Australian Politics
Incomes leap for low-paid
THE incomes of the nation's poorest households rose more dramatically than those of the richest Australians in the final years of the Howard government, buoyed by rising wages and bulging welfare payments. While lone parents, indigenous Australians and the disabled still struggled, overall the poorest households have enjoyed the largest rise in income over the past six years.
The findings of the first study to track changes to income and wealth in the same group of people cast a new light on one of Kevin Rudd's central themes in Opposition - that in John Howard's "brutopia" the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer. During last year's election campaign, Mr Rudd described working families as the "forgotten people", but the new research appears to paint a contrary picture. Since 2001, earnings for those at the bottom of the ladder rose more sharply than for those near the top - the top 10 per cent suffering a slight fall from 2001 to 2006.
While the rise in overall wealth favoured the top end - primarily due to higher property ownership - increases to lower-end incomes meant the rich hadn't skated away from the poor. "The figures show current income is not a good predictor of future income," said labour economist Mark Wooden, who will detail the findings at the two-day New Agenda for Prosperity conference, presented by the Melbourne Institute and The Australian, opening at Melbourne University on Thursday.
The data comes from the federal Government's Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey, a longitudinal study of 14,000 people nationwide, which is managed by the institute. "It shows everyone has done pretty well in Australia since 2001," Professor Wooden, institute deputy director, told The Australian. "The rich have done a little better overall than the poor, and those with property have had a big surge. "But those with property are spread across the income spectrum."
The data, compiled by the institute's Roger Wilkins, shows median incomes - after adjusting for inflation - for those in the lowest 10 per cent of households increased 29 per cent after tax to about $26,000. The top 10 per cent saw their income fall by 2.5 per cent to $138,000. Wealth for the median household has risen rapidly since the turn of the century, from $215,000 to $340,000, fuelled by the property boom and a 51per cent increase in average superannuation balances to $123,000. For the bottom 10 per cent, wealth rose from $114,000 to $175,000. For the top 10 per it rose from $770,000 to $975,000.
"Income changes have tended to favour the poor, with the biggest winners being those in the bottom 10per cent and the biggest losers those in the top 10 per cent," Professor Wooden said. "And if you factor in non-cash benefits provided by the Government, the figures would tilt even more in favour of the poor."
Professor Wooden said a significant contributor to the improved fortunes of the poor had been better employment prospects and relatively strong wages growth. Moves from welfare to work almost invariably mean increased incomes, but even among the employed it has been the low-paid who have fared best. "People don't tend to move from one minimum pay job to another," he said. "They move to better jobs. Also at the lower end, there are automatic pay increments built into the system, whereas atthe top of the scale when people are close to their maximum productivity potential, pay increases are harder to come by except when there's a promotion. "And those lighthouse examples of directors getting massive bonuses or payouts? They are just a tiny fraction of the overall picture."
The pro-poor picture in income growth had policy implications for welfare delivery. "The Government could be handing out dollars to people who will be doing a lot better in the near future," Professor Wooden said. "This approach won't do much to address systemic disadvantage."
Those who remained stalled in the lowest 20 per cent of income and wealth over the six years surveyed were the indigenous, lone parents and the disabled. "It is here where the study could point the way to more targeted welfare delivery," hesaid.
In an essay titled Howard's Brutopia: The Battle of Ideas in Australian Politics published in The Monthly in 2006 shortly before he became Opposition leader, Mr Rudd cites warnings about the "brutopia of unchecked market forces".
Source
NSW hospitals cook the books
NSW Health says altering hospital records to show better treatment times in emergency departments is not a widespread practice. Falsified records from Gosford Hospital showing faster emergency treatment times had been forwarded to the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), NSW Health director of performance improvement Dr Tony O'Connell confirmed today. But audits of numerous public hospitals revealed that the practice was not widespread, he said.
"We've been doing both internal and external audits of numerous hospitals and there's no evidence that this is widespread," Dr O'Connell told AAP. "In fact it was from an internal audit at Gosford hospital that it was discovered that there was one person who was doctoring results, and that was reported to ICAC and ICAC were satisfied with the actions which the area health service proposed to take to address that issue."
