said they would rather have no scheme than this scheme. At the other end of the analysis spectrum, the noted business commentator Robert Gottliebsen wrote: "Finally the full horror of Kevin Rudd's carbon trading legislation for business is starting to dawn on some Liberal Party politicians."
The public mood has also shifted. There is now majority support for waiting until after the Copenhagen climate summit this month and the setting up of a global template for action.
The upswelling of grassroots opposition to the Rudd's ETS was impressive in both its scale and vehemence. Here, too, there has been a great deal of denial. When I wrote last week that more than 400,000 emails had been sent to Coalition members urging them to vote down the ETS, some people commented that this was a bogus number and a bogus campaign, driven by the technology of mass emailing. This, too, is wishful thinking. As the Liberal senator Cory Bernardi explained: "These are not spam emails. They are not like the junk mail campaigns that the Greens run and Get Up! run. These are real people writing about their personal situations." Coalition members have been logging the email traffic because it is a precious electoral resource, and most of the emails are individually written, not group mail. I've looked at hundreds of them. "I've never seen any like it," Bernardi said. "My office has received more than 10,000 emails. When I put an online petition against the ETS on my website last month I got 4818 responses in about 60 hours. Most of my colleagues have seen traffic like this."
The point Gillard missed in her "extremists and deniers" pantomime was that her government had failed dismally to explain its legislation to the public. People crave authenticity in their elected representatives, not spin. Thus the unlikely hero to emerge from the Liberal carnage last week was Ian Macfarlane, the man with a gravel pit for a larynx. People love authenticity and loyalty and Macfarlane has these qualities in spades. He should be promoted when Abbott remakes his shadow ministry.
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Turnbull shows his colours
Just another Left-leaning elitist. Probably bitter that he chose the wrong party to further his ambitions. He has in effect joined the Labor party now. Americans would call him a RINO. Australians will say that he never was a fair dinkum conservative. He's not fair dinkum in general as far as I can see: Just a poser and an ego
MALCOLM Turnbull has today described new Liberal leader Tony Abbott's views on climate change as "bulls**t" and vowed to cross the floor and vote with Labor when the legislation is brought back to Parliament next year. The former Liberal leader this morning posted a blog via the website Twitter where he pledged to tell a few “home truths about the farce that the Coalition's policy, of lack of policy, on climate change has descended into”.
His intervention follows reports today that the opposition treasury spokesman Joe Hockey attacked Mr Abbott's plans for a climate change switch at a shadow cabinet meeting two weeks ago, warning it would cost over $50 billion.
Mr Turnbull said today that while a shadow minister Mr Abbott was never afraid of speaking bluntly in a manner that was at odds with Coalition policy. “So as I am a humble backbencher I am sure he won't complain if I tell a few home truths about the farce that the Coalition's policy, of lack of policy, on climate change has descended into,” he said. “First, let's get this straight. You cannot cut emissions without a cost. To replace dirty coal fired power stations with cleaner gas fired ones, or renewables like wind let alone nuclear power or even coal fired power with carbon capture and storage is all going to cost money. “To get farmers to change the way they manage their land, or plant trees and vegetation all costs money. “Somebody has to pay. “So any suggestion that you can dramatically cut emissions without any cost is, to use a favourite term of Mr Abbott, `bullshit'. Moreover he knows it.”
Mr Turnbull said the whole argument for an emissions trading scheme as opposed to cutting emissions via a carbon tax or simply by regulation is that it was cheaper. “In other words electricity prices will rise by less to achieve the same level of emission reduction,” he said. “It is not possible to criticise the new Coalition policy on climate change because it does not exist. Mr Abbott apparently knows what he is against, but not what he is for.”
Mr Turnbull goes on to observe that, “the fact is that Tony and the people who put him in his job do not want to do anything about climate change”. “They do not believe in human caused global warming. As Tony observed on one occasion “climate change is crap” or if you consider his mentor, Senator Minchin, the world is not warming, it's cooling and the climate change issue is part of a vast left wing conspiracy to deindustrialise the world,” he said. “Now politics is about conviction and a commitment to carry out those convictions. The Liberal Party is currently led by people whose conviction on climate change is that it is “crap” and you don't need to do anything about it.
“Any policy that is announced will simply be a con, an environmental figleaf to cover a determination to do nothing. After all, as Nick Minchin observed, in his view the majority of the Party Room do not believe in human caused global warming at all. I disagree with that assessment, but many people in the community will be excused for thinking the leadership ballot proved him right.”
Mr Turnbull said voters should remember that Nick Minchin's defence of the Howard Government's ETS was that the Government was panicked by the polls and therefore didn't really mean it. “Tony himself has in just four or five months publicly advocated the blocking of the ETS, the passing of the ETS, the amending of the ETS and if the amendments were satisfactory passing it, and now the blocking of it,” Mr Turnbull said. “His only redeeming virtue in this remarkable lack of conviction is that every time he announced a new position to me he would preface it with “Mate, mate, I know I am a bit of a weather vane on this, but ...”
The former Liberal leader said “we have an Opposition Leader who has in the space of a few months held every possible position on the issue, each one contradicting the position he expressed earlier”. “Many Liberals are rightly dismayed that on this vital issue of climate change we are not simply without a policy, without any prospect of having a credible policy but we are now without integrity. We have given our opponents the irrefutable, undeniable evidence that we cannot be trusted,” he said. “Not that anyone would doubt it, but I will be voting for the ETS legislation when it returns in February and if my colleagues have any sense they will do so as well.”
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Monday, December 07, 2009
Sunday, December 06, 2009
New conservative leader challenges Prime Minister to debate climate change
Rudd is too smart to get sucked into that one -- he knows he will lose -- but a refusal will undermine his credibility
FEDERAL Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has challenged Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to a series of public debates on climate change.
The Government plans to re-introduce its emissions trading scheme (ETS) legislation into Parliament when it resumes in February, after the bills were defeated in the Senate last week.
Mr Abbott says most people want more information on the scheme. "That's code for saying that they don't understand it," he told the Nine Network on Sunday. "I'd like to challenge the prime minister to a series of public debates on this subject before Parliament comes back. "This big emissions tax, it's going to be not just for this year or next year, it's going to be forever if it comes in, and it shouldn't come in with(out) the public understanding exactly what it means."
Mr Abbott said the debates could be in a town hall and broadcast to the public or beamed live from a television studio. "We'll debate it up hill and down dale, we'll debate it once, twice, three times, four times, however many times is necessary until the public feel that they have had their questions answered to their satisfaction," he said.
Referring to former federal opposition leader John Hewson's inability to explain a Goods and Services Tax (GST) to the public, Mr Abbott said: "Perhaps he (Mr Rudd) can explain what the emissions tax will do to the price of a birthday cake".
Mr Abbott said he was prepared to allow the prime minister to choose the debate venue. "It's really up to him but he can't and shouldn't run away from explaining fully this great big new tax to the Australian public," he said.
He said Mr Rudd often sounded more like a public servant in a seminar than a "retail", or one-on-one, politician. "But look, I don't under-estimate him. He didn't get to be the prime minister by being foolish or by lacking the ability to communicate and I'm sure he would give a good account of himself."
Citing comments from Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) board member and economist Warwick McKibbin, Mr Abbott said Australia could reduce its carbon emissions by at least five per cent without an emissions trading scheme (ETS). "I haven't said it will be cost-free ... but I think there are all sorts of ways of paying for this that don't involve a great big new tax that we will live with forever," he said.
"Don't assume that I want regulation, what I want is appropriate incentives. "You could have a fund that would directly purchase emission abatements and that would be a lot less than the $10 billion or $12 billion a year money-go-round which Labor is proposing." Mr Abbott said tree planting and more energy-efficient buildings could make a significant contribution to slashing carbon emissions.
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"There's no such thing as right and wrong" bears fruit
Huge rise in assault, drugs at schools as students are taught that everything is relative
NEW South Wales principals have reported more than 500 cases of serious assaults, threats and drug use in public schools this year. More than 109 students were caught bringing firearms, knives and other weapons to school in the first two terms of this year - up 300 per cent compared to the same period five years ago. The 526 cases of serious offences were logged by the Education Department's school safety and response unit hotline, a 24-hour line offering support and advice for principals. The number of students reported with illegal drugs has risen sharply - from nine in 2005 to 60 this year. South Western Sydney and the NSW north coast were the worst offending regions and accounted for 38 per cent of all drug busts.
NSW Parents and Citizens' Federation spokeswoman Helen Walton said there were anecdotal reports of students bringing heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and the drug ice to school. "I think people are silly if they're blind to the fact that it does exist," she said. "It really does happen. It's not just a one-off as some people seem to think. Anybody who turns a blind eye and says it won't happen in our school is just leaving themselves open to be very disappointed."
Ms Walton said the department needed to conduct an on-going review of their programs to address the issue of drug use in schools. "The department needs to make sure the programs are aimed at preventing this violence. Let's make it on-going and let's make it based on the needs over a period of time."
The figures, released quietly on the department's website last month, reveal assaults on students and teachers continue to be a major issue. Schools in south-western and western Sydney recorded the highest number of assaults and threats. In an incident earlier this year, an argument between two teenage boys over a female that began on the Internet spilled over at school when one held a knife to the other's throat. In another case, a mother allegedly paid a student to harm a Year Three boy who had been bullying her son. She also made threats towards the principal of the school.
The statistics don't include the death in August of 15-year-old Jai Morcom at Mullumbimby High School during a brawl over the right to sit at a playground lunch table.
Despite more than four in five schools not recording any serious incidents, 52 filed at least three cases of criminal behaviour. NSW Public School Principals Forum chair Cheryl McBride denied there has been a significant spike in school violence. She said only an "incredibly small percentage" of students were at fault, considering more than 735,000 students attended public schools. "Does this 109 number signal a great concern for us as school principals? No, because it's such an infinitesimal part of the population," Ms McBride said.
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Crammed Christmas Island centre to cost extra $45m
Christmas Island will cost the Federal Government $45 million more than it budgeted for this year as the overstretched detention centre is expanded to house hundreds more asylum seekers. The Immigration Department said this week it would boost capacity on the island to hold as many as 2200 asylum seekers, more than double the permanent population. A new compound for 400 men will be completed at the high-security complex by March. There are plans to house asylum seekers in tents until then. "The tents may be used for accommodation or for recreation and education activities," a department spokesman said.
The extension provoked an angry response from the co-ordinator of A Just Australia, Kate Gauthier. Asylum seekers could be supported in the community for a fraction of the price, or $56 a day, she said.
After the budget, the Immigration Department was given an extra $34 million for infrastructure expansion on Christmas Island. It was also topped up for an additional $11 million in running costs, 2009-10 portfolio additional estimate statements showed. "That $45 million is throwing good money after bad," Ms Gauthier said. "When the Government came in, it agreed detention on Christmas Island was a bad policy but said it was obliged not to waste taxpayers' money and use the facility if they needed it. Now they are going one step further."
The detention centre was built by the Howard government to house 800 people but lay dormant until boat numbers began increasing last year. Despite numerous calls to process asylum claims on the mainland, Labor has adhered to an election promise to keep boat arrivals offshore.
The Australian Human Rights Commission said yesterday it was concerned about the level of community support and services available to people held on the small island. "Increases in numbers, of course, exacerbate our concerns," the president, Catherine Branson, said. "The detention centre itself was designed to accommodate a certain number so to have it now modified to take a larger number raises issues we would like to know more about."
Some dongas from the now closed Baxter detention centre had arrived on the island and more would follow, the Immigration Department said.
A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister said asylum seekers would be brought to the mainland if the island filled up.
The Opposition said more beds would not stop the dangerous and criminal activities of people smugglers. "The Government must reintroduce measures and messages that make it clear people smugglers will not be tolerated as the de facto selectors of Australia's newest residents," the immigration spokeswoman, Sharman Stone, said. The Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, said he supported former leader Malcolm Turnbull's pledge to reintroduce temporary protection visas.
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Yet more government meddling in people's lives proposed
Walk the dog or face time behind bars
PET owners could be punished for not walking their dogs, under radical new laws being proposed by the RSPCA. Under the legislation, they would have to regularly exercise dogs, ensure animals are not kept chained up and give their pets adequate food and water.
If the proposal becomes law, dog and cat owners across Australia would face prosecution, fines of up to $12,000 fines for animal cruelty and magistrates could consider jail in extreme circumstances.
Dr Hugh Wirth, head of RSPCA Victoria, is one of four experts the Federal Department of Agriculture's welfare division has appointed to draft national animal welfare guidelines. "The draft will tell people what they have to do rather than what they want to do," Dr Wirth said. "The new standards would be regulatory, therefore a breach of the standards is a breach of the law." The proposed new laws are designed to formalise the national code, which states dogs must be walked at least once a day.
Dr Wirth said jail sentences would not be handed out for a first offence, but it would something available for magistrates to consider. "I would be amazed if a magistrate ordered jail time on the first offence, but, like every other offence under cruelty legislation, jail is an option," Dr Wirth said.
The proposed laws would be designed to help overcome the problems animal inspectors have had penalising bad owners. The working party is designed to create a national standard, but ultimately the laws would be have to be passed by State Governments.
A spokesman for the federal Department of Agriculture said the working group was one of six set up to look at animal welfare. "One of the goals of the Australian Animal Welfare Strategy is to develop national standards and guidelines for the care of different kinds of animals," the spokesman said. "The states and territories are ultimately responsible for legislating for animal welfare, not the Commonwealth."
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Rudd is too smart to get sucked into that one -- he knows he will lose -- but a refusal will undermine his credibility
FEDERAL Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has challenged Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to a series of public debates on climate change.
The Government plans to re-introduce its emissions trading scheme (ETS) legislation into Parliament when it resumes in February, after the bills were defeated in the Senate last week.
Mr Abbott says most people want more information on the scheme. "That's code for saying that they don't understand it," he told the Nine Network on Sunday. "I'd like to challenge the prime minister to a series of public debates on this subject before Parliament comes back. "This big emissions tax, it's going to be not just for this year or next year, it's going to be forever if it comes in, and it shouldn't come in with(out) the public understanding exactly what it means."
Mr Abbott said the debates could be in a town hall and broadcast to the public or beamed live from a television studio. "We'll debate it up hill and down dale, we'll debate it once, twice, three times, four times, however many times is necessary until the public feel that they have had their questions answered to their satisfaction," he said.
Referring to former federal opposition leader John Hewson's inability to explain a Goods and Services Tax (GST) to the public, Mr Abbott said: "Perhaps he (Mr Rudd) can explain what the emissions tax will do to the price of a birthday cake".
Mr Abbott said he was prepared to allow the prime minister to choose the debate venue. "It's really up to him but he can't and shouldn't run away from explaining fully this great big new tax to the Australian public," he said.
He said Mr Rudd often sounded more like a public servant in a seminar than a "retail", or one-on-one, politician. "But look, I don't under-estimate him. He didn't get to be the prime minister by being foolish or by lacking the ability to communicate and I'm sure he would give a good account of himself."
Citing comments from Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) board member and economist Warwick McKibbin, Mr Abbott said Australia could reduce its carbon emissions by at least five per cent without an emissions trading scheme (ETS). "I haven't said it will be cost-free ... but I think there are all sorts of ways of paying for this that don't involve a great big new tax that we will live with forever," he said.
"Don't assume that I want regulation, what I want is appropriate incentives. "You could have a fund that would directly purchase emission abatements and that would be a lot less than the $10 billion or $12 billion a year money-go-round which Labor is proposing." Mr Abbott said tree planting and more energy-efficient buildings could make a significant contribution to slashing carbon emissions.
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"There's no such thing as right and wrong" bears fruit
Huge rise in assault, drugs at schools as students are taught that everything is relative
NEW South Wales principals have reported more than 500 cases of serious assaults, threats and drug use in public schools this year. More than 109 students were caught bringing firearms, knives and other weapons to school in the first two terms of this year - up 300 per cent compared to the same period five years ago. The 526 cases of serious offences were logged by the Education Department's school safety and response unit hotline, a 24-hour line offering support and advice for principals. The number of students reported with illegal drugs has risen sharply - from nine in 2005 to 60 this year. South Western Sydney and the NSW north coast were the worst offending regions and accounted for 38 per cent of all drug busts.
NSW Parents and Citizens' Federation spokeswoman Helen Walton said there were anecdotal reports of students bringing heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and the drug ice to school. "I think people are silly if they're blind to the fact that it does exist," she said. "It really does happen. It's not just a one-off as some people seem to think. Anybody who turns a blind eye and says it won't happen in our school is just leaving themselves open to be very disappointed."
Ms Walton said the department needed to conduct an on-going review of their programs to address the issue of drug use in schools. "The department needs to make sure the programs are aimed at preventing this violence. Let's make it on-going and let's make it based on the needs over a period of time."
The figures, released quietly on the department's website last month, reveal assaults on students and teachers continue to be a major issue. Schools in south-western and western Sydney recorded the highest number of assaults and threats. In an incident earlier this year, an argument between two teenage boys over a female that began on the Internet spilled over at school when one held a knife to the other's throat. In another case, a mother allegedly paid a student to harm a Year Three boy who had been bullying her son. She also made threats towards the principal of the school.
The statistics don't include the death in August of 15-year-old Jai Morcom at Mullumbimby High School during a brawl over the right to sit at a playground lunch table.
Despite more than four in five schools not recording any serious incidents, 52 filed at least three cases of criminal behaviour. NSW Public School Principals Forum chair Cheryl McBride denied there has been a significant spike in school violence. She said only an "incredibly small percentage" of students were at fault, considering more than 735,000 students attended public schools. "Does this 109 number signal a great concern for us as school principals? No, because it's such an infinitesimal part of the population," Ms McBride said.
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Crammed Christmas Island centre to cost extra $45m
Christmas Island will cost the Federal Government $45 million more than it budgeted for this year as the overstretched detention centre is expanded to house hundreds more asylum seekers. The Immigration Department said this week it would boost capacity on the island to hold as many as 2200 asylum seekers, more than double the permanent population. A new compound for 400 men will be completed at the high-security complex by March. There are plans to house asylum seekers in tents until then. "The tents may be used for accommodation or for recreation and education activities," a department spokesman said.
The extension provoked an angry response from the co-ordinator of A Just Australia, Kate Gauthier. Asylum seekers could be supported in the community for a fraction of the price, or $56 a day, she said.
After the budget, the Immigration Department was given an extra $34 million for infrastructure expansion on Christmas Island. It was also topped up for an additional $11 million in running costs, 2009-10 portfolio additional estimate statements showed. "That $45 million is throwing good money after bad," Ms Gauthier said. "When the Government came in, it agreed detention on Christmas Island was a bad policy but said it was obliged not to waste taxpayers' money and use the facility if they needed it. Now they are going one step further."
The detention centre was built by the Howard government to house 800 people but lay dormant until boat numbers began increasing last year. Despite numerous calls to process asylum claims on the mainland, Labor has adhered to an election promise to keep boat arrivals offshore.
The Australian Human Rights Commission said yesterday it was concerned about the level of community support and services available to people held on the small island. "Increases in numbers, of course, exacerbate our concerns," the president, Catherine Branson, said. "The detention centre itself was designed to accommodate a certain number so to have it now modified to take a larger number raises issues we would like to know more about."
Some dongas from the now closed Baxter detention centre had arrived on the island and more would follow, the Immigration Department said.
A spokeswoman for the Prime Minister said asylum seekers would be brought to the mainland if the island filled up.
The Opposition said more beds would not stop the dangerous and criminal activities of people smugglers. "The Government must reintroduce measures and messages that make it clear people smugglers will not be tolerated as the de facto selectors of Australia's newest residents," the immigration spokeswoman, Sharman Stone, said. The Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, said he supported former leader Malcolm Turnbull's pledge to reintroduce temporary protection visas.
SOURCE
Yet more government meddling in people's lives proposed
Walk the dog or face time behind bars
PET owners could be punished for not walking their dogs, under radical new laws being proposed by the RSPCA. Under the legislation, they would have to regularly exercise dogs, ensure animals are not kept chained up and give their pets adequate food and water.
If the proposal becomes law, dog and cat owners across Australia would face prosecution, fines of up to $12,000 fines for animal cruelty and magistrates could consider jail in extreme circumstances.
Dr Hugh Wirth, head of RSPCA Victoria, is one of four experts the Federal Department of Agriculture's welfare division has appointed to draft national animal welfare guidelines. "The draft will tell people what they have to do rather than what they want to do," Dr Wirth said. "The new standards would be regulatory, therefore a breach of the standards is a breach of the law." The proposed new laws are designed to formalise the national code, which states dogs must be walked at least once a day.
Dr Wirth said jail sentences would not be handed out for a first offence, but it would something available for magistrates to consider. "I would be amazed if a magistrate ordered jail time on the first offence, but, like every other offence under cruelty legislation, jail is an option," Dr Wirth said.
The proposed laws would be designed to help overcome the problems animal inspectors have had penalising bad owners. The working party is designed to create a national standard, but ultimately the laws would be have to be passed by State Governments.
A spokesman for the federal Department of Agriculture said the working group was one of six set up to look at animal welfare. "One of the goals of the Australian Animal Welfare Strategy is to develop national standards and guidelines for the care of different kinds of animals," the spokesman said. "The states and territories are ultimately responsible for legislating for animal welfare, not the Commonwealth."
SOURCE
Saturday, December 05, 2009
ZEG
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is amazed as I am at the elevation of Ms Keneally to the post of Premier of NSW, and has only faint hopes for her.
Australian climate records a mess too
And note that Australian records are a large part of what data we have about one half of the globe (the Southern half)
Australian weather records for an international database on climate change were a "bloody mess", riddled with entry errors, duplication and inaccuracies, leaked British computer files reveal. The Herald found the criticism in a 247-page specialist programmer's log, unearthed among the thousands of files hacked from East Anglia University, which is at the centre of a climate change email scandal. Labelled "HARRY-READ-ME", the log catalogues problems with the raw, historical climate data sent from hundreds of meteorological stations around the world.
The Australian data comes in for particular criticism as the programmer discovers World Meteorological Organisation codes are missing, station names overlap and many co-ordinates are incorrect. At one point the programmer writes about his attempts to make sense of the data. "What a bloody mess," he concludes. In another case, 30 years of data is attributed to a site at Cobar Airport but the frustrated programmer writes: "Now looking at the dates. something bad has happened ... COBAR AIRPORT AWS [automatic weather station] cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!" In another he says: "Getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data ... so many false references ... so many changes ... bewildering."
The log spans four years of work at the university's Climatic Research Unit, the British keeper of global temperature records. The programmer rails that the information has "no uniform integrity".
His criticisms relate solely to the construction of the database and do not question the validity of historical temperature records or analyses that suggest the impact of human activity on global warming trends. "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar co-ordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight."
Michael Coughlan, the head of the National Climate Centre at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, said it was difficult to comment without knowing the source of the raw data. It was unlikely to have come directly from the bureau's centre because unchecked, raw data was rarely requested for climate analysis. The bureau had a network of more than 100 specially selected weather stations ["SELECTED"?? Selected on what grounds? Selected to be near urban heat islands? I'm betting that not many rural stations made the cut.] to monitor climate change, and a century of records from them had been checked. "We've put an enormous effort into developing a high-quality reliable climate record for Australia and all that data is freely available," Dr Coughlan said.
But he said that if the British programmer had been using raw weather data, which is sent around the world in real time for weather forecasting, it would not be surprising that it contained errors. This raw data could have come from countries other than Australia, and would have been difficult to correct without access to information in Australia, such as the original field books. "A computer programmer sitting in England won't have the resources to make those corrections. I can understand their frustrations," Dr Coughlan said. [That naughty raw data again]
The programmer's log is one of the most read files worldwide since the email archives were leaked. The log has been treated particularly sympathetically as it reveals his blow-by-blow frustrations, which seemed to be unfolding as his scientist colleagues, including the head of the Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, appeared to discuss via email ways to avoid freedom-of-information requests for raw data and to denigrate their critics. Professor Jones, who has denied a conspiracy to manipulate global warming statistics as "complete rubbish", has stood down from his post while the university investigates the leaks.
The Herald attempted to contact Professor Jones and spoke to the computer programmer we believe to be the author of the file. The programmer did not deny his name but referred queries to the university's media unit. Professor Jones has not responded. RealClimate, a website run by climate scientists, confirms the log as the work of a specialist charged with upgrading data.
"Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets, will share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be," it says. [Tedious?? It sounds more than tedious. Try complete failure]
SOURCE
New conservative leader changes the game
THIS week Tony Abbott smashed the mould of Australian politics. With the opposition divided and behind, he is forcing Kevin Rudd to an election on climate change, the issue that is supposedly owned by the Labor Party. This is either brilliance or sheer folly.
Abbott does not accept the orthodoxies that have governed politics during the Rudd ascendancy, and this makes him dangerous for both Labor and Liberal. Abbott is an unpredictable and elemental force who defies the modern political rule book. No adviser can tell Abbott what to say or how to say it.
After being elected Liberal leader by surprise, Abbott spent the rest of week throwing political grenades -- supporting individual workplace contracts, backing a nuclear power debate and killing the emissions trading scheme -- while his colleagues held their breath wondering how the public would react.
Abbott has a gift for ridiculing the conventional wisdom. He told Sydney radio station 2GB's Chris Smith the idea that climate change is the greatest moral challenge of the age is "plain wrong", asking what about "man's inhumanity to man". His plan is to force Rudd to re-fight the entire Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme issue, and explain and justify his ETS to the Australian people.
Labor has been rocked by these events. It takes solace in one big idea: that Abbott is an extremist and ultimately unelectable. Yet Labor's control of the political agenda is under threat as Abbott generates a surge across talkback radio. For two years Rudd has carefully identified his likely opponent at the next election: Brendan Nelson, Peter Costello, Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey. Yet it is none of them.
From right field Abbott has emerged, suddenly, shockingly, swinging hard, a knockabout intellectual with a flair for populism that puts Rudd in the shade, a politician who turns his mistakes into confessional honesty, a conviction leader yet a man of humility.
Within hours of becoming leader Abbott mocked himself on radio, repeating his daughter's put-down of him as "a gay, lame, churchie loser". Abbott thinks it's a great joke. Leading a divided party, his recipe for Liberal unity is elemental: attack the government day after day after day. The opening weeks will be vital. If Abbott gets a good start he will only gather momentum. But if Labor can brand him as an unreliable extremist, Liberal woes will intensify.
A natural meeter and greeter, from the fire truck to the beach to the local school, Abbott will talk to the people in the language they know. He depicts Rudd as a remote bureaucratic wonk. "I think he lives in his own world," Abbott says of Rudd. He dismissed Rudd's speech this week to an Australia-Israel function as "just crackers, frankly", saying that facing a nuclear threat from Iran recived a lecture from Rudd about climate change.
Abbott, who once called himself a "Catholic romantic idealist", is branded by his faiths. While this makes him a target, it motivates the moral stands he has taken: stopping Pauline Hanson in her tracks and spending more time inside Aboriginal communities than nearly any other senior politician.
Where Turnbull said the ETS had to be passed for the sake of our children, Abbott dismisses it as a monstrous tax fraud.
Labor can take heart that Abbott was the least popular of the three Liberal contenders and seems hell-bent on making himself a very big target. Yet while his policies are polarising, his personality is engaging. He never walks away from a fight or a conversation, traits that Australians appreciate. Abbott is capable of surprises, just as Mark Latham surprised the Howard government.
With by-elections today in the Liberal seats of Bradfield in Sydney and Higgins in Melbourne -- both with high levels of green consciousness -- Abbott runs the risk of an early setback. His problem is reconciling his anti-ETS crusade with the need to convince urban voters he is serious about climate change action. Operating this week in the fluidity of the huge Liberal reversal on the ETS, he pledged to keep Rudd's emission targets yet rejected any market-based or carbon-tax policy for the 2010 election. It sounds like the Magic Pudding. Here is Labor's opening: the chance to depict Abbott as a populist unfit to run the nation, a good bloke but not a reliable prime minister.
Yet the more Labor attacks Abbott for his irresponsibility, the more it must admit the ETS puts a price on carbon and means higher energy prices, leading back to Abbott's core proposition.
With the most important reform of Labor's first term again rejected, Rudd and Julia Gillard have only one real option: a double dissolution election. Despite endless speculation the outlook is obvious. Rudd now has the grounds for a double dissolution on the original bill. But the fully amended bill (with its extra $7 billion in assistance from the Wong-Macfarlane deal) will be introduced in February and, if defeated twice with a three-month interval, Rudd will have a second trigger on this more preferred bill. That means he can call a double dissolution later in 2010 (the constitutional limitation is by early August), approximating a full-term parliament.
It would be crazy for Rudd to call a snap election now. He needs time to undermine Abbott and get the dissolution on the preferred bill, thereby being guaranteed its passage if he wins the poll.
This is not just a repeat of the 2007 election. John Howard and Rudd agreed on an ETS, so it was never the issue. The 2007 test was climate change credentials and Rudd outshone Howard as a candidate of the future. This time the Rudd-Abbott dispute will be greater and Abbott, unlike Howard in 2007, has political ammunition to fire and a grassroots crusade to lead. He will target Rudd on one issue: explaining the ETS and explaining why Australians need it.
The people will decide this result. For Abbott, the ETS is the prime exhibit of Rudd as a high-taxing, high-spending bureaucrat with Whitlamite overtones, out of touch with people and imposing new cost-of-living pressures on them. The ETS slots perfectly into Abbott's economic campaign.
As an aggressive leader in the Howard mould, Abbott is a mixture of conservative, radical and populist. Many of his opponents misread him. In his recent book Battlelines, Abbott argued "the Federation is broken and does need to be fixed". Convinced the Howard government was punished for the failure of the states, Abbott will hold Rudd to a degree of responsibility for the failures in NSW and Queensland.
As health minister during the Howard era and an unsuccessful advocate for a national takeover of public hospitals, Abbott is guaranteed to put health services at the centre of his campaign by insisting that Rudd is accountable for the condition of public hospitals across the board.
On boat people, he will campaign as a dedicated border protectionist.
On Aboriginal deprivation, he champions Noel Pearson's philosophy and will attack any Rudd retreat to the rights agenda.
On industrial relations, he backs individual agreements on the pre-2005 model before Work Choices.
But there are two urgent lessons Abbott must learn from Howard if he wants to succeed. As a social conservative he must convince people that he does not seek to recast the moral agenda on issues such as abortion and divorce. Second, Abbott's credentials are suspect on economic policy where, too often, he seems inexperienced and unsure, suspicious of markets, reluctant about disciplined costings and inclined to old-fashioned regulation. Labor will gun Abbott on economic policy.
SOURCE
Corrupt public hospital boss
Unbelievable! Charity funds raided for beauty treatments!
THE boss of the Brisbane Royal Children's Hospital approved thousands of dollars worth of luxury beauty treatments for nurses out of the hospital's charity fund for sick children, documents show. RCH district manager Doug Brown is being investigated over a $6500 bill for "pamper packages" at a Brisbane beauty salon, despite department financial guidelines prohibiting staff gifts, The Courier Mail reported.
The Royal Children's Hospital Foundation asks for donations to help support seriously ill kids, buy medical equipment and fund ground-breaking medical research. But an invoice obtained by The Courier-Mail shows Mr Brown approved its funds be used for 65 nurses to enjoy manicures, massages and body polishes at Skin Beautiful in the Queen St Mall two years ago.
The case is part of a wider Queensland Health ethical standards probe into Mr Brown, including his approval of an $8000 interest-free loan of taxpayer funds to a senior bureaucrat for personal overseas travel four months earlier. Mr Brown approved the loan to then director of allied health Gil Hainey despite guidelines banning loans to staff.
The beauty voucher issue allegedly involves a dispute with nurses during the relocation of oncology services from the Mater Children's Hospital at South Brisbane to the RCH at Herston in September 2007.
A group of about eight MCH nurses were allegedly offered six months' free parking at taxpayers' expense in the Metro Car Park at the RCH, despite the entitlement generally being given only to more senior medical specialists. But the plan allegedly backfired when nurses in the Banksia Ward at the RCH, led by a group known as the Oncology Steering Committee, learned of the parking perk and threatened industrial action. Mr Brown, who is listed as the board secretary of the RCH Foundation, allegedly tried to hose down the issue by organising with the nurses for 65 Ella Bache gift vouchers.
The invoice shows the salon billed the RCH for 65 packages costing $100 each, with the 90-minute sessions including eyelash tints, pedicures, manicures, and body polishes. "Approved," Mr Brown wrote. "Foundation to sponsor - oncology consolidation."
Queensland Health yesterday confirmed the bill was paid out of RCH Foundation funds, saying the money initially came from a district account before being reimbursed by the charity.
Director-general Mick Reid said the probe involved "alleged financial mismanagement in relation to car parking and alleged improper purchase of gift vouchers for staff". "Gifts to staff are in breach of the provisions of the Financial Management Practice Manual," he said. "I am treating this matter with the highest degree of seriousness and will act on all recommendations."