Dr O'Connell denied that NSW Health had been covering up the results of the audits and said they had not been released because they were "standard" reports. "We haven't released them because they're kind of standard ... that any big organisation would do and they don't show anything wrong with the way that the data is collected," he said. "So we haven't released it, but gosh I think we should now."
Dr O'Connell said any staff caught altering hospital records would be dealt with under the department's fraud guidelines. "Any behaviour by staff which corrupts data deliberately is fraudulent behaviour and would be addressed in the department's fraud guidelines, which all staff when they start work are made familiar with," he said.
Hospital staff understood they needed to treat patients in emergency departments quickly and better hospital resources would assist them, Dr O'Connell said. "Our intent is to get patients through our (emergency departments) in the clinically appropriate time. We want patients not to be queueing, we want patients not to be waiting an inappropriate length of time."
Source
Drunken cop promoted
A POLICE officer who admitted to drinking at least 18 beers before going on duty to carry out a breath test has not been disciplined. Instead, Senior-Constable Alan Reedy has been promoted - despite telling a court last month about a wild night in Cunnamulla that ended with him knocked unconscious after trying to arrest a woman.
Reedy was at the Warrego Hotel about 10pm on May 14, 2005, when asked by colleagues to carry out a breath test. After the test he drank two rums at the Club Hotel and about 12.45am declared himself on duty to arrest local woman Corrinne Mitchell, who he says spat on him, sparking a fight that ended in Reedy being flown to Toowoomba Hospital for treatment. Three people pleaded guilty to charges over the incident but five others fought the charges, which were dropped last month when a judge ruled Reedy's evidence unreliable. A police spokesman said the matter was being reviewed but "at this time the Queensland Police Service has not received any complaint about the matter".
Reedy, who is now a plainclothes detective in Cairns, admitted in the District Court in Charleville to drinking about two mid-strength beers per hour between 10am and 6pm while off-duty at a golf function. From there, the then-constable went to a barbecue where he continued to consume alcohol, before moving on to the Warrego Hotel about 10pm.
In court, defence barrister Phil Hardcastle asked Reedy: "Now how many drinks did you have at the Warrego before you went back on duty to do this breath test?" "Mate, it was just one drink all up," Reedy replied. Mr Hardcastle says: "Then you drop into the Club Hotel. You have two rum and Cokes and you're called away by Senior Constable Lahey?" "Yep," Reedy replies.
An attempt by Constable Lahey to take Reedy home failed - he returned instead to the Club Hotel where he was later assaulted by a group of people after he put himself back on duty and tried to arrest Ms Mitchell. In court, Crown witnesses backed the defendants' claim that Reedy had directed racial comments at Aborigines in a bar and then dragged Ms Mitchell by her hair, pulling clumps out. Reedy denied the claims.
A statement from the Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions states the charge of grievous bodily harm against Ms Mitchell and four others was thrown out because "the judge concluded that it would be unsafe to rely on the complainant's memory to establish guilt beyond doubt". "The reasons for this were that the complainant had consumed a large amount of alcohol before the injuries were inflicted . . . and he had been knocked unconscious in the attack." A police spokesman admitted a driver had been charged over the earlier breath test performed by Reedy.
Queensland Council for Civil Liberties vice-president Terry O'Gorman said the public had the right to have their breath tests carried out by officers who were not affected by alcohol. QPS policy states officers who have a blood alcohol content above .02 face disciplinary action. Mr O'Gorman called for a Crime and Misconduct Commission inquiry into the police handling of the matter. A police spokesman said Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson and Reedy were unavailable for comment.
Source
Australia's Chinese suburbs are top-drawer
Safe, peaceful, affluent and a great place to eat. But they do tend to be targeted by robbers. If only all immigrants were as high-quality as the Chinese!
SUBURBAN multicultural hubs are on the rise, with overseas-born residents accounting for more than 50 per cent of the population in some suburbs. An analysis of Census statistics by RP Data research director Tim Lawless has found Robertson, in Brisbane's south, is home to the highest proportion of overseas-born residents, with migrants comprising 58 per cent of its population. Mr Lawless said the majority of foreign-born residents were from mainland China and Hong Kong.