Mr Brown did not return calls. The probe is expected to be finalised and handed to the Crime and Misconduct Commission before the new year.
SOURCE
A comeback for Sir Lunchalot?
NSW: The Premier, Kristina Keneally, will reward the dumped ministers John Della Bosca and Ian Macdonald [Sir Lunchalot] by reinstating them to senior positions in a cabinet reshuffle this weekend. Rewarding the plotters against the former premier Nathan Rees will fuel criticism that Ms Keneally is a ''puppet'' of powerbrokers Eddie Obeid, Joe Tripodi, Mr Della Bosca and Mr Macdonald, who all backed her into the leadership against the wishes of Labor's head office.
Mr Obeid is understood to have given guarantees to at least one minister that his position was safe on Thursday, Government sources say. When asked if she was speaking to Mr Obeid and Mr Tripodi about who would be in her cabinet, Ms Keneally did not deny it, saying she was prepared to consult on who she would appoint.
The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, took a shot at the week of plotting saying: ''People of NSW are sick to death of fighting, infighting and divisions in the Government of NSW. The time has come for the NSW Government to get its act together … ''The people of NSW are now expecting better government, and I would suggest the new Premier of NSW get on with the job, and get on with the job as of today.''
Mr Rudd is understood to be unhappy he was talked into defending Mr Rees three weeks ago after the then premier sacked Mr Tripodi, only to see his support evaporate.
After being sworn in as the state's first female premier, Ms Keneally said her Government would be about ''respect'' and protecting the ''vulnerable''. She did not rule out scrapping the $5.3 billion CBD Metro and said Mr Rees's transport blueprint would be reviewed and ''finalised'' before it was released.
Ms Keneally continued to deny accusations she was a ''puppet'' of Mr Obeid and Mr Tripodi and has said she is ''nobody's puppet, nobody's protege, nobody's girl''.
More HERE
Another corrupt Queensland police investigation
POLICE who investigated an alleged cover-up of child sexual abuse at a Queensland Catholic primary school had close ties with teachers and the principal. At least three police officers involved in the investigation last year of a teacher, later charged with the rape and abuse of 13 young girls, had children at the school or spouses on staff at the close-knit Toowoomba school, west of Brisbane.
Police previously said all officers with any involvement at the school were taken off the case at the start of the investigation.
The initial abuse complaint was made by a nine-year-old girl and her father to the school principal in September, 2007. Police were not told and the veteran teacher, 60, remained at the school for another 14 months, during which time he is alleged to have abused another 12 girls, resulting in him now facing 46 charges of rape and indecent treatment. He faces court next year. Police were belatedly alerted in November last year , but only when another child brought her allegations of abuse directly to them.
The Weekend Australian has learned that a detective who last year helped interview the alleged offender and later took the statement of the father -- who made the first abuse complaint to the principal -- is married to another teacher at the school and was treasurer of the parents and friends association that threw a farewell for the alleged pedophile, who retired briefly from the school before being rehired last year. The father told the detective he and his daughter had gone to the principal with abuse complaints about the teacher, involving herself and another girl, more than a year before before he was arrested. Under state law, schools and their governing bodies have a mandatory requirement to report to police any suspicions of sexual abuse by a staff member. Two other police involved in the investigation also had children at the school.
Police last night issued a statement saying they "hold no concerns whatsoever" of any possible conflict of interest among the investigators. But parents of the victims say they were assured by police there had been no prior suspicions about the teacher, who later confessed to some of the abuse.
In February, the state government ordered an investigation into the school because of a series of reports by The Weekend Australian revealing the inaction to the earlier abuse complaint to the principal. In May, the principal became the first person in Australia to be charged under the six-year-old mandatory reporting laws. But this week, he was acquitted after magistrate Haydn Stjernqvist found the principal had met his legal obligations by reporting the complaints to senior officers in Catholic Education.
Documents showed that after the parent's complaint -- coupled with staff allegations about the teacher giving out lollies and putting children on his lap -- the principal suspected he had sexually abused at least one student. Prosecutors accused the principal and Catholic Education of watering down the complaints before taking them to the teacher, who denied the allegations.
SOURCE
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG is amazed as I am at the elevation of Ms Keneally to the post of Premier of NSW, and has only faint hopes for her.
Australian climate records a mess too
And note that Australian records are a large part of what data we have about one half of the globe (the Southern half)
Australian weather records for an international database on climate change were a "bloody mess", riddled with entry errors, duplication and inaccuracies, leaked British computer files reveal. The Herald found the criticism in a 247-page specialist programmer's log, unearthed among the thousands of files hacked from East Anglia University, which is at the centre of a climate change email scandal. Labelled "HARRY-READ-ME", the log catalogues problems with the raw, historical climate data sent from hundreds of meteorological stations around the world.
The Australian data comes in for particular criticism as the programmer discovers World Meteorological Organisation codes are missing, station names overlap and many co-ordinates are incorrect. At one point the programmer writes about his attempts to make sense of the data. "What a bloody mess," he concludes. In another case, 30 years of data is attributed to a site at Cobar Airport but the frustrated programmer writes: "Now looking at the dates. something bad has happened ... COBAR AIRPORT AWS [automatic weather station] cannot start in 1962, it didn't open until 1993!" In another he says: "Getting seriously fed up with the state of the Australian data ... so many false references ... so many changes ... bewildering."
The log spans four years of work at the university's Climatic Research Unit, the British keeper of global temperature records. The programmer rails that the information has "no uniform integrity".
His criticisms relate solely to the construction of the database and do not question the validity of historical temperature records or analyses that suggest the impact of human activity on global warming trends. "I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar co-ordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight."
Michael Coughlan, the head of the National Climate Centre at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, said it was difficult to comment without knowing the source of the raw data. It was unlikely to have come directly from the bureau's centre because unchecked, raw data was rarely requested for climate analysis. The bureau had a network of more than 100 specially selected weather stations ["SELECTED"?? Selected on what grounds? Selected to be near urban heat islands? I'm betting that not many rural stations made the cut.] to monitor climate change, and a century of records from them had been checked. "We've put an enormous effort into developing a high-quality reliable climate record for Australia and all that data is freely available," Dr Coughlan said.
But he said that if the British programmer had been using raw weather data, which is sent around the world in real time for weather forecasting, it would not be surprising that it contained errors. This raw data could have come from countries other than Australia, and would have been difficult to correct without access to information in Australia, such as the original field books. "A computer programmer sitting in England won't have the resources to make those corrections. I can understand their frustrations," Dr Coughlan said. [That naughty raw data again]
The programmer's log is one of the most read files worldwide since the email archives were leaked. The log has been treated particularly sympathetically as it reveals his blow-by-blow frustrations, which seemed to be unfolding as his scientist colleagues, including the head of the Climatic Research Unit, Phil Jones, appeared to discuss via email ways to avoid freedom-of-information requests for raw data and to denigrate their critics. Professor Jones, who has denied a conspiracy to manipulate global warming statistics as "complete rubbish", has stood down from his post while the university investigates the leaks.
The Herald attempted to contact Professor Jones and spoke to the computer programmer we believe to be the author of the file. The programmer did not deny his name but referred queries to the university's media unit. Professor Jones has not responded. RealClimate, a website run by climate scientists, confirms the log as the work of a specialist charged with upgrading data.
"Anyone who has ever worked on constructing a database from dozens of individual, sometimes contradictory and inconsistently formatted datasets, will share his evident frustration with how tedious that can be," it says. [Tedious?? It sounds more than tedious. Try complete failure]
SOURCE
New conservative leader changes the game
THIS week Tony Abbott smashed the mould of Australian politics. With the opposition divided and behind, he is forcing Kevin Rudd to an election on climate change, the issue that is supposedly owned by the Labor Party. This is either brilliance or sheer folly.
Abbott does not accept the orthodoxies that have governed politics during the Rudd ascendancy, and this makes him dangerous for both Labor and Liberal. Abbott is an unpredictable and elemental force who defies the modern political rule book. No adviser can tell Abbott what to say or how to say it.
After being elected Liberal leader by surprise, Abbott spent the rest of week throwing political grenades -- supporting individual workplace contracts, backing a nuclear power debate and killing the emissions trading scheme -- while his colleagues held their breath wondering how the public would react.
Abbott has a gift for ridiculing the conventional wisdom. He told Sydney radio station 2GB's Chris Smith the idea that climate change is the greatest moral challenge of the age is "plain wrong", asking what about "man's inhumanity to man". His plan is to force Rudd to re-fight the entire Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme issue, and explain and justify his ETS to the Australian people.
Labor has been rocked by these events. It takes solace in one big idea: that Abbott is an extremist and ultimately unelectable. Yet Labor's control of the political agenda is under threat as Abbott generates a surge across talkback radio. For two years Rudd has carefully identified his likely opponent at the next election: Brendan Nelson, Peter Costello, Malcolm Turnbull, Joe Hockey. Yet it is none of them.
From right field Abbott has emerged, suddenly, shockingly, swinging hard, a knockabout intellectual with a flair for populism that puts Rudd in the shade, a politician who turns his mistakes into confessional honesty, a conviction leader yet a man of humility.
Within hours of becoming leader Abbott mocked himself on radio, repeating his daughter's put-down of him as "a gay, lame, churchie loser". Abbott thinks it's a great joke. Leading a divided party, his recipe for Liberal unity is elemental: attack the government day after day after day. The opening weeks will be vital. If Abbott gets a good start he will only gather momentum. But if Labor can brand him as an unreliable extremist, Liberal woes will intensify.
A natural meeter and greeter, from the fire truck to the beach to the local school, Abbott will talk to the people in the language they know. He depicts Rudd as a remote bureaucratic wonk. "I think he lives in his own world," Abbott says of Rudd. He dismissed Rudd's speech this week to an Australia-Israel function as "just crackers, frankly", saying that facing a nuclear threat from Iran recived a lecture from Rudd about climate change.
Abbott, who once called himself a "Catholic romantic idealist", is branded by his faiths. While this makes him a target, it motivates the moral stands he has taken: stopping Pauline Hanson in her tracks and spending more time inside Aboriginal communities than nearly any other senior politician.
Where Turnbull said the ETS had to be passed for the sake of our children, Abbott dismisses it as a monstrous tax fraud.
Labor can take heart that Abbott was the least popular of the three Liberal contenders and seems hell-bent on making himself a very big target. Yet while his policies are polarising, his personality is engaging. He never walks away from a fight or a conversation, traits that Australians appreciate. Abbott is capable of surprises, just as Mark Latham surprised the Howard government.
With by-elections today in the Liberal seats of Bradfield in Sydney and Higgins in Melbourne -- both with high levels of green consciousness -- Abbott runs the risk of an early setback. His problem is reconciling his anti-ETS crusade with the need to convince urban voters he is serious about climate change action. Operating this week in the fluidity of the huge Liberal reversal on the ETS, he pledged to keep Rudd's emission targets yet rejected any market-based or carbon-tax policy for the 2010 election. It sounds like the Magic Pudding. Here is Labor's opening: the chance to depict Abbott as a populist unfit to run the nation, a good bloke but not a reliable prime minister.
Yet the more Labor attacks Abbott for his irresponsibility, the more it must admit the ETS puts a price on carbon and means higher energy prices, leading back to Abbott's core proposition.
With the most important reform of Labor's first term again rejected, Rudd and Julia Gillard have only one real option: a double dissolution election. Despite endless speculation the outlook is obvious. Rudd now has the grounds for a double dissolution on the original bill. But the fully amended bill (with its extra $7 billion in assistance from the Wong-Macfarlane deal) will be introduced in February and, if defeated twice with a three-month interval, Rudd will have a second trigger on this more preferred bill. That means he can call a double dissolution later in 2010 (the constitutional limitation is by early August), approximating a full-term parliament.
It would be crazy for Rudd to call a snap election now. He needs time to undermine Abbott and get the dissolution on the preferred bill, thereby being guaranteed its passage if he wins the poll.
This is not just a repeat of the 2007 election. John Howard and Rudd agreed on an ETS, so it was never the issue. The 2007 test was climate change credentials and Rudd outshone Howard as a candidate of the future. This time the Rudd-Abbott dispute will be greater and Abbott, unlike Howard in 2007, has political ammunition to fire and a grassroots crusade to lead. He will target Rudd on one issue: explaining the ETS and explaining why Australians need it.
The people will decide this result. For Abbott, the ETS is the prime exhibit of Rudd as a high-taxing, high-spending bureaucrat with Whitlamite overtones, out of touch with people and imposing new cost-of-living pressures on them. The ETS slots perfectly into Abbott's economic campaign.
As an aggressive leader in the Howard mould, Abbott is a mixture of conservative, radical and populist. Many of his opponents misread him. In his recent book Battlelines, Abbott argued "the Federation is broken and does need to be fixed". Convinced the Howard government was punished for the failure of the states, Abbott will hold Rudd to a degree of responsibility for the failures in NSW and Queensland.
As health minister during the Howard era and an unsuccessful advocate for a national takeover of public hospitals, Abbott is guaranteed to put health services at the centre of his campaign by insisting that Rudd is accountable for the condition of public hospitals across the board.
On boat people, he will campaign as a dedicated border protectionist.
On Aboriginal deprivation, he champions Noel Pearson's philosophy and will attack any Rudd retreat to the rights agenda.
On industrial relations, he backs individual agreements on the pre-2005 model before Work Choices.
But there are two urgent lessons Abbott must learn from Howard if he wants to succeed. As a social conservative he must convince people that he does not seek to recast the moral agenda on issues such as abortion and divorce. Second, Abbott's credentials are suspect on economic policy where, too often, he seems inexperienced and unsure, suspicious of markets, reluctant about disciplined costings and inclined to old-fashioned regulation. Labor will gun Abbott on economic policy.
SOURCE
Corrupt public hospital boss
Unbelievable! Charity funds raided for beauty treatments!
THE boss of the Brisbane Royal Children's Hospital approved thousands of dollars worth of luxury beauty treatments for nurses out of the hospital's charity fund for sick children, documents show. RCH district manager Doug Brown is being investigated over a $6500 bill for "pamper packages" at a Brisbane beauty salon, despite department financial guidelines prohibiting staff gifts, The Courier Mail reported.
The Royal Children's Hospital Foundation asks for donations to help support seriously ill kids, buy medical equipment and fund ground-breaking medical research. But an invoice obtained by The Courier-Mail shows Mr Brown approved its funds be used for 65 nurses to enjoy manicures, massages and body polishes at Skin Beautiful in the Queen St Mall two years ago.
The case is part of a wider Queensland Health ethical standards probe into Mr Brown, including his approval of an $8000 interest-free loan of taxpayer funds to a senior bureaucrat for personal overseas travel four months earlier. Mr Brown approved the loan to then director of allied health Gil Hainey despite guidelines banning loans to staff.
The beauty voucher issue allegedly involves a dispute with nurses during the relocation of oncology services from the Mater Children's Hospital at South Brisbane to the RCH at Herston in September 2007.
A group of about eight MCH nurses were allegedly offered six months' free parking at taxpayers' expense in the Metro Car Park at the RCH, despite the entitlement generally being given only to more senior medical specialists. But the plan allegedly backfired when nurses in the Banksia Ward at the RCH, led by a group known as the Oncology Steering Committee, learned of the parking perk and threatened industrial action. Mr Brown, who is listed as the board secretary of the RCH Foundation, allegedly tried to hose down the issue by organising with the nurses for 65 Ella Bache gift vouchers.
The invoice shows the salon billed the RCH for 65 packages costing $100 each, with the 90-minute sessions including eyelash tints, pedicures, manicures, and body polishes. "Approved," Mr Brown wrote. "Foundation to sponsor - oncology consolidation."
Queensland Health yesterday confirmed the bill was paid out of RCH Foundation funds, saying the money initially came from a district account before being reimbursed by the charity.
Director-general Mick Reid said the probe involved "alleged financial mismanagement in relation to car parking and alleged improper purchase of gift vouchers for staff". "Gifts to staff are in breach of the provisions of the Financial Management Practice Manual," he said. "I am treating this matter with the highest degree of seriousness and will act on all recommendations."
Mr Brown did not return calls. The probe is expected to be finalised and handed to the Crime and Misconduct Commission before the new year.
SOURCE
A comeback for Sir Lunchalot?
NSW: The Premier, Kristina Keneally, will reward the dumped ministers John Della Bosca and Ian Macdonald [Sir Lunchalot] by reinstating them to senior positions in a cabinet reshuffle this weekend. Rewarding the plotters against the former premier Nathan Rees will fuel criticism that Ms Keneally is a ''puppet'' of powerbrokers Eddie Obeid, Joe Tripodi, Mr Della Bosca and Mr Macdonald, who all backed her into the leadership against the wishes of Labor's head office.
Mr Obeid is understood to have given guarantees to at least one minister that his position was safe on Thursday, Government sources say. When asked if she was speaking to Mr Obeid and Mr Tripodi about who would be in her cabinet, Ms Keneally did not deny it, saying she was prepared to consult on who she would appoint.
The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, took a shot at the week of plotting saying: ''People of NSW are sick to death of fighting, infighting and divisions in the Government of NSW. The time has come for the NSW Government to get its act together … ''The people of NSW are now expecting better government, and I would suggest the new Premier of NSW get on with the job, and get on with the job as of today.''
Mr Rudd is understood to be unhappy he was talked into defending Mr Rees three weeks ago after the then premier sacked Mr Tripodi, only to see his support evaporate.
After being sworn in as the state's first female premier, Ms Keneally said her Government would be about ''respect'' and protecting the ''vulnerable''. She did not rule out scrapping the $5.3 billion CBD Metro and said Mr Rees's transport blueprint would be reviewed and ''finalised'' before it was released.
Ms Keneally continued to deny accusations she was a ''puppet'' of Mr Obeid and Mr Tripodi and has said she is ''nobody's puppet, nobody's protege, nobody's girl''.
More HERE
Another corrupt Queensland police investigation
POLICE who investigated an alleged cover-up of child sexual abuse at a Queensland Catholic primary school had close ties with teachers and the principal. At least three police officers involved in the investigation last year of a teacher, later charged with the rape and abuse of 13 young girls, had children at the school or spouses on staff at the close-knit Toowoomba school, west of Brisbane.
Police previously said all officers with any involvement at the school were taken off the case at the start of the investigation.
The initial abuse complaint was made by a nine-year-old girl and her father to the school principal in September, 2007. Police were not told and the veteran teacher, 60, remained at the school for another 14 months, during which time he is alleged to have abused another 12 girls, resulting in him now facing 46 charges of rape and indecent treatment. He faces court next year. Police were belatedly alerted in November last year , but only when another child brought her allegations of abuse directly to them.
The Weekend Australian has learned that a detective who last year helped interview the alleged offender and later took the statement of the father -- who made the first abuse complaint to the principal -- is married to another teacher at the school and was treasurer of the parents and friends association that threw a farewell for the alleged pedophile, who retired briefly from the school before being rehired last year. The father told the detective he and his daughter had gone to the principal with abuse complaints about the teacher, involving herself and another girl, more than a year before before he was arrested. Under state law, schools and their governing bodies have a mandatory requirement to report to police any suspicions of sexual abuse by a staff member. Two other police involved in the investigation also had children at the school.
Police last night issued a statement saying they "hold no concerns whatsoever" of any possible conflict of interest among the investigators. But parents of the victims say they were assured by police there had been no prior suspicions about the teacher, who later confessed to some of the abuse.
In February, the state government ordered an investigation into the school because of a series of reports by The Weekend Australian revealing the inaction to the earlier abuse complaint to the principal. In May, the principal became the first person in Australia to be charged under the six-year-old mandatory reporting laws. But this week, he was acquitted after magistrate Haydn Stjernqvist found the principal had met his legal obligations by reporting the complaints to senior officers in Catholic Education.
Documents showed that after the parent's complaint -- coupled with staff allegations about the teacher giving out lollies and putting children on his lap -- the principal suspected he had sexually abused at least one student. Prosecutors accused the principal and Catholic Education of watering down the complaints before taking them to the teacher, who denied the allegations.
SOURCE
Friday, December 04, 2009
The NSW Labor party really is amazing
They have elected a corruptocrat as leader
New South Wales has its first female premier. American-born Kristina Keneally was installed following the sacking of Nathan Rees last night in one of the most extraordinary scenes in the state's political history. Ms Keneally's elevation also resulted in the first female double act in Australian political history, with Carmel Tebbutt her deputy.
Mr Rees, whose fate was sealed after he labelled sections of his Government treacherous, was executed by Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi in an ambush caucus meeting, The Daily Telegraph reported. Despite earlier vowing not to hand over the state to the two factional bosses, at 7.15pm (AEST) Mr Rees resigned in front of his caucus, following in the footsteps of the man he replaced last year, Morris Iemma.
He walked from the party room at Parliament House and simply said: "It's a difficult decision and we move on." An overwhelming 47 MPs of the 70 members of the party's full caucus then voted to install Ms Keneally.
More HERE
Gagged government scientist resigns
Politicized climate science again. Warmism is a cancer of the intellect
Eminent scientist Clive Spash has resigned from the CSIRO and called for a Senate inquiry into the science body following the censorship of his controversial report into emissions trading. Dr Spash has lashed out at the organisation which he says promotes self-censorship among its scientists with its unfair publication guidelines. He has been stunned at the treatment he's received at the hands of CSIRO management, including boss Megan Clark, and he also believes he's not alone.
"I've been treated extremely poorly," he told AAP on Thursday. "There needs to be a Senate inquiry. "The way the publication policy and the charter are being interpreted will encourage self-censorship. "It's obviously happened before at the CSIRO - and there's issues currently."
Last month, Dr Spash accused the organisation of gagging him and his report - The Brave New World of Carbon Trading - and restricting its publication. The report is critical of cap and trade schemes, like the one the federal government is seeking to introduce, as well as big compensation to polluters. Dr Spash advocates a direct tax on carbon.
The CSIRO said the report was in breach of its publication guidelines, which restrict scientists from speaking out on public policy. But it provoked accusations the CSIRO is censoring research harmful to the government. Under intense pressure, Dr Clark publicly released the report on November 26 but warned Dr Spash would be punished for his behaviour and his refusal to amend it.
"I believe that internationally peer-reviewed science should be published or, if Dr Clark wishes to have her own opinion, then she should publish her own opinion," Dr Spash said, who has been on sick leave. "I've been to the doctor under extreme stress. "I was surprised at senior management and how I was treated."
He had been ordered not to speak to the media while working for the CSIRO, which originally headhunted him for the job. Dr Spash, who is heading to Europe where he plans to stay indefinitely, was reluctant to openly criticise the government but noted that Science Minister Kim Carr had been abreast of the situation.
Journal New Political Economy had written to Senator Carr, detailing the changes the CSIRO had demanded and refusing to publish the censored version of the paper. "They cut the conclusion by half, 11 per cent of the text, changed the thrust of the meaning from being an index criticism of an ETS to being an argument that it stands to be redesigned," Dr Spash said. "I was clearly censored."
SOURCE
Deranged health bureaucracy
Political correctness trumps medical knowledge
NURSES trying to re-enter the workforce are being quizzed on unrelated health topics. Disgruntled nurse Janette Morton, 47, from Bargara, northwest of Bundaberg, contacted The Courier-Mail to voice her disgust at some of the questions on a test paper which she believes are "irrelevant" to nursing. Nurses trying to return to the workforce are required to sit a Competence Assessment Service Challenge Test as part of their assessment to regain their qualifications.
Ms Morton said one question related to the percentage of non-speaking English people in Australia in 1997. Ms Morton said the nature of some of the questions contained in the test was "utterly ridiculous". "It's a lot harder than anyone would have thought," she said. "What is knowing the exact percentage of non-English speaking people going to do when I want to go work in ahospital or a nursing home? What is the relevance?"
She sat the assessment test last month in a bid to restart her nursing career after quitting the workforce in 2000 to care for her sick father. Ms Morton said she was "shocked" there was a multiple-choice question on the exam paper asking where the majority of Aborigines lived in Australia.
"The whole thing has been an absolute circus," she said. "Finding the material that we need to study is absolutely up to us. We are given a broad outline of what will possibly be in the exam but I didn't know I would need to know these sorts of things."
Ms Morton failed part A of the test which requires an 80 per cent pass grade. The test is set up by the Central Queensland University and Central Queensland Institute of TAFE on behalf of the Queensland Nursing Council. All questions on the competence test are computer generated and it has two components – part A is a written examination and part B is a clinical competence assessment. Nurses must get an 80 per cent pass in all four sections of the exam to proceed to part B.
Queensland Nurses Union secretary Gay Hawksworth defended the questions contained in the test. "It's cultural awareness and sensitivity, it's working with people from other cultures but it's also about nursing people from other cultures," she said.
QNC defended the testing process and said all questions were based on the "enrolled nurse TAFE curriculum and the registered nurse undergraduate degree curriculum".
SOURCE
Australian Immigration Intake at Record High
New statistics show that over 500,000 long-term or permanent migrants arrive in Australia each year. Figures released from the Bureau of Statistics Australia have confirmed that 510,564 migrants, students, and long-term workers have arrived in Australia in the year to June. This is an increase of 15% on the previous year.
According to the preliminary statistics, Australia has grown by 443,139 or 2.07%. The growth comes due to a number of factors including a significant increase in births, with more than 300,000 new babies born, bringing Australia's fertility rate back to 1.98. Though fertility rates have improved, two thirds of Australia's population growth still comes from immigration.
Within Australia, Western Australia grew the most at 3.03%, and Perth is forecast to house 2 million people in the near future. Victoria's population grew by a record 2.14% for the state, and is expected to reach a population of 5.5 million by February 2010. It is estimated that Melbourne reached 4 million people in September 2009, and is now growing at approximately 2000 a week.
SOURCE
They have elected a corruptocrat as leader
New South Wales has its first female premier. American-born Kristina Keneally was installed following the sacking of Nathan Rees last night in one of the most extraordinary scenes in the state's political history. Ms Keneally's elevation also resulted in the first female double act in Australian political history, with Carmel Tebbutt her deputy.
Mr Rees, whose fate was sealed after he labelled sections of his Government treacherous, was executed by Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi in an ambush caucus meeting, The Daily Telegraph reported. Despite earlier vowing not to hand over the state to the two factional bosses, at 7.15pm (AEST) Mr Rees resigned in front of his caucus, following in the footsteps of the man he replaced last year, Morris Iemma.
He walked from the party room at Parliament House and simply said: "It's a difficult decision and we move on." An overwhelming 47 MPs of the 70 members of the party's full caucus then voted to install Ms Keneally.
More HERE
Gagged government scientist resigns
Politicized climate science again. Warmism is a cancer of the intellect
Eminent scientist Clive Spash has resigned from the CSIRO and called for a Senate inquiry into the science body following the censorship of his controversial report into emissions trading. Dr Spash has lashed out at the organisation which he says promotes self-censorship among its scientists with its unfair publication guidelines. He has been stunned at the treatment he's received at the hands of CSIRO management, including boss Megan Clark, and he also believes he's not alone.
"I've been treated extremely poorly," he told AAP on Thursday. "There needs to be a Senate inquiry. "The way the publication policy and the charter are being interpreted will encourage self-censorship. "It's obviously happened before at the CSIRO - and there's issues currently."
Last month, Dr Spash accused the organisation of gagging him and his report - The Brave New World of Carbon Trading - and restricting its publication. The report is critical of cap and trade schemes, like the one the federal government is seeking to introduce, as well as big compensation to polluters. Dr Spash advocates a direct tax on carbon.
The CSIRO said the report was in breach of its publication guidelines, which restrict scientists from speaking out on public policy. But it provoked accusations the CSIRO is censoring research harmful to the government. Under intense pressure, Dr Clark publicly released the report on November 26 but warned Dr Spash would be punished for his behaviour and his refusal to amend it.
"I believe that internationally peer-reviewed science should be published or, if Dr Clark wishes to have her own opinion, then she should publish her own opinion," Dr Spash said, who has been on sick leave. "I've been to the doctor under extreme stress. "I was surprised at senior management and how I was treated."
He had been ordered not to speak to the media while working for the CSIRO, which originally headhunted him for the job. Dr Spash, who is heading to Europe where he plans to stay indefinitely, was reluctant to openly criticise the government but noted that Science Minister Kim Carr had been abreast of the situation.
Journal New Political Economy had written to Senator Carr, detailing the changes the CSIRO had demanded and refusing to publish the censored version of the paper. "They cut the conclusion by half, 11 per cent of the text, changed the thrust of the meaning from being an index criticism of an ETS to being an argument that it stands to be redesigned," Dr Spash said. "I was clearly censored."
SOURCE
Deranged health bureaucracy
Political correctness trumps medical knowledge
NURSES trying to re-enter the workforce are being quizzed on unrelated health topics. Disgruntled nurse Janette Morton, 47, from Bargara, northwest of Bundaberg, contacted The Courier-Mail to voice her disgust at some of the questions on a test paper which she believes are "irrelevant" to nursing. Nurses trying to return to the workforce are required to sit a Competence Assessment Service Challenge Test as part of their assessment to regain their qualifications.
Ms Morton said one question related to the percentage of non-speaking English people in Australia in 1997. Ms Morton said the nature of some of the questions contained in the test was "utterly ridiculous". "It's a lot harder than anyone would have thought," she said. "What is knowing the exact percentage of non-English speaking people going to do when I want to go work in ahospital or a nursing home? What is the relevance?"
She sat the assessment test last month in a bid to restart her nursing career after quitting the workforce in 2000 to care for her sick father. Ms Morton said she was "shocked" there was a multiple-choice question on the exam paper asking where the majority of Aborigines lived in Australia.
"The whole thing has been an absolute circus," she said. "Finding the material that we need to study is absolutely up to us. We are given a broad outline of what will possibly be in the exam but I didn't know I would need to know these sorts of things."
Ms Morton failed part A of the test which requires an 80 per cent pass grade. The test is set up by the Central Queensland University and Central Queensland Institute of TAFE on behalf of the Queensland Nursing Council. All questions on the competence test are computer generated and it has two components – part A is a written examination and part B is a clinical competence assessment. Nurses must get an 80 per cent pass in all four sections of the exam to proceed to part B.
Queensland Nurses Union secretary Gay Hawksworth defended the questions contained in the test. "It's cultural awareness and sensitivity, it's working with people from other cultures but it's also about nursing people from other cultures," she said.
QNC defended the testing process and said all questions were based on the "enrolled nurse TAFE curriculum and the registered nurse undergraduate degree curriculum".
SOURCE
Australian Immigration Intake at Record High
New statistics show that over 500,000 long-term or permanent migrants arrive in Australia each year. Figures released from the Bureau of Statistics Australia have confirmed that 510,564 migrants, students, and long-term workers have arrived in Australia in the year to June. This is an increase of 15% on the previous year.
According to the preliminary statistics, Australia has grown by 443,139 or 2.07%. The growth comes due to a number of factors including a significant increase in births, with more than 300,000 new babies born, bringing Australia's fertility rate back to 1.98. Though fertility rates have improved, two thirds of Australia's population growth still comes from immigration.
Within Australia, Western Australia grew the most at 3.03%, and Perth is forecast to house 2 million people in the near future. Victoria's population grew by a record 2.14% for the state, and is expected to reach a population of 5.5 million by February 2010. It is estimated that Melbourne reached 4 million people in September 2009, and is now growing at approximately 2000 a week.
SOURCE
Thursday, December 03, 2009
New conservative alignment in Australian Federal politics
NATIONALS Senate leader Barnaby Joyce has agreed to serve on Tony Abbott's front bench as part of a new political partnership both hope will yield a 2010 election victory. Senator Joyce's agreement to join Mr Abbott's inner circle yesterday came in stark contrast to his previous refusal to serve Malcolm Turnbull so he would remain free to criticise Liberal Party policy.
It also came as Senator Joyce told The Australian he felt liberated by Mr Abbott's victory and his endorsement of the Nationals' long-argued rejection of Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme. "It's just a tax," Senator Joyce said. "We've been saying it for months and now everyone is saying it."
Senator Joyce has become a popular figure among conservatives since his election as a senator for Queensland in 2004, largely because of a straight style of speaking and his preparedness to put his loyalty to the Nationals ahead of the Coalition.
After becoming the party's Senate leader last year, he refused Mr Turnbull's offer of a frontbench position, rejecting the bonds of frontbencher solidarity and reserving his right to oppose the Liberals on issues of concern to rural and regional Australia. However, sources confirmed last night that Senator Joyce had agreed to take a shadow portfolio under Mr Abbott, convinced the new Liberal leader's conservative views would be unlikely to differ substantially from his own.
Earlier yesterday, in an interview in which he would not comment on his frontbench prospects, Senator Joyce invoked his experience as an accountant when explaining why Australia should not adopt an ETS or any other new tax. "I've seen the tears and the terror in people's eyes when they go broke when they are basically turfed out on their backsides because they've got the finances wrong," he said. "Countries should also not get the finances wrong."