"Robertson was followed by Stretton, with 55 per cent of the population born overseas, also mainly from China and Hong Kong," he said. "The Brisbane CBD comes in as the third highest suburb based on residents born overseas. This would be due to the high number of international students that reside within inner-city accommodation."
Rocky Lee and his parents, Ming Lau and Yiu Lee, have recently moved to Stretton. Hong Kong-born Mr Lee said he and his family had lived in Carindale, in the city's southeast, since they arrived in Brisbane about 10 years ago, but had wanted to move to the Stretton area because of its multicultural reputation. "And I think it's also got a reputation as a prestigious area," Mr Lee said.
Louis Soh, of Yong Real Estate, based on Brisbane's southside, said the majority of his clients were born overseas. "I would say that about 60 per cent are from overseas," Mr Soh said. He said migrants, particularly those from China and Hong Kong, were attracted to the southside because of its standing as an Asian hub. "There's the Chinese shopping centre in Sunnybank and a lot of people have relatives here," Mr Soh said.
Mr Lawless said migrant clusters were evident throughout Brisbane. Darra and Richlands, in the city's southwest, hold the largest migrant clusters - Vietnam-born residents account for 17 per cent of the suburbs' total population. The second largest cluster was the Chinese community living in Sunnybank, with 9.3 per cent of the overall population, while South Africans living in Anstead [Anstead has large semi-rural blocks of land] account for 6.2 per cent of the total population.
Conversely, Ipswich [a most unprestigious area], which forms part of the greater Brisbane area, is home to the most Australian-born residents. More than 93 per cent of the population in Purga, Deebing Heights and Tallegalla were born in Australia. The Australian Demographic Statistics report shows more migrants settled in Australia last year than in any other period in history.
Source
Monday, March 24, 2008
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Lack of beds delays public hospital surgery
DOZENS of life-saving operations are being cancelled every day in southeast Queensland public hospitals because no intensive care unit beds are available. Nine major surgeries were put off at Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital on just one day last week due to the lack of post-operative ICU beds. Health sources said that was happening every day at the PA - despite a huge injection of extra funding from the State Government in January for this very problem.
The PA received a $10.4 million boost after the mid-year budget review, after the hospital had been forced to turn sick people away last year. A $15 million budget blowout led to 60 beds being closed in October and 20 per cent of operating theatre procedures cancelled. Premier Anna Bligh stepped into the non-surgery crisis and delivered the life-saving funds. "The PA Hospital will progressively reopen beds and restore theatre lists. This will enable the hospital to return to full activity within a few weeks," Ms Bligh said at the time.
But it would appear little has changed. On Tuesday, nine operations were cancelled or postponed because no ICU beds were available. For one cancer patient needing a life-saving Whipple operation, which involves the removal of the head of the pancreas, a portion of the bile duct, the gallbladder and the duodenum, it was the second time in two weeks that surgery was put off. His operation has been rescheduled for Tuesday, but it will go ahead only if there is a spare bed in intensive care for the following two days. Another patient was referred from Ipswich Hospital to the PA last week for heart surgery, but was sent home because no ICU bed was free.
A senior Queensland Health employee, who declined to be identified, told The Sunday Mail that operations were cancelled at the last minute because beds were taken by trauma patients. The source said a spate of major accidents had produced victims with severe injuries at the same time. As a result, patients waiting in hospital wards for serious surgery were sent home. He claimed the Government was reluctant to invest more money in ICU beds, which cost $10,000 a day to run.
A Queensland Health spokesman said there were 568 critical-care beds in Queensland including ICU, coronary, pediatric and neonatal units. More would come on line as new hospitals were built on the Gold and Sunshine coasts. The spokesman said Queensland Health did not collate statewide figures on the number of operations cancelled or postponed because of ICU bed unavailability.
Queensland Health's Public Hospital Performance Report for the 2007 December quarter revealed many patients were still waiting longer than recommended for critical surgery as record numbers presented to emergency departments. The report found that Category 1 patients who had waited longer than the recommended 30 days for surgery had almost doubled to 13.9 per cent in 12 months.