Senator Joyce said the country had $115 billion in federal debt courtesy of Rudd government economic stimulus spending and was now about to face "the uncomfortable part of the paradigm" as the debts fell due. "It's not a great time to start rejigging the economy in such a fashion that you can't even service the debt," he said. "We are in a spot of bother. But we don't realise it yet because the demands of repaying the money have not become prevalent in the economy."
He said the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was a tax on carbon and would destroy the coal industry, the biggest export in his home state. "What are you going to do when you decide that our major export is no longer our major export? What are you going to replace it with?" Senator Joyce said.
He also said Mr Turnbull's backing for Mr Rudd's CPRS had lulled the Prime Minister into the flawed view that most Australians had backed his climate change plans. If fact, rural and regional Australians hated the CPRS. Senator Joyce said Mr Abbott was popular in his community, particularly among men, who saw him as "fair dinkum" [genuine]"
SOURCE
Conservative leader's real trouble is with the sisterhood, not women in general
Apparently, Tony Abbott has woman trouble. Despite the fact he has three daughters, a wife, two sisters and a mother who adore him, the popular perception of the new Opposition Leader is that women can't stand his blokeish, confrontational style.
In just about every interview since he was elected to the Liberal leadership on Tuesday, he has been asked about his lack of appeal to the fairer sex. Kerry O'Brien on The 7.30 Report asked: "Coming back to that hardline image of yours, for a lot of women, you're not exactly a pin-up boy, are you, as a political leader?"
On A Current Affair, Tracy Grimshaw gave him a hard time about contraception, abortion and making divorce harder to get. The Business Spectator e-zine claimed: "Abbott's aggressive approach will do little to sway the female vote at the next election . . . a significant number of women only see an arrogant hardliner . . . it's not surprising that young women are loath to support him."
Women journalists across the country railed to each other that Abbott was "the devil". The female twitterverse was almost universally condemnatory. Former Cleo editor Mia Freedman's attitude was typical: "Oh, Tony Abbott also anti-IVF," she tweeted. "Seems like his Speedos are the least reprehensible of his crimes against women." The ex-Dolly editor Marina Go tweeted: "I would rather eat my first born than vote for Abbott . . . what concerns me most [is] his anti-free choice views . . . [Tweetfems are] outraged that a man with Abbott's beliefs could possibly head up a major political party in Australia in 2009."
Yet, as Abbott pointed out to Grimshaw, polls shows his women problem is a myth. "The last poll showed me somewhat more popular among women than men," he said. "People will make judgments based on what they see now, not some caricature they heard some years ago."
A Newspoll taken last week shows, while Abbott's overall popularity is low compared with Joe Hockey, there is no significant gender gap: Abbott had a 19 per cent following among women, and 18 per cent among men.
And when it came down to a choice between Abbott and his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, whose appeal to women went unquestioned, guess who was the clear front runner, especially among young females? Abbott was more popular with women at 41 per cent, compared with Turnbull's 39 per cent. For women aged 18 to 34, Abbott picked up 43 per cent, compared with Turnbull's 35 per cent.
One female Coalition MP, an Abbott fan, said yesterday that support for him in the party room this week was "gender neutral". "Tony's the quintessential Australian bloke . . . but he's matured a lot. In the end people will judge Tony for his ideas as a conviction politician."
The fact is, Abbott's so-called woman trouble is with a particular subset of female - the aggressively secular, paleo-feminist, emasculating Australian broad, for whom unabashed red-blooded blokeishness is an affront of biblical proportions. They are unrepresentative of women, and disproportionately influential, because they either work in the media or politics or have high-profile, heavily networked careers, which mean they are quoted in the media, and their opinions sought after.
For them, abortion on demand, no matter what the circumstances, is a bedrock article of faith. This is the essence of their visceral, red-fanged rage against him. They hold firm to an outdated, 1970s view of feminism that requires unquestioning belief in abortion as a social good.
Abbott's pronouncements on abortion in the past have been considered, mild and unthreatening to the legal status of the procedure, but to paleo-feminists, the fact that he is a male practising Catholic who dares to express his private beliefs is secular apostasy punishable by social and political death. His actual words are unobjectionable. In his book Battlelines, he wrote he "never supported any move to recriminalise abortion, because that would have stigmatised millions of Australian women". "Every abortion is a tragedy and up to 100,000 abortions a year is this generation's legacy of unutterable shame," he said in 2006.
Two years earlier, he honestly grappled with a taboo subject that affects the Christian majority of Parliament, including the ostentatiously Anglican (formerly Catholic) Kevin Rudd, in a speech. "Even those who think that abortion is a woman's right should be troubled by the fact that 100,000 Australian women choose to destroy their unborn babies every year . . . I fear there is no satisfactory answer to this question . . . Governments can't legislate for virtue but shouldn't be indifferent to it either."
This led to protesters hurling themselves at him, wearing T-shirts with slogans such as "Get your rosaries off my ovaries". But he was echoing the feelings of many people, whose opinions have been suppressed as successfully as in any totalitarian state. Polls have found Australian support of abortion on demand vacillating between about 53 and 61 per cent for 20 years, according to the 2007 Australian Election Study by Australian National University and Deakin University researchers.
But drill down and attitudes are more nuanced. A 2006 poll commissioned by the Australian Federation of Right to Life Associations found, similarly, that 60 per cent of Australians support abortion on demand. But it found just 39 per cent support abortion for financial or social (non-medical) reasons; just 20 per cent agree with partial birth abortion; 54 per cent believe abortion involves the taking of a human life; and 57 per cent believe a 20-week-old foetus is a person with human rights.
And, reflecting the change Abbott introduced as health minister, to fund a pregnancy support national phone counselling service, 95 per cent of those polled agreed women should receive free independent counselling before abortion. The extremist viewpoint is not Abbott's but that of abortion fundamentalists posing as feminists who are his most strident critics.
SOURCE
Climate sceptics triumphant in Australian conservative politics
At the recent United Nations climate summit in New York, Barack Obama told his fellow leaders that "the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent and it is growing". The Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, calls the threat "catastrophic", the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, believes addressing it is "crucial for the future of mankind".
Just months ago Tony Abbott described the same threat as "absolute crap". Yesterday the new Liberal leader backpedalled just a little by saying his words were "hyberbole" for debate. "I think that climate change is real and I think that man does make a contribution," he said, before adding the great qualification of sceptics: "There is an argument first as to how great that contribution is, and second, over what should be done about it."
There is no argument that Abbott's leadership marks the triumphant return of the climate sceptics to the top of the federal Liberal Party. Just last month Abbott attacked as "climate change alarmists" those scientists who worked on the peak UN scientific advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and who are warning about the threat from climate change.
Abbott described them on Four Corners as "the people who will tell you as if it's as obvious as night following day that we have a huge problem and that unless we dramatically change the way we live, life as we know it will be under massive threat. As I said, there's an evangelical fervour about those people which you don't normally associate with scientists".
As a member of Malcolm Turnbull's shadow cabinet Abbott cheerfully championed the work of the prominent Australian climate sceptic Professor Ian Plimer. "I think that in response to the IPCC alarmist - ah, in inverted commas - view, there've been quite a lot of other reputable scientific voices. Now not everyone agrees with Ian Plimer's position, but he is a highly credible scientist and he has written what seems like a very well-argued book refuting most of the claims of the climate catastrophists." His remarks were a direct challenge to Turnbull, who had warned that he could not lead a party that did not take climate change seriously.
A decade ago, the Liberal Party's climate sceptics, backed by some of the world's big minerals and energy companies, fought an epic battle inside the Howard government to stop Australia taking action on climate change, ratifying the Kyoto Protocol or passing an emissions trading scheme. With the substantial support from the then Western Mining boss, Hugh Morgan, and successive heads of Rio Tinto, the sceptics quashed Howard's first environment minister, Robert Hill, who had endorsed Kyoto.
The Kyoto fight was lost on World Environment Day 2002, when Howard backed the sceptics. By then, Hill had been replaced by David Kemp, a vocal sceptic of the science on climate change. Only when Howard was under huge electoral pressure before the 2007 election did he moderate his own sceptical views, appoint Turnbull as his environment minister and promise an emissions trading scheme.
Last week Turnbull, at the death knell of his short leadership of the Liberal Party, had no doubt the sceptics inside the party were again fighting to regain control. "The people that have sought to tear me down do not even believe in the policies we took to the last election," he said bluntly. "They basically believe or regard John Howard as being too green. They don't believe in climate change, they don't think we should take any action on climate change."
SOURCE
Woman sues over flesh-eating bug horror
Negligent government hospital
A QUEENSLAND woman has told of her long and arduous battle against a rare flesh-eating bug infection after it was allegedly misdiagnosed by hospital staff. With what began as a superficial graze, Tracey, who does not wish to use her last name, could have lost a leg, even her life, to the gruesome bug, The Courier-Mail reports.
The legacy of the episode is a rough, colourless patchwork spreading from her left foot to above the knee. Those extensive skin grafts followed 12 rapid-fire operations to "debride" or cut away ravaged soft tissue as the rare necrotising fasciitis bacteria advanced into and up her leg.
Targeted also by powerful antibiotics, the infection finally gave up at the back of Tracey's thigh. By then, surgeons had stripped her limb to virtually bone and muscle. "It looked like a chicken leg," she says.
Yet much of her suffering, Tracey is convinced, would have been averted but for an alleged string of systemic blunders at Gympie Hospital. The 46-year-old claims the "attention" she received included:
* Being sent home from the emergency department with headache tablets.
* Returning to the hospital and writhing in a casualty bay, her screams for help ignored by the staff on duty.
* Repeated instances of non or wrong diagnosis.
* Nurses regularly forgetting to re-connect her antibiotic drip.
* An ambulance transfer to Brisbane without her husband being informed.
"They were just so wrong in how they treated me," Tracey says. "I can't believe how bad the health system is in Queensland. It's disgusting."
Tracey is suing the State Government for medical negligence over what her lawyer, Olamide Kowalik, of Trilby Misso, describes as "a sequence of bungles (that) almost cost her life". The avalanche of toxins discharged by necrotising fasciitis not only destroys flesh but shuts down organs. Tracey's daughter Jayde, 23, says fob-offs and delays at Gympie Hospital took her mother to the brink of kidney and liver failure.
However, it was a nightmare out of nowhere, erupting early last year from a simple scratch near Tracey's ankle. "I was walking up my wooden stairs and fell against them," says Tracey of Amamoor-Dagun, in Gympie's Mary Valley region. "I had a normal graze that was really small. It bled but wasn't deep."
Two days later, on Friday, February 22, Tracey felt the first twinge. "I was limping, and I thought 'that was a bit strange', then went to bed," she recalls. "About one o'clock on Saturday morning, I was in severe pain. My husband, Gary, took me to hospital." Tracey says she was seen by a nurse and a doctor in emergency. "They gave me four (paracetamol-codeine) tablets and a script for anti-biotics and sent me home," she says.
"I spent most the of the day lying down. But the pain had got so bad, I remember just yelling at my husband to make it stop. My foot was swollen now, with a purple rash and a few blisters." Early Sunday, Tracey went back to the hospital where she was given a shot of morphine and a vague diagnosis of "infection". Eventually she was again directed to go home.
But on Monday morning, she staggered to her GP, who immediately arranged for Tracey's admission to hospital. "By this stage, Mum's leg literally looked gangrenous," Jayde says. Still, Tracey was forced to wait more than five hours in an emergency department cubicle for a bed to become available.
"They tried to get a drip in my hand seven times," Tracey says. "Nurses tried, doctors tried . . . in the end they got someone from pathology who just did it instantly."
The next day, recalls Jayde, her mother's leg had grotesquely transformed. "The entire calf muscle was one huge blister," she says. "Mum looked like absolute death but all the nurses kept saying to me was that they didn't know what it was. I thought they were going to have to chop her leg off because it just looked rotten."
Jayde says she pressed a doctor for a diagnosis. "But it wasn't necrotising fasciitis," she asserts.
Nurses from other sections of the hospital appeared at her mother's bedside. "Not to see how she was," Jayde says. "Like a sideshow at a circus, they said they had come to see the 'lady with the big blister'."
Tracey's terror, confusion and isolation converged with her overnight transfer to Royal Brisbane Hospital. She claims nobody from Gympie Hospital bothered to let her husband know she was leaving. Tracey says she can't speak highly enough of her swift diagnosis and treatment at Royal Brisbane. She spent three months there, and another three months learning to walk again in a state-run rehabilitative unit.
Necrotising fasciitis, left alone, kills seven out of 10 victims within days. As uncommon as it is, reported cases have increased around the world in the past five years. The bacteria may be carried unwittingly on a person and introduced to the body through an abrasion or cut.
Queensland Health would not comment on the case but Tracey says she has not had an apology and will not hear of excuses. "If they at Gympie Hospital didn't know what the hell it was, why didn't they contact someone who did?" she says. "If they'd got on to it sooner, my leg wouldn't have been this bad. "I get depressed. I get anxiety. Sometimes, I get the feeling that I just don't want to be here any more."
SOURCE
NATIONALS Senate leader Barnaby Joyce has agreed to serve on Tony Abbott's front bench as part of a new political partnership both hope will yield a 2010 election victory. Senator Joyce's agreement to join Mr Abbott's inner circle yesterday came in stark contrast to his previous refusal to serve Malcolm Turnbull so he would remain free to criticise Liberal Party policy.
It also came as Senator Joyce told The Australian he felt liberated by Mr Abbott's victory and his endorsement of the Nationals' long-argued rejection of Kevin Rudd's emissions trading scheme. "It's just a tax," Senator Joyce said. "We've been saying it for months and now everyone is saying it."
Senator Joyce has become a popular figure among conservatives since his election as a senator for Queensland in 2004, largely because of a straight style of speaking and his preparedness to put his loyalty to the Nationals ahead of the Coalition.
After becoming the party's Senate leader last year, he refused Mr Turnbull's offer of a frontbench position, rejecting the bonds of frontbencher solidarity and reserving his right to oppose the Liberals on issues of concern to rural and regional Australia. However, sources confirmed last night that Senator Joyce had agreed to take a shadow portfolio under Mr Abbott, convinced the new Liberal leader's conservative views would be unlikely to differ substantially from his own.
Earlier yesterday, in an interview in which he would not comment on his frontbench prospects, Senator Joyce invoked his experience as an accountant when explaining why Australia should not adopt an ETS or any other new tax. "I've seen the tears and the terror in people's eyes when they go broke when they are basically turfed out on their backsides because they've got the finances wrong," he said. "Countries should also not get the finances wrong."
Senator Joyce said the country had $115 billion in federal debt courtesy of Rudd government economic stimulus spending and was now about to face "the uncomfortable part of the paradigm" as the debts fell due. "It's not a great time to start rejigging the economy in such a fashion that you can't even service the debt," he said. "We are in a spot of bother. But we don't realise it yet because the demands of repaying the money have not become prevalent in the economy."
He said the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was a tax on carbon and would destroy the coal industry, the biggest export in his home state. "What are you going to do when you decide that our major export is no longer our major export? What are you going to replace it with?" Senator Joyce said.
He also said Mr Turnbull's backing for Mr Rudd's CPRS had lulled the Prime Minister into the flawed view that most Australians had backed his climate change plans. If fact, rural and regional Australians hated the CPRS. Senator Joyce said Mr Abbott was popular in his community, particularly among men, who saw him as "fair dinkum" [genuine]"
SOURCE
Conservative leader's real trouble is with the sisterhood, not women in general
Apparently, Tony Abbott has woman trouble. Despite the fact he has three daughters, a wife, two sisters and a mother who adore him, the popular perception of the new Opposition Leader is that women can't stand his blokeish, confrontational style.
In just about every interview since he was elected to the Liberal leadership on Tuesday, he has been asked about his lack of appeal to the fairer sex. Kerry O'Brien on The 7.30 Report asked: "Coming back to that hardline image of yours, for a lot of women, you're not exactly a pin-up boy, are you, as a political leader?"
On A Current Affair, Tracy Grimshaw gave him a hard time about contraception, abortion and making divorce harder to get. The Business Spectator e-zine claimed: "Abbott's aggressive approach will do little to sway the female vote at the next election . . . a significant number of women only see an arrogant hardliner . . . it's not surprising that young women are loath to support him."
Women journalists across the country railed to each other that Abbott was "the devil". The female twitterverse was almost universally condemnatory. Former Cleo editor Mia Freedman's attitude was typical: "Oh, Tony Abbott also anti-IVF," she tweeted. "Seems like his Speedos are the least reprehensible of his crimes against women." The ex-Dolly editor Marina Go tweeted: "I would rather eat my first born than vote for Abbott . . . what concerns me most [is] his anti-free choice views . . . [Tweetfems are] outraged that a man with Abbott's beliefs could possibly head up a major political party in Australia in 2009."