Opposition health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek slammed the Government for not fixing the problem at the PA. "Where has all the money gone? The PA is not allowed to say 'We cannot take people'. It begs the question: What is happening at all the other hospitals?" Mr Langbroek said.
Source
An admirable and realistic approach to defence reform
Get rid of the bureaucrats, not the soldiers. There is another article here on our new defence minister which is very encouraging
There is "fat" in the non-uniform ranks of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon says in support of his $10 billion savings demand. Mr Fitzgibbon today said while he would not foreshadow where the ADF should make the desired spending cuts, its operational capabilities were quarantined from the major budget review. "I'm not going to pre-empt our review ... but it is pretty obvious to anyone who watches defence closely that on the non-uniform side there is a deal of fat," the minister told Sky News today. "I've made it clear, and the prime minister has made it clear, we won't touch any area which affects operations or logistics or capability. "We're talking about the business side of defence, the bureaucratic side, ensuring it is running as leanly as possible."
His comments come after The Weekend Australian reported the Rudd Government has asked the ADF to slash $10 billion in spending over the next decade. It also says the defence department's 20,000 member civilian workforce has ballooned by almost 4000, or more than 20 per cent, since 2001.
Mr Fitzgibbon today said the savings would not be stripped from the ADF, but reinvested into its "higher priority" projects. He said the Rudd government was committed to ongoing three per cent real annual increases in the ADF's budget. The efficiency drive was necessary as the former Howard government had left the defence budget in "a real mess", Mr Fitzgibbon said.
The former government had invested in new defence infrastructure but there was a $6 billion hole in annual operating and other ancillary costs to support it, he said. "It's like putting aside money in the family budget to pay off the car but not also budgeting for the fuel, the maintenance, the rego, the insurance," Mr Fitzgibbon said. "We've got to ensure that the $22 billion that we invest in defence each year is spent efficiently and effectively, and that means finetuning that department and making sure that we don't carry fat."
A defence watchdog today said finding the desired savings would be difficult, but cuts to the ranks of supporting bureaucrats was the right place to start.
Source
Union flexes its muscle
This is a bit hard to believe but is alarming if true
THE powerful Maritime Union of Australia is beginning to flex its industrial muscle after a successful meeting with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at The Lodge in Canberra. A leaked confidential union strategy document reveals the MUA believes it has "strong support" from Mr Rudd and is planning to push new industrial arrangements. The union wants a return to "pattern bargaining", a technique to negotiate increased wages and conditions. Opponents say it would increase inflation and interest rates.
The document also reveals plans to pressure the Government into reversing laws that "penalise" workers with a recreational cannabis habit. Union national secretary Paddy Crumlin met Mr Rudd on Australia Day when, according to the document, the PM agreed to give the MUA access to government-collected personal security information on so-called "scabs" crewing non-union ships.
The question of wages is addressed under the heading "Enterprise Agreement". It advocates "common terms and conditions" for all workers in key parts of the industry. The document, prepared in January, argues against a long negotiating period with individual employers. It suggests using "terms and conditions that are contained in the offshore oil and gas industry agreement as our log of claim". "This will greatly assist in proceeding much quicker to negotiations," the document says. "Those conditions would also need to include appropriate living away from home allowances that apply in remote and expensive living areas, ie northwest Australia."
The effect of such a campaign would be to impose the boom wages and conditions applying in WA to the rest of the country - regardless of productivity. Under the strategy of pattern bargaining, the union would target an industrially weak employer first, gain an agreement and then force it on employers across the industry - again regardless of productivity or conditions in workplaces.
The document is likely to be seized on by the Opposition, which has been warning that under the Government's new industrial relations regime a non-productivity-based wages breakout is much more likely.
On "scabs and parasites" crewing non-union ships, the MUA says it has received co-operation from ministers including Deputy PM Julia Gillard and Attorney-General Robert McClelland.