Yet, as Abbott pointed out to Grimshaw, polls shows his women problem is a myth. "The last poll showed me somewhat more popular among women than men," he said. "People will make judgments based on what they see now, not some caricature they heard some years ago."
A Newspoll taken last week shows, while Abbott's overall popularity is low compared with Joe Hockey, there is no significant gender gap: Abbott had a 19 per cent following among women, and 18 per cent among men.
And when it came down to a choice between Abbott and his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, whose appeal to women went unquestioned, guess who was the clear front runner, especially among young females? Abbott was more popular with women at 41 per cent, compared with Turnbull's 39 per cent. For women aged 18 to 34, Abbott picked up 43 per cent, compared with Turnbull's 35 per cent.
One female Coalition MP, an Abbott fan, said yesterday that support for him in the party room this week was "gender neutral". "Tony's the quintessential Australian bloke . . . but he's matured a lot. In the end people will judge Tony for his ideas as a conviction politician."
The fact is, Abbott's so-called woman trouble is with a particular subset of female - the aggressively secular, paleo-feminist, emasculating Australian broad, for whom unabashed red-blooded blokeishness is an affront of biblical proportions. They are unrepresentative of women, and disproportionately influential, because they either work in the media or politics or have high-profile, heavily networked careers, which mean they are quoted in the media, and their opinions sought after.
For them, abortion on demand, no matter what the circumstances, is a bedrock article of faith. This is the essence of their visceral, red-fanged rage against him. They hold firm to an outdated, 1970s view of feminism that requires unquestioning belief in abortion as a social good.
Abbott's pronouncements on abortion in the past have been considered, mild and unthreatening to the legal status of the procedure, but to paleo-feminists, the fact that he is a male practising Catholic who dares to express his private beliefs is secular apostasy punishable by social and political death. His actual words are unobjectionable. In his book Battlelines, he wrote he "never supported any move to recriminalise abortion, because that would have stigmatised millions of Australian women". "Every abortion is a tragedy and up to 100,000 abortions a year is this generation's legacy of unutterable shame," he said in 2006.
Two years earlier, he honestly grappled with a taboo subject that affects the Christian majority of Parliament, including the ostentatiously Anglican (formerly Catholic) Kevin Rudd, in a speech. "Even those who think that abortion is a woman's right should be troubled by the fact that 100,000 Australian women choose to destroy their unborn babies every year . . . I fear there is no satisfactory answer to this question . . . Governments can't legislate for virtue but shouldn't be indifferent to it either."
This led to protesters hurling themselves at him, wearing T-shirts with slogans such as "Get your rosaries off my ovaries". But he was echoing the feelings of many people, whose opinions have been suppressed as successfully as in any totalitarian state. Polls have found Australian support of abortion on demand vacillating between about 53 and 61 per cent for 20 years, according to the 2007 Australian Election Study by Australian National University and Deakin University researchers.
But drill down and attitudes are more nuanced. A 2006 poll commissioned by the Australian Federation of Right to Life Associations found, similarly, that 60 per cent of Australians support abortion on demand. But it found just 39 per cent support abortion for financial or social (non-medical) reasons; just 20 per cent agree with partial birth abortion; 54 per cent believe abortion involves the taking of a human life; and 57 per cent believe a 20-week-old foetus is a person with human rights.
And, reflecting the change Abbott introduced as health minister, to fund a pregnancy support national phone counselling service, 95 per cent of those polled agreed women should receive free independent counselling before abortion. The extremist viewpoint is not Abbott's but that of abortion fundamentalists posing as feminists who are his most strident critics.
SOURCE
Climate sceptics triumphant in Australian conservative politics
At the recent United Nations climate summit in New York, Barack Obama told his fellow leaders that "the threat from climate change is serious, it is urgent and it is growing". The Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, calls the threat "catastrophic", the French President, Nicolas Sarkozy, believes addressing it is "crucial for the future of mankind".
Just months ago Tony Abbott described the same threat as "absolute crap". Yesterday the new Liberal leader backpedalled just a little by saying his words were "hyberbole" for debate. "I think that climate change is real and I think that man does make a contribution," he said, before adding the great qualification of sceptics: "There is an argument first as to how great that contribution is, and second, over what should be done about it."
There is no argument that Abbott's leadership marks the triumphant return of the climate sceptics to the top of the federal Liberal Party. Just last month Abbott attacked as "climate change alarmists" those scientists who worked on the peak UN scientific advisory body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and who are warning about the threat from climate change.
Abbott described them on Four Corners as "the people who will tell you as if it's as obvious as night following day that we have a huge problem and that unless we dramatically change the way we live, life as we know it will be under massive threat. As I said, there's an evangelical fervour about those people which you don't normally associate with scientists".
As a member of Malcolm Turnbull's shadow cabinet Abbott cheerfully championed the work of the prominent Australian climate sceptic Professor Ian Plimer. "I think that in response to the IPCC alarmist - ah, in inverted commas - view, there've been quite a lot of other reputable scientific voices. Now not everyone agrees with Ian Plimer's position, but he is a highly credible scientist and he has written what seems like a very well-argued book refuting most of the claims of the climate catastrophists." His remarks were a direct challenge to Turnbull, who had warned that he could not lead a party that did not take climate change seriously.
A decade ago, the Liberal Party's climate sceptics, backed by some of the world's big minerals and energy companies, fought an epic battle inside the Howard government to stop Australia taking action on climate change, ratifying the Kyoto Protocol or passing an emissions trading scheme. With the substantial support from the then Western Mining boss, Hugh Morgan, and successive heads of Rio Tinto, the sceptics quashed Howard's first environment minister, Robert Hill, who had endorsed Kyoto.
The Kyoto fight was lost on World Environment Day 2002, when Howard backed the sceptics. By then, Hill had been replaced by David Kemp, a vocal sceptic of the science on climate change. Only when Howard was under huge electoral pressure before the 2007 election did he moderate his own sceptical views, appoint Turnbull as his environment minister and promise an emissions trading scheme.
Last week Turnbull, at the death knell of his short leadership of the Liberal Party, had no doubt the sceptics inside the party were again fighting to regain control. "The people that have sought to tear me down do not even believe in the policies we took to the last election," he said bluntly. "They basically believe or regard John Howard as being too green. They don't believe in climate change, they don't think we should take any action on climate change."
SOURCE
Woman sues over flesh-eating bug horror
Negligent government hospital
A QUEENSLAND woman has told of her long and arduous battle against a rare flesh-eating bug infection after it was allegedly misdiagnosed by hospital staff. With what began as a superficial graze, Tracey, who does not wish to use her last name, could have lost a leg, even her life, to the gruesome bug, The Courier-Mail reports.
The legacy of the episode is a rough, colourless patchwork spreading from her left foot to above the knee. Those extensive skin grafts followed 12 rapid-fire operations to "debride" or cut away ravaged soft tissue as the rare necrotising fasciitis bacteria advanced into and up her leg.
Targeted also by powerful antibiotics, the infection finally gave up at the back of Tracey's thigh. By then, surgeons had stripped her limb to virtually bone and muscle. "It looked like a chicken leg," she says.
Yet much of her suffering, Tracey is convinced, would have been averted but for an alleged string of systemic blunders at Gympie Hospital. The 46-year-old claims the "attention" she received included:
* Being sent home from the emergency department with headache tablets.
* Returning to the hospital and writhing in a casualty bay, her screams for help ignored by the staff on duty.
* Repeated instances of non or wrong diagnosis.
* Nurses regularly forgetting to re-connect her antibiotic drip.
* An ambulance transfer to Brisbane without her husband being informed.
"They were just so wrong in how they treated me," Tracey says. "I can't believe how bad the health system is in Queensland. It's disgusting."
Tracey is suing the State Government for medical negligence over what her lawyer, Olamide Kowalik, of Trilby Misso, describes as "a sequence of bungles (that) almost cost her life". The avalanche of toxins discharged by necrotising fasciitis not only destroys flesh but shuts down organs. Tracey's daughter Jayde, 23, says fob-offs and delays at Gympie Hospital took her mother to the brink of kidney and liver failure.
However, it was a nightmare out of nowhere, erupting early last year from a simple scratch near Tracey's ankle. "I was walking up my wooden stairs and fell against them," says Tracey of Amamoor-Dagun, in Gympie's Mary Valley region. "I had a normal graze that was really small. It bled but wasn't deep."
Two days later, on Friday, February 22, Tracey felt the first twinge. "I was limping, and I thought 'that was a bit strange', then went to bed," she recalls. "About one o'clock on Saturday morning, I was in severe pain. My husband, Gary, took me to hospital." Tracey says she was seen by a nurse and a doctor in emergency. "They gave me four (paracetamol-codeine) tablets and a script for anti-biotics and sent me home," she says.
"I spent most the of the day lying down. But the pain had got so bad, I remember just yelling at my husband to make it stop. My foot was swollen now, with a purple rash and a few blisters." Early Sunday, Tracey went back to the hospital where she was given a shot of morphine and a vague diagnosis of "infection". Eventually she was again directed to go home.
But on Monday morning, she staggered to her GP, who immediately arranged for Tracey's admission to hospital. "By this stage, Mum's leg literally looked gangrenous," Jayde says. Still, Tracey was forced to wait more than five hours in an emergency department cubicle for a bed to become available.
"They tried to get a drip in my hand seven times," Tracey says. "Nurses tried, doctors tried . . . in the end they got someone from pathology who just did it instantly."
The next day, recalls Jayde, her mother's leg had grotesquely transformed. "The entire calf muscle was one huge blister," she says. "Mum looked like absolute death but all the nurses kept saying to me was that they didn't know what it was. I thought they were going to have to chop her leg off because it just looked rotten."
Jayde says she pressed a doctor for a diagnosis. "But it wasn't necrotising fasciitis," she asserts.
Nurses from other sections of the hospital appeared at her mother's bedside. "Not to see how she was," Jayde says. "Like a sideshow at a circus, they said they had come to see the 'lady with the big blister'."
Tracey's terror, confusion and isolation converged with her overnight transfer to Royal Brisbane Hospital. She claims nobody from Gympie Hospital bothered to let her husband know she was leaving. Tracey says she can't speak highly enough of her swift diagnosis and treatment at Royal Brisbane. She spent three months there, and another three months learning to walk again in a state-run rehabilitative unit.
Necrotising fasciitis, left alone, kills seven out of 10 victims within days. As uncommon as it is, reported cases have increased around the world in the past five years. The bacteria may be carried unwittingly on a person and introduced to the body through an abrasion or cut.
Queensland Health would not comment on the case but Tracey says she has not had an apology and will not hear of excuses. "If they at Gympie Hospital didn't know what the hell it was, why didn't they contact someone who did?" she says. "If they'd got on to it sooner, my leg wouldn't have been this bad. "I get depressed. I get anxiety. Sometimes, I get the feeling that I just don't want to be here any more."
SOURCE
Wednesday, December 02, 2009
ZEG
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG expresses high hopes for new conservative leader, Tony Abbott
Conservative politicians block climate deal in Senate
At last the Liberal party has a real conservative in charge
The Coalition has managed to block the the Government's plan to fight climate change. The senate eventually voted 41-33 to defeat the government's climate change scheme despite two key Liberal moderates, Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce, crossing the Senate floor.
Blocking the emissions trading scheme (ETS) - which would set a limit on carbon pollution, then allow companies to trade permits to pollute within that cap - has handed Kevin Rudd a trigger for an early election.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong hit out at opposing senators before the final vote, saying changing Australia's economy is crucial to fighting climate change. "You do not tackle climate change unless you change your economy," Senator Wong told the senate. "You have to make polluters pay."
Mr Rudd has said publicly he has no interest in going to the polls early, but Labor insiders have said many Government number crunchers are open to the idea. A March election is touted as the most likely timing, if Mr Rudd decided to call a snap poll.
New Liberal leader Tony Abbott, led a revolt against Malcolm Turnbull over a deal done with the Government that would have seen the Opposition support the scheme. But in a secret ballot of Liberal MPs straight after the leadership spill, a majority voted to renege on that deal.
The scheme would make household items and bills more expensive, because polluters would pass on the cost of polluting to consumers. However the Government has promised most families will be no worse off. Mr Abbott has called the scheme a "$130 billion tax". "This great big new tax is not actually going to reduce our emissions, it's just going to make a whole lot of things more expensive," he said on Macquarie radio this morning. "I am confident ... this legislation will be defeated in the Senate today."
Mr Abbott said yesterday he was not frightened by the prospect of fighting an election against Mr Rudd on climate change. He has promised an alternative policy on climate change next year, arguing there is no need to rush a policy that important.
But the Government is already painting Mr Abbott's leadership as a relic of the Howard era, with no new ideas for the future. Mr Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong had set a deadline of last week for the climate deal to be passed, but offered it again to Mr Abbott after yesterday's spill. The deal negotiated with the Opposition gave billions of extra dollars for polluters in compensation for when the cap is introduced.
The Government wanted the deal passed in time for next week's UN climate conference in Copenhagen. It is supposed to secure a successor to the Kyoto climate treaty, although no-one thinks it will achieve anything binding. Senator Wong has said she will go the summit early to try to salvage something, but it will be harder without an ETS deal.
Meanwhile Liberal Party strategists are plotting a strategy of using the ETS to target the PM as failing to deliver on promises that he would ease financial stress on families. Sources told The Australian that party research showed battlers were angry that costs were rising on Mr Rudd's watch - and that he was proposing to add to the burden with the climate plan.
Mr Abbott said he would pursue Mr Rudd for driving up interest rates with profligate spending, pointing to yesterday's decision by the Reserve Bank to lift the official cash rate by 0.25 percentage points to 3.75 per cent. The Opposition Leader also foreshadowed industrial relations reform. While admitting the Howard government's Work Choices laws had gone too far, he said they had created two million jobs and that "a free and flexible economy" was vital.
SOURCE
New Liberal leader Tony Abbott says he would have 'removed' Oceanic Viking asylum seekers
FEDERAL Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has suggested he would have solved the stand-off aboard the Oceanic Viking by forcibly removing the asylum seekers. The 78 Tamils disembarked in Indonesia after more than a month aboard the vessel following a deal offered by Australian authorities which guaranteed their refugee claims would be fast-tracked.
But Mr Abbott said the group should have been removed. "If 70 people invaded the prime minister's office it wouldn't matter how good the cause was, they would be removed,'' he told Fairfax Radio. "Now, I think that the people who were on the Oceanic Viking should have been removed.''
Mr Abbott, in his first full day as opposition leader, made the comment while taking calls on talkback radio this morning. And like Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in the lead up to the 2007 election, Mr Abbott has advocated a policy of turning the asylum seeker boats back so they do not reach Australian waters. The newly-elected opposition leader also flagged a return to temporary protection visas, a policy also supported by Malcolm Turnbull before he was dumped.
"We've got to above all else deny to unauthorised arrivals the great prize of permanent residency in Australia,'' he said. "And that means a new class of visas, akin to the temporary protection visas, it means offshore processing. "It means where you can, turning boats around and it means working closely with host countries to try to ensure that we don't get people setting off in these leaky boats." There have been 49 boats carrying asylum seekers intercepted in Australian waters this year.
Meanwhile, Mr Abbott is set to announce his frontbench team in the coming days after rolling Malcolm Turnbull in yesterday's leadership spill... The Opposition Leader said he would like Senator Barnaby Joyce, the Nationals leader in the Senate, to be a part of his frontbench team and was considering his options. "I'm in the process of thinking about that and obviously talking to Warren Truss, the leader of the Nats,'' Mr Abbott told 3AW Radio this morning. "Malcolm wanted him on the frontbench because he's the leader of the National Party in the Senate and the Nats leader in the Senate should be part of the frontbench.'' Mr Abbott described Senator Joyce as a very "effective, accomplished politician''. "I think the National Party are lucky to have him and I think the coalition is stronger thanks to Barnaby.''
Meanwhile, Christopher Pyne, manager of Opposition business in the Lower House, predicts the nation faces a March election, with today's ETS defeat set to prompt a double dissolution. "I think the election will be on March the 6th," Mr Pyne told ABC TV. "(The government) will be rushing off to the polls because that was what the ETS in my view was all about ... so they could bring it back (to Parliament) and it could be a double dissolution trigger."
Mr Pyne said he expected Mr Abbott to remain in the Liberal top job until then. "I think he will take the party to the election with gusto," he said. "We will certainly know the difference between Labor and Liberal on election day, which is a huge plus in politics."...