The Sunday Mail put the MUA's version of the meeting to the Prime Minister's office. A spokeswoman confirmed Mr Crumlin was at The Lodge as part of a National Australia Day Committee event. Questions on non-union crews and their security details were referred by the PM's office to Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus. A spokeswoman for Mr Debus said the MUA had been informed that security checks undergone by foreign crews were more stringent than those required for Australian crew "and that was the end of the matter".
Source
Australian Study Shows Dramatic Drop in Abortion, Low Proportion of Homosexuals
An extensive study of Australian attitudes towards sexuality and Australians' sexual behaviour has revealed that younger generations of Australian women are obtaining abortions much less frequently then the previous generation. Dr. Julia Shelley of Deakin University in Melbourne, one of members of the team of researchers conducting the study, told NEWS.com.au, "We've plotted a sudden decline in the abortion rate that is so low it harps right back to the time when abortion was illegal and rarely practiced.'' "That means that a young Australian woman these days is about as unlikely to have an abortion now as her grandmother was back in her day.''
The study, begun in 2005, involved 8,205 randomly selected Australians (4,124 females and 4,081 males) being interviewed about various issues related to sexual health and behaviour. "The main aim of the study is to follow a nationally representative group of Australians over their lifetime documenting both the natural history and patterns of health and relationships," reads the official description of the study.
According to the study, less than 5 percent of women born in the 1980s have had an abortion, which is significantly less than the 14 percent of older women. Dr. Shelley pointed out that the peak time for women to obtain an abortion is between the ages of 20 and 25, indicating that the figure of 5 percent for women born in the 1980s is unlikely to climb much higher over time.
The researcher attributed the decline in the abortion rate to several factors, including an increased use of contraceptives and a change in attitude that favors giving birth to children in Australia. According to Shelley, Australia is presently experiencing an increase in birthrate. However, Shelley was only willing to admit that women increasingly deciding not to abort, and instead to give birth to their children "may partially" explain the fall in abortion, instead putting most of the emphasis on an increased use of contraceptives, brought about thanks to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases.
"If women generally are now more willing to have babies if they fall pregnant then it may partially explain the fall in abortion among younger women,'' she said. However, she indicated "safe sex" practices are the primary reason for the decrease in abortion rates. "Widespread sexual education trailed the sexual revolution by some decades and I think the effect of that only more recently cut in and change practices,'' she said. "But probably more significantly, the occurrence of HIV and AIDS has vastly increased condom use which has the side effect of stopping unwanted pregnancies.''
The study also indicated that an extremely small fraction of the Australian population self-defines as "homosexual." Only .66 percent of women and 1.03 percent of men defined themselves as homosexual. This figure is well below the "statistic" of 10 percent that is often touted by homosexual activists. The extremely low percentage of homosexuals in the population agrees with the findings of other similar studies in Western countries. Besides those who self-defined as homosexual, another 1.26 percent of women and 1.23 percent of men defined themselves as bi-sexual.
However, the study also found that Australians have extremely liberal attitudes towards sex and marriage, with 86 percent of women and 88 percent of men agreeing that sex before marriage is acceptable.
Source
DOZENS of life-saving operations are being cancelled every day in southeast Queensland public hospitals because no intensive care unit beds are available. Nine major surgeries were put off at Brisbane's Princess Alexandra Hospital on just one day last week due to the lack of post-operative ICU beds. Health sources said that was happening every day at the PA - despite a huge injection of extra funding from the State Government in January for this very problem.
The PA received a $10.4 million boost after the mid-year budget review, after the hospital had been forced to turn sick people away last year. A $15 million budget blowout led to 60 beds being closed in October and 20 per cent of operating theatre procedures cancelled. Premier Anna Bligh stepped into the non-surgery crisis and delivered the life-saving funds. "The PA Hospital will progressively reopen beds and restore theatre lists. This will enable the hospital to return to full activity within a few weeks," Ms Bligh said at the time.
But it would appear little has changed. On Tuesday, nine operations were cancelled or postponed because no ICU beds were available. For one cancer patient needing a life-saving Whipple operation, which involves the removal of the head of the pancreas, a portion of the bile duct, the gallbladder and the duodenum, it was the second time in two weeks that surgery was put off. His operation has been rescheduled for Tuesday, but it will go ahead only if there is a spare bed in intensive care for the following two days. Another patient was referred from Ipswich Hospital to the PA last week for heart surgery, but was sent home because no ICU bed was free.
A senior Queensland Health employee, who declined to be identified, told The Sunday Mail that operations were cancelled at the last minute because beds were taken by trauma patients. The source said a spate of major accidents had produced victims with severe injuries at the same time. As a result, patients waiting in hospital wards for serious surgery were sent home. He claimed the Government was reluctant to invest more money in ICU beds, which cost $10,000 a day to run.
A Queensland Health spokesman said there were 568 critical-care beds in Queensland including ICU, coronary, pediatric and neonatal units. More would come on line as new hospitals were built on the Gold and Sunshine coasts. The spokesman said Queensland Health did not collate statewide figures on the number of operations cancelled or postponed because of ICU bed unavailability.
Queensland Health's Public Hospital Performance Report for the 2007 December quarter revealed many patients were still waiting longer than recommended for critical surgery as record numbers presented to emergency departments. The report found that Category 1 patients who had waited longer than the recommended 30 days for surgery had almost doubled to 13.9 per cent in 12 months.
Opposition health spokesman John-Paul Langbroek slammed the Government for not fixing the problem at the PA. "Where has all the money gone? The PA is not allowed to say 'We cannot take people'. It begs the question: What is happening at all the other hospitals?" Mr Langbroek said.
Source
An admirable and realistic approach to defence reform
Get rid of the bureaucrats, not the soldiers. There is another article here on our new defence minister which is very encouraging
There is "fat" in the non-uniform ranks of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), Defence Minister Joel Fitzgibbon says in support of his $10 billion savings demand. Mr Fitzgibbon today said while he would not foreshadow where the ADF should make the desired spending cuts, its operational capabilities were quarantined from the major budget review. "I'm not going to pre-empt our review ... but it is pretty obvious to anyone who watches defence closely that on the non-uniform side there is a deal of fat," the minister told Sky News today. "I've made it clear, and the prime minister has made it clear, we won't touch any area which affects operations or logistics or capability. "We're talking about the business side of defence, the bureaucratic side, ensuring it is running as leanly as possible."
His comments come after The Weekend Australian reported the Rudd Government has asked the ADF to slash $10 billion in spending over the next decade. It also says the defence department's 20,000 member civilian workforce has ballooned by almost 4000, or more than 20 per cent, since 2001.
Mr Fitzgibbon today said the savings would not be stripped from the ADF, but reinvested into its "higher priority" projects. He said the Rudd government was committed to ongoing three per cent real annual increases in the ADF's budget. The efficiency drive was necessary as the former Howard government had left the defence budget in "a real mess", Mr Fitzgibbon said.
The former government had invested in new defence infrastructure but there was a $6 billion hole in annual operating and other ancillary costs to support it, he said. "It's like putting aside money in the family budget to pay off the car but not also budgeting for the fuel, the maintenance, the rego, the insurance," Mr Fitzgibbon said. "We've got to ensure that the $22 billion that we invest in defence each year is spent efficiently and effectively, and that means finetuning that department and making sure that we don't carry fat."
A defence watchdog today said finding the desired savings would be difficult, but cuts to the ranks of supporting bureaucrats was the right place to start.
Source
Union flexes its muscle
This is a bit hard to believe but is alarming if true
THE powerful Maritime Union of Australia is beginning to flex its industrial muscle after a successful meeting with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at The Lodge in Canberra. A leaked confidential union strategy document reveals the MUA believes it has "strong support" from Mr Rudd and is planning to push new industrial arrangements. The union wants a return to "pattern bargaining", a technique to negotiate increased wages and conditions. Opponents say it would increase inflation and interest rates.
The document also reveals plans to pressure the Government into reversing laws that "penalise" workers with a recreational cannabis habit. Union national secretary Paddy Crumlin met Mr Rudd on Australia Day when, according to the document, the PM agreed to give the MUA access to government-collected personal security information on so-called "scabs" crewing non-union ships.