Mr Abbott said Mr Rudd was "worse than Whitlam" when it came to wasting public money. "We have to make the Government the issue," he said. "We have to ensure that people are thinking about Labor's broken promises - rising interest rates, wasted money in the education revolution program, the $43 billion broadband program which will never happen."
John Howard paid tribute to his understudy, describing Mr Abbott as "a person of high intelligence, great energy".
More HERE
Arrogant head-teacher ignores grievous bullying at government school
It was only the glare of publicity that got some decency out of this lazy bureaucrat
BRAVE Tyler Fishlock had to flee his school after standing up to repeated attacks by a bully he cannot see. Tyler - who captured the hearts of Victorians after having both his eyes removed to save his life from cancer - has been beaten with a ruler and a xylophone stick, kicked and punched, pushed, and had scissors clicked dangerously in front of this face. He was also called "retard", "spastic" and "blind kid".
"I can't dodge it. I can't see him coming and I think 'Oh God, here comes the monster again'," said Tyler, 7. "I am terrified of him."
After the third serious attack last week, the bully was suspended for two days and Caroline Springs College hired a "bodyguard" teacher to protect other children.
Tyler's distraught mother Georgette Fishlock yesterday withdrew him from school after the principal refused to remove the troublemaker from Tyler's class. But after being contacted by the Herald Sun, the school reversed its decision and has promised to move the boy to another class from tomorrow.
Ms Fishlock said Tyler will now return to school, but he missed out on performing in The Lion Sleeps Tonight at his first school concert last night because he was too scared. "Up until this point he never felt any different to any other child," Ms Fishlock said. "He tends to tackle life head-on like he always has, but this has put a real dampener on his school year." Ms Fishlock said the bully picked on other kids too, "but I think he favors Tyler because he gets something out of scaring him".
In the worst attack, teachers told the Fishlocks how Tyler was jabbed with a ruler in the area where he has painful scar tissue on his torso from operations. In a separate incident, the boy's mother made him apologise for threatening Tyler with scissors.
Last Wednesday Tyler was hit with a xylophone stick before being kicked in the kneecaps until he was rescued, cowering in the corner of his music class. After that attack, Ms Fishlock threatened to withdraw Tyler from school for the rest of the year unless the bully was removed from his class.
When contacted by the Herald Sun, college director Patrick Waring said the Fishlocks had no right to demand the boy be removed. He soon called back to say an agreement had been reached and the boy would be moved. "Parents are in no position - it doesn't matter who they are - to tell us ... what they want done with other people's children," Mr Waring said. "These are six-year-olds who are having a bit of trouble getting on with each other. We are not talking about high-end bullying, it is just spasmodic bad behaviour." [He might change his tune if someone blinded him and pushed him around]
SOURCE
Australians have the biggest homes
This comparison isn't a guide to much. House prices vary much more in America than they do in Australia. A tangle of Greenie land-use restrictions in California make housing prices there something like three times higher than they are in Texas, for instance. And higher prices mean that most people must settle for smaller homes. Texas prices seem quite low by Australian standards, in fact
AUSTRALIANS have the world's largest houses, beating traditional champion the US, however the cost of renting is similarly expanding. Data commissioned by CommSec shows the Australian house has grown on average by 10 per cent in the past decade to a record high of 214sq m, three times the size of the average British house. But a second report from BIS Shrapnel has also forecast rents would continue to spiral with a rise of 5 per cent a year in Brisbane between 2010 and 2012 and similar levels in other capitals, the Courier-Mail reported. It was estimated landlords would pocket an extra $2 billion nationally during the period.
According to CommSec, while the houses are getting bigger, so too are the families with the number of people in each household rising from 2.51 to 2.56, the first such rise in at least 100 years. NSW has the biggest houses in Australia and by a large margin. The size of the average new house built in NSW in 2008-09 was 262.9sq m, followed by Queensland 253sq m.
"The increase in the size of the average family unit may mean that fewer new homes need to be built," CommSec's Craig James said. "It makes sense. Population is rising, as is the cost of housing and the cost of moving house, so we are making greater use of what we've got. "Children are living at home longer with parents and more people are opting for shared accommodation."
Had the number of persons per household remained unchanged, CommSec estimates that 166,000 extra homes would needed to have been built in the 2007-08 year. "If the size of the average household continues to rise, there will be reduced demand for new houses and apartments," Mr James said.
"It is questionable whether Aussie homes can, or indeed should, continue to grow. "Generation Y is already baulking at the cost of housing, choosing to stay at home longer with parents."
In Europe Denmark has the biggest homes (houses and flats), with an average floor area of 137sq m, followed by Greece (126sq m), and the Netherlands (115.5sq m). Homes in the UK are the smallest in Europe at 76sq m.
Weekend auction clearances showed no let-up in demand ahead of tomorrow's Reserve Bank meeting that could lift interest rates for the third month in a row.
SOURCE
That shirt & Tie!
The man definitely craves attention. And if I owed millions (which he does) I would certainly not be funding the hugely expensive ostentation described below. But my background is Presbyterian and his is Jewish so perhaps we are both right within our own perspectives. I doubt that ostentation is good PR in the long run, though. Presbyterians (mainly people of Scottish origin) do pretty well without it -- and also without attracting odium upon themselves. There is no anti-Presbyterianism that I have heard of. A low profile has its benefits
AUSTRALIA'S most expensive and extravagant wedding went off without a hitch last night - at a rumoured cost of more than $3 million. Blushing bride Brynne Gordon dripped in $500,000 worth of diamonds and dazzled in a tasteful, strapless, ivory gown of silk, satin and tulle, while her groom wore a tuxedo with a twist.
Guests were one as they described Brynne, at just 26, radiating pure and genuine joy to be marrying the man who swept her off her feet and brought her to Australia after a whirlwind courtship in the US.
Members of the wedding party arrived in Rolls Royces, at least one bearing "Brynne" numberplates. Television starlets, AFL stars, radio personalities and talkback hosts, media commentators and fashionistas swarmed into Crown's Palladium Ballroom to watch "Doc" Geoffrey Edelsten wed the vivacious young woman who has given him a new lease of life after a colourful career.
Guests were treated to a sumptuous, seven-course dinner. Molly Meldrum, Chris Judd, Pete Hellier, Dave Hughes, Pippa Black, Tiffany Hall, Jeanne Pratt and Tottie Goldsmith were among them. Former Collingwood legend Tom Hafey knew Dr Edelsten in Sydney and said he had found him to be shy.
Brynne's brothers Nick and Ryan said it was a wedding most women would only ever dream of. "It's hard to imagine just how big and amazing it is," said Ryan, 29. "I think it's probably every girl's dream to meet the man of her dreams and marry in like, a fairytale." Proud and protective of their older sister, Nick and Ryan were equally full of praise for their new brother-in-law. "He's fantastic to Brynne, he's great with our whole family and he treats her so well, we are really happy for both of them."
More HERE
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG expresses high hopes for new conservative leader, Tony Abbott
Conservative politicians block climate deal in Senate
At last the Liberal party has a real conservative in charge
The Coalition has managed to block the the Government's plan to fight climate change. The senate eventually voted 41-33 to defeat the government's climate change scheme despite two key Liberal moderates, Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce, crossing the Senate floor.
Blocking the emissions trading scheme (ETS) - which would set a limit on carbon pollution, then allow companies to trade permits to pollute within that cap - has handed Kevin Rudd a trigger for an early election.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong hit out at opposing senators before the final vote, saying changing Australia's economy is crucial to fighting climate change. "You do not tackle climate change unless you change your economy," Senator Wong told the senate. "You have to make polluters pay."
Mr Rudd has said publicly he has no interest in going to the polls early, but Labor insiders have said many Government number crunchers are open to the idea. A March election is touted as the most likely timing, if Mr Rudd decided to call a snap poll.
New Liberal leader Tony Abbott, led a revolt against Malcolm Turnbull over a deal done with the Government that would have seen the Opposition support the scheme. But in a secret ballot of Liberal MPs straight after the leadership spill, a majority voted to renege on that deal.
The scheme would make household items and bills more expensive, because polluters would pass on the cost of polluting to consumers. However the Government has promised most families will be no worse off. Mr Abbott has called the scheme a "$130 billion tax". "This great big new tax is not actually going to reduce our emissions, it's just going to make a whole lot of things more expensive," he said on Macquarie radio this morning. "I am confident ... this legislation will be defeated in the Senate today."
Mr Abbott said yesterday he was not frightened by the prospect of fighting an election against Mr Rudd on climate change. He has promised an alternative policy on climate change next year, arguing there is no need to rush a policy that important.
But the Government is already painting Mr Abbott's leadership as a relic of the Howard era, with no new ideas for the future. Mr Rudd and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong had set a deadline of last week for the climate deal to be passed, but offered it again to Mr Abbott after yesterday's spill. The deal negotiated with the Opposition gave billions of extra dollars for polluters in compensation for when the cap is introduced.
The Government wanted the deal passed in time for next week's UN climate conference in Copenhagen. It is supposed to secure a successor to the Kyoto climate treaty, although no-one thinks it will achieve anything binding. Senator Wong has said she will go the summit early to try to salvage something, but it will be harder without an ETS deal.
Meanwhile Liberal Party strategists are plotting a strategy of using the ETS to target the PM as failing to deliver on promises that he would ease financial stress on families. Sources told The Australian that party research showed battlers were angry that costs were rising on Mr Rudd's watch - and that he was proposing to add to the burden with the climate plan.
Mr Abbott said he would pursue Mr Rudd for driving up interest rates with profligate spending, pointing to yesterday's decision by the Reserve Bank to lift the official cash rate by 0.25 percentage points to 3.75 per cent. The Opposition Leader also foreshadowed industrial relations reform. While admitting the Howard government's Work Choices laws had gone too far, he said they had created two million jobs and that "a free and flexible economy" was vital.
SOURCE
New Liberal leader Tony Abbott says he would have 'removed' Oceanic Viking asylum seekers
FEDERAL Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has suggested he would have solved the stand-off aboard the Oceanic Viking by forcibly removing the asylum seekers. The 78 Tamils disembarked in Indonesia after more than a month aboard the vessel following a deal offered by Australian authorities which guaranteed their refugee claims would be fast-tracked.
But Mr Abbott said the group should have been removed. "If 70 people invaded the prime minister's office it wouldn't matter how good the cause was, they would be removed,'' he told Fairfax Radio. "Now, I think that the people who were on the Oceanic Viking should have been removed.''
Mr Abbott, in his first full day as opposition leader, made the comment while taking calls on talkback radio this morning. And like Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said in the lead up to the 2007 election, Mr Abbott has advocated a policy of turning the asylum seeker boats back so they do not reach Australian waters. The newly-elected opposition leader also flagged a return to temporary protection visas, a policy also supported by Malcolm Turnbull before he was dumped.
"We've got to above all else deny to unauthorised arrivals the great prize of permanent residency in Australia,'' he said. "And that means a new class of visas, akin to the temporary protection visas, it means offshore processing. "It means where you can, turning boats around and it means working closely with host countries to try to ensure that we don't get people setting off in these leaky boats." There have been 49 boats carrying asylum seekers intercepted in Australian waters this year.
Meanwhile, Mr Abbott is set to announce his frontbench team in the coming days after rolling Malcolm Turnbull in yesterday's leadership spill... The Opposition Leader said he would like Senator Barnaby Joyce, the Nationals leader in the Senate, to be a part of his frontbench team and was considering his options. "I'm in the process of thinking about that and obviously talking to Warren Truss, the leader of the Nats,'' Mr Abbott told 3AW Radio this morning. "Malcolm wanted him on the frontbench because he's the leader of the National Party in the Senate and the Nats leader in the Senate should be part of the frontbench.'' Mr Abbott described Senator Joyce as a very "effective, accomplished politician''. "I think the National Party are lucky to have him and I think the coalition is stronger thanks to Barnaby.''
Meanwhile, Christopher Pyne, manager of Opposition business in the Lower House, predicts the nation faces a March election, with today's ETS defeat set to prompt a double dissolution. "I think the election will be on March the 6th," Mr Pyne told ABC TV. "(The government) will be rushing off to the polls because that was what the ETS in my view was all about ... so they could bring it back (to Parliament) and it could be a double dissolution trigger."
Mr Pyne said he expected Mr Abbott to remain in the Liberal top job until then. "I think he will take the party to the election with gusto," he said. "We will certainly know the difference between Labor and Liberal on election day, which is a huge plus in politics."...
Mr Abbott said Mr Rudd was "worse than Whitlam" when it came to wasting public money. "We have to make the Government the issue," he said. "We have to ensure that people are thinking about Labor's broken promises - rising interest rates, wasted money in the education revolution program, the $43 billion broadband program which will never happen."
John Howard paid tribute to his understudy, describing Mr Abbott as "a person of high intelligence, great energy".
More HERE
Arrogant head-teacher ignores grievous bullying at government school
It was only the glare of publicity that got some decency out of this lazy bureaucrat
BRAVE Tyler Fishlock had to flee his school after standing up to repeated attacks by a bully he cannot see. Tyler - who captured the hearts of Victorians after having both his eyes removed to save his life from cancer - has been beaten with a ruler and a xylophone stick, kicked and punched, pushed, and had scissors clicked dangerously in front of this face. He was also called "retard", "spastic" and "blind kid".
"I can't dodge it. I can't see him coming and I think 'Oh God, here comes the monster again'," said Tyler, 7. "I am terrified of him."
After the third serious attack last week, the bully was suspended for two days and Caroline Springs College hired a "bodyguard" teacher to protect other children.
Tyler's distraught mother Georgette Fishlock yesterday withdrew him from school after the principal refused to remove the troublemaker from Tyler's class. But after being contacted by the Herald Sun, the school reversed its decision and has promised to move the boy to another class from tomorrow.
Ms Fishlock said Tyler will now return to school, but he missed out on performing in The Lion Sleeps Tonight at his first school concert last night because he was too scared. "Up until this point he never felt any different to any other child," Ms Fishlock said. "He tends to tackle life head-on like he always has, but this has put a real dampener on his school year." Ms Fishlock said the bully picked on other kids too, "but I think he favors Tyler because he gets something out of scaring him".
In the worst attack, teachers told the Fishlocks how Tyler was jabbed with a ruler in the area where he has painful scar tissue on his torso from operations. In a separate incident, the boy's mother made him apologise for threatening Tyler with scissors.
Last Wednesday Tyler was hit with a xylophone stick before being kicked in the kneecaps until he was rescued, cowering in the corner of his music class. After that attack, Ms Fishlock threatened to withdraw Tyler from school for the rest of the year unless the bully was removed from his class.
When contacted by the Herald Sun, college director Patrick Waring said the Fishlocks had no right to demand the boy be removed. He soon called back to say an agreement had been reached and the boy would be moved. "Parents are in no position - it doesn't matter who they are - to tell us ... what they want done with other people's children," Mr Waring said. "These are six-year-olds who are having a bit of trouble getting on with each other. We are not talking about high-end bullying, it is just spasmodic bad behaviour." [He might change his tune if someone blinded him and pushed him around]
SOURCE
Australians have the biggest homes
This comparison isn't a guide to much. House prices vary much more in America than they do in Australia. A tangle of Greenie land-use restrictions in California make housing prices there something like three times higher than they are in Texas, for instance. And higher prices mean that most people must settle for smaller homes. Texas prices seem quite low by Australian standards, in fact
AUSTRALIANS have the world's largest houses, beating traditional champion the US, however the cost of renting is similarly expanding. Data commissioned by CommSec shows the Australian house has grown on average by 10 per cent in the past decade to a record high of 214sq m, three times the size of the average British house. But a second report from BIS Shrapnel has also forecast rents would continue to spiral with a rise of 5 per cent a year in Brisbane between 2010 and 2012 and similar levels in other capitals, the Courier-Mail reported. It was estimated landlords would pocket an extra $2 billion nationally during the period.
According to CommSec, while the houses are getting bigger, so too are the families with the number of people in each household rising from 2.51 to 2.56, the first such rise in at least 100 years. NSW has the biggest houses in Australia and by a large margin. The size of the average new house built in NSW in 2008-09 was 262.9sq m, followed by Queensland 253sq m.
"The increase in the size of the average family unit may mean that fewer new homes need to be built," CommSec's Craig James said. "It makes sense. Population is rising, as is the cost of housing and the cost of moving house, so we are making greater use of what we've got. "Children are living at home longer with parents and more people are opting for shared accommodation."
Had the number of persons per household remained unchanged, CommSec estimates that 166,000 extra homes would needed to have been built in the 2007-08 year. "If the size of the average household continues to rise, there will be reduced demand for new houses and apartments," Mr James said.
"It is questionable whether Aussie homes can, or indeed should, continue to grow. "Generation Y is already baulking at the cost of housing, choosing to stay at home longer with parents."
In Europe Denmark has the biggest homes (houses and flats), with an average floor area of 137sq m, followed by Greece (126sq m), and the Netherlands (115.5sq m). Homes in the UK are the smallest in Europe at 76sq m.
Weekend auction clearances showed no let-up in demand ahead of tomorrow's Reserve Bank meeting that could lift interest rates for the third month in a row.
SOURCE
That shirt & Tie!
The man definitely craves attention. And if I owed millions (which he does) I would certainly not be funding the hugely expensive ostentation described below. But my background is Presbyterian and his is Jewish so perhaps we are both right within our own perspectives. I doubt that ostentation is good PR in the long run, though. Presbyterians (mainly people of Scottish origin) do pretty well without it -- and also without attracting odium upon themselves. There is no anti-Presbyterianism that I have heard of. A low profile has its benefits
AUSTRALIA'S most expensive and extravagant wedding went off without a hitch last night - at a rumoured cost of more than $3 million. Blushing bride Brynne Gordon dripped in $500,000 worth of diamonds and dazzled in a tasteful, strapless, ivory gown of silk, satin and tulle, while her groom wore a tuxedo with a twist.
Guests were one as they described Brynne, at just 26, radiating pure and genuine joy to be marrying the man who swept her off her feet and brought her to Australia after a whirlwind courtship in the US.
Members of the wedding party arrived in Rolls Royces, at least one bearing "Brynne" numberplates. Television starlets, AFL stars, radio personalities and talkback hosts, media commentators and fashionistas swarmed into Crown's Palladium Ballroom to watch "Doc" Geoffrey Edelsten wed the vivacious young woman who has given him a new lease of life after a colourful career.
Guests were treated to a sumptuous, seven-course dinner. Molly Meldrum, Chris Judd, Pete Hellier, Dave Hughes, Pippa Black, Tiffany Hall, Jeanne Pratt and Tottie Goldsmith were among them. Former Collingwood legend Tom Hafey knew Dr Edelsten in Sydney and said he had found him to be shy.
Brynne's brothers Nick and Ryan said it was a wedding most women would only ever dream of. "It's hard to imagine just how big and amazing it is," said Ryan, 29. "I think it's probably every girl's dream to meet the man of her dreams and marry in like, a fairytale." Proud and protective of their older sister, Nick and Ryan were equally full of praise for their new brother-in-law. "He's fantastic to Brynne, he's great with our whole family and he treats her so well, we are really happy for both of them."
More HERE
Tuesday, December 01, 2009
Dislike of Warmist laws causes change in conservative leadership
TONY Abbott's Liberal leadership is a remarkable result for the Liberal party and a victory for those two camps who wanted to remove Malcolm Turnbull and oppose the Rudd Government's ETS. Abbott’s position will now be to oppose the ETS but faces the prospect of rebels immediately undermining his leadership by supporting the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
Mr Divisive – as he is seen – will now have to be the conciliatory and healing leader that Joe Hockey had promised to be.
In the end Abbott’s decisiveness as a potential leader has triumphed over Turnbull’s dictatorial style and crash through approach and Hockey’s attempts to compromise so much he threatened to leave the party without a policy position.
The Liberals have voted for decisiveness and character over indecision from Hockey and overbearing character from Turnbull.
The scene is now set for further ructions within the Liberal party or revolts in the Senate and a Liberal-nationals Coalition attacking the Rudd Government’s ETS as a new tax.
SOURCE
Major Australian resort area runs short of public hospital beds
BOOMING coastal populations in the southeast and north are facing the gravest shortages of public hospital beds in Queensland. The lack of overnight beds, especially on the Gold and Sunshine coasts, has led AMA Queensland president Mason Stevenson to angrily accuse State Treasury of "holding sway" over patients' lives. "If you are a citizen of the Gold or Sunshine coast, (your) health and safety is compromised," Dr Stevenson said. "Dollars and cents appear to come first. "And patients will continue to suffer, and some patients will die, as a result."
For the Gold Coast, the picture only gets bleaker. The Courier-Mail can reveal the new Gold Coast University Hospital will open in late 2012 with up to 150 fewer available beds than promised. Queensland Health deputy director-general (planning and infrastructure) Michael Walsh said staff recruitment delays – not budget cuts – were to blame.
Gold Coast Medical Association president Philip Morris said the hold-up was in stark contrast to the Government's rhetoric. "They keep saying they've got a 750-bed hospital," Dr Morris said.
The Courier-Mail's hospital-by-hospital analysis found the Mackay Health Service District was Queensland's poorest provider of overnight public beds – with six hospitals, 252 beds and only 1.5 beds per 1000 people. The rate was almost half the national average of 2.5 beds for every 1000 residents. According to State Government projections, the Mackay region was expected to be one of the top growth spots from 2006-2026, increasing its population by 37.4 per cent.
However, the Gold Coast was the next most under-resourced area. And its 1.72 beds per 1000 people – based on an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figure of 855 beds – could well be flattering. A Queensland Health spokesman told The Courier-Mail the latest departmental count for the coast was 745 overnight public hospital beds. The Gold Coast Hospital claimed 472 of those, while its Robina campus had 210 and Carrara Health Centre a further 63.
Dr Morris said the coast's population was expected to balloon from 500,000 to 823,000 over the next two decades. He warned that without expansion beyond the University Hospital, the tourism mecca would dive towards a 1000-bed deficit in 25 years. "This will be a disaster for the community," he said.
Dr Stevenson said the Sunshine Coast, the third-worst facilitated district with 1.8 beds per 1000 people, was so bereft of wards and specialist treatments that 180 of its constituents occupied a Brisbane public hospital bed every night. "By 2016-17, the number will have increased to 280," he said. "That denies those beds to Brisbane residents, and also puts enormous pressure on our ambulance and patient transfer systems."
A Coolum Beach GP, Dr Stevenson said the Sunshine Coast population would grow from about 300,000 to 460,000 in 2017. Yet it was missing "tertiary-level services that are now regarded as mainstream throughout the western world". "We do not have access to public cardiology, neurosurgery, vascular surgery or public cancer radiotherapy," Dr Stevenson said.
Brisbane's Metro South Health Service District also failed to meet the national standard, with 2.13 beds per 1000 people. The zone includes major hospitals such as Logan, Mater Adult, Mater Children's, Mater Mothers, Princess Alexandra and QEII.
However, Health Minister Paul Lucas insists there is no crisis. "Of course we want to build more beds and . . . we are doing it," he said. Mr Lucas said the Commonwealth's inadequate subsidising of nursing homes was driving providers out of the sector. "(As a result), there are on average 400 (acute) beds being occupied by Queenslanders who are eligible for nursing home placement," he said.
SOURCE
Teachers bullied to keep quiet on problem government schools
The Queensland Opposition said whistleblowing teachers were being bullied by other teachers to keep problems in schools quiet. New figures released by the State Government showed the number of formal complaints of bullying and aggressive behaviour by teachers against other teachers had increased by more than 40 per cent over the past two years. In 2007, 26 teachers made formal complaints to the education department about other teachers. The number rose to 30 in 2008 and there have been 37 complaints so far in 2009.
Education Minister Geoff Wilson said in an answer to a parliamentary question on notice that the number represented less than one per cent of the state's 47,000 teachers.
Opposition education spokesman Bruce Flegg said he had been approached by a number of teachers concerned about being told by other teachers to keep quiet about school problems. He said the Government was also covering up by refusing to release to the Opposition details of apprehended violence orders against teachers and the number of weapons seized in schools. "There's pressure to cover up those sorts of events, but teachers in those schools want the root causes to be addressed," Dr Flegg said.
"I don't think there is any doubt whistleblowers are being bullied. "The agenda is about controlling the public relations rather than fixing the problems." He said it was a systemic problem that required government action.
SOURCE
Crackdown on rogue bike riders in NSW
You probably have to be full of testerone to ride a bike through fast-moving traffic but the testosterone does seem to foster a disregard for everyone else
Wear bright clothing. Leave MP3 players and mobile phones at home. Never ride more than two abreast. And never travel in packs of more than 20. That's the basic message for cyclists riding in groups contained in new NSW Government guidelines aimed at reducing the increasing number of road injuries and deaths.
"Riding in traffic can be safe and enjoyable for cyclists who follow some commonsense tips," Assistant Transport Minister David Borger said today when he launched the safety campaign at a Darlinghurst coffee shop. “We all know 'the road is there to share' and, in order to save lives, all road users need to obey the rules and respect others. "Cyclists are among our most vulnerable road users and it is important they understand the safest way to travel."
Last year, there were almost 700 cycling accidents, three involving fatalities, in the Sydney region. The number of deaths is expected to have doubled this year. There have been several highly publicised incidents recently. They include two serious accidents on Southern Cross Drive and a case in Seven Hills in which a cyclist, who was allegedly riding illegally on a T-Way lane, followed and boarded a bus, before bashing the 64-year-old driver.
Parramatta police duty officer, Inspector Beth Sturton, said police had still not been able to identify the cyclist involved in the T-Way dispute. "There's still a couple of witnesses [we're] trying to speak to but nothing's come to light there that can identify the individual at this stage," Inspector Sturton said.
Mr Borger said cyclists, like all other road users, were expected to obey the rules. "This includes all signs and signals, staying clear of moving motor vehicles, wearing a helmet, ride no more than two abreast unless passing and follow lane markings. “Cyclists should also look out for pedestrians and give way to them and they are strongly advised to wear brightly coloured or reflective clothing to help make them more visible.”
SOURCE
TONY Abbott's Liberal leadership is a remarkable result for the Liberal party and a victory for those two camps who wanted to remove Malcolm Turnbull and oppose the Rudd Government's ETS. Abbott’s position will now be to oppose the ETS but faces the prospect of rebels immediately undermining his leadership by supporting the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
Mr Divisive – as he is seen – will now have to be the conciliatory and healing leader that Joe Hockey had promised to be.
In the end Abbott’s decisiveness as a potential leader has triumphed over Turnbull’s dictatorial style and crash through approach and Hockey’s attempts to compromise so much he threatened to leave the party without a policy position.
The Liberals have voted for decisiveness and character over indecision from Hockey and overbearing character from Turnbull.
The scene is now set for further ructions within the Liberal party or revolts in the Senate and a Liberal-nationals Coalition attacking the Rudd Government’s ETS as a new tax.
SOURCE
Major Australian resort area runs short of public hospital beds
BOOMING coastal populations in the southeast and north are facing the gravest shortages of public hospital beds in Queensland. The lack of overnight beds, especially on the Gold and Sunshine coasts, has led AMA Queensland president Mason Stevenson to angrily accuse State Treasury of "holding sway" over patients' lives. "If you are a citizen of the Gold or Sunshine coast, (your) health and safety is compromised," Dr Stevenson said. "Dollars and cents appear to come first. "And patients will continue to suffer, and some patients will die, as a result."
For the Gold Coast, the picture only gets bleaker. The Courier-Mail can reveal the new Gold Coast University Hospital will open in late 2012 with up to 150 fewer available beds than promised. Queensland Health deputy director-general (planning and infrastructure) Michael Walsh said staff recruitment delays – not budget cuts – were to blame.
Gold Coast Medical Association president Philip Morris said the hold-up was in stark contrast to the Government's rhetoric. "They keep saying they've got a 750-bed hospital," Dr Morris said.
The Courier-Mail's hospital-by-hospital analysis found the Mackay Health Service District was Queensland's poorest provider of overnight public beds – with six hospitals, 252 beds and only 1.5 beds per 1000 people. The rate was almost half the national average of 2.5 beds for every 1000 residents. According to State Government projections, the Mackay region was expected to be one of the top growth spots from 2006-2026, increasing its population by 37.4 per cent.
However, the Gold Coast was the next most under-resourced area. And its 1.72 beds per 1000 people – based on an Australian Institute of Health and Welfare figure of 855 beds – could well be flattering. A Queensland Health spokesman told The Courier-Mail the latest departmental count for the coast was 745 overnight public hospital beds. The Gold Coast Hospital claimed 472 of those, while its Robina campus had 210 and Carrara Health Centre a further 63.
Dr Morris said the coast's population was expected to balloon from 500,000 to 823,000 over the next two decades. He warned that without expansion beyond the University Hospital, the tourism mecca would dive towards a 1000-bed deficit in 25 years. "This will be a disaster for the community," he said.
Dr Stevenson said the Sunshine Coast, the third-worst facilitated district with 1.8 beds per 1000 people, was so bereft of wards and specialist treatments that 180 of its constituents occupied a Brisbane public hospital bed every night. "By 2016-17, the number will have increased to 280," he said. "That denies those beds to Brisbane residents, and also puts enormous pressure on our ambulance and patient transfer systems."
A Coolum Beach GP, Dr Stevenson said the Sunshine Coast population would grow from about 300,000 to 460,000 in 2017. Yet it was missing "tertiary-level services that are now regarded as mainstream throughout the western world". "We do not have access to public cardiology, neurosurgery, vascular surgery or public cancer radiotherapy," Dr Stevenson said.
Brisbane's Metro South Health Service District also failed to meet the national standard, with 2.13 beds per 1000 people. The zone includes major hospitals such as Logan, Mater Adult, Mater Children's, Mater Mothers, Princess Alexandra and QEII.
However, Health Minister Paul Lucas insists there is no crisis. "Of course we want to build more beds and . . . we are doing it," he said. Mr Lucas said the Commonwealth's inadequate subsidising of nursing homes was driving providers out of the sector. "(As a result), there are on average 400 (acute) beds being occupied by Queenslanders who are eligible for nursing home placement," he said.
SOURCE
Teachers bullied to keep quiet on problem government schools
The Queensland Opposition said whistleblowing teachers were being bullied by other teachers to keep problems in schools quiet. New figures released by the State Government showed the number of formal complaints of bullying and aggressive behaviour by teachers against other teachers had increased by more than 40 per cent over the past two years. In 2007, 26 teachers made formal complaints to the education department about other teachers. The number rose to 30 in 2008 and there have been 37 complaints so far in 2009.
Education Minister Geoff Wilson said in an answer to a parliamentary question on notice that the number represented less than one per cent of the state's 47,000 teachers.
Opposition education spokesman Bruce Flegg said he had been approached by a number of teachers concerned about being told by other teachers to keep quiet about school problems. He said the Government was also covering up by refusing to release to the Opposition details of apprehended violence orders against teachers and the number of weapons seized in schools. "There's pressure to cover up those sorts of events, but teachers in those schools want the root causes to be addressed," Dr Flegg said.
"I don't think there is any doubt whistleblowers are being bullied. "The agenda is about controlling the public relations rather than fixing the problems." He said it was a systemic problem that required government action.
SOURCE
Crackdown on rogue bike riders in NSW
You probably have to be full of testerone to ride a bike through fast-moving traffic but the testosterone does seem to foster a disregard for everyone else
Wear bright clothing. Leave MP3 players and mobile phones at home. Never ride more than two abreast. And never travel in packs of more than 20. That's the basic message for cyclists riding in groups contained in new NSW Government guidelines aimed at reducing the increasing number of road injuries and deaths.
"Riding in traffic can be safe and enjoyable for cyclists who follow some commonsense tips," Assistant Transport Minister David Borger said today when he launched the safety campaign at a Darlinghurst coffee shop. “We all know 'the road is there to share' and, in order to save lives, all road users need to obey the rules and respect others. "Cyclists are among our most vulnerable road users and it is important they understand the safest way to travel."
Last year, there were almost 700 cycling accidents, three involving fatalities, in the Sydney region. The number of deaths is expected to have doubled this year. There have been several highly publicised incidents recently. They include two serious accidents on Southern Cross Drive and a case in Seven Hills in which a cyclist, who was allegedly riding illegally on a T-Way lane, followed and boarded a bus, before bashing the 64-year-old driver.
Parramatta police duty officer, Inspector Beth Sturton, said police had still not been able to identify the cyclist involved in the T-Way dispute. "There's still a couple of witnesses [we're] trying to speak to but nothing's come to light there that can identify the individual at this stage," Inspector Sturton said.
Mr Borger said cyclists, like all other road users, were expected to obey the rules. "This includes all signs and signals, staying clear of moving motor vehicles, wearing a helmet, ride no more than two abreast unless passing and follow lane markings. “Cyclists should also look out for pedestrians and give way to them and they are strongly advised to wear brightly coloured or reflective clothing to help make them more visible.”
SOURCE
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