The question of wages is addressed under the heading "Enterprise Agreement". It advocates "common terms and conditions" for all workers in key parts of the industry. The document, prepared in January, argues against a long negotiating period with individual employers. It suggests using "terms and conditions that are contained in the offshore oil and gas industry agreement as our log of claim". "This will greatly assist in proceeding much quicker to negotiations," the document says. "Those conditions would also need to include appropriate living away from home allowances that apply in remote and expensive living areas, ie northwest Australia."
The effect of such a campaign would be to impose the boom wages and conditions applying in WA to the rest of the country - regardless of productivity. Under the strategy of pattern bargaining, the union would target an industrially weak employer first, gain an agreement and then force it on employers across the industry - again regardless of productivity or conditions in workplaces.
The document is likely to be seized on by the Opposition, which has been warning that under the Government's new industrial relations regime a non-productivity-based wages breakout is much more likely.
On "scabs and parasites" crewing non-union ships, the MUA says it has received co-operation from ministers including Deputy PM Julia Gillard and Attorney-General Robert McClelland.
The Sunday Mail put the MUA's version of the meeting to the Prime Minister's office. A spokeswoman confirmed Mr Crumlin was at The Lodge as part of a National Australia Day Committee event. Questions on non-union crews and their security details were referred by the PM's office to Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus. A spokeswoman for Mr Debus said the MUA had been informed that security checks undergone by foreign crews were more stringent than those required for Australian crew "and that was the end of the matter".
Source
Australian Study Shows Dramatic Drop in Abortion, Low Proportion of Homosexuals
An extensive study of Australian attitudes towards sexuality and Australians' sexual behaviour has revealed that younger generations of Australian women are obtaining abortions much less frequently then the previous generation. Dr. Julia Shelley of Deakin University in Melbourne, one of members of the team of researchers conducting the study, told NEWS.com.au, "We've plotted a sudden decline in the abortion rate that is so low it harps right back to the time when abortion was illegal and rarely practiced.'' "That means that a young Australian woman these days is about as unlikely to have an abortion now as her grandmother was back in her day.''
The study, begun in 2005, involved 8,205 randomly selected Australians (4,124 females and 4,081 males) being interviewed about various issues related to sexual health and behaviour. "The main aim of the study is to follow a nationally representative group of Australians over their lifetime documenting both the natural history and patterns of health and relationships," reads the official description of the study.
According to the study, less than 5 percent of women born in the 1980s have had an abortion, which is significantly less than the 14 percent of older women. Dr. Shelley pointed out that the peak time for women to obtain an abortion is between the ages of 20 and 25, indicating that the figure of 5 percent for women born in the 1980s is unlikely to climb much higher over time.
The researcher attributed the decline in the abortion rate to several factors, including an increased use of contraceptives and a change in attitude that favors giving birth to children in Australia. According to Shelley, Australia is presently experiencing an increase in birthrate. However, Shelley was only willing to admit that women increasingly deciding not to abort, and instead to give birth to their children "may partially" explain the fall in abortion, instead putting most of the emphasis on an increased use of contraceptives, brought about thanks to an increase in sexually transmitted diseases.
"If women generally are now more willing to have babies if they fall pregnant then it may partially explain the fall in abortion among younger women,'' she said. However, she indicated "safe sex" practices are the primary reason for the decrease in abortion rates. "Widespread sexual education trailed the sexual revolution by some decades and I think the effect of that only more recently cut in and change practices,'' she said. "But probably more significantly, the occurrence of HIV and AIDS has vastly increased condom use which has the side effect of stopping unwanted pregnancies.''
The study also indicated that an extremely small fraction of the Australian population self-defines as "homosexual." Only .66 percent of women and 1.03 percent of men defined themselves as homosexual. This figure is well below the "statistic" of 10 percent that is often touted by homosexual activists. The extremely low percentage of homosexuals in the population agrees with the findings of other similar studies in Western countries. Besides those who self-defined as homosexual, another 1.26 percent of women and 1.23 percent of men defined themselves as bi-sexual.
However, the study also found that Australians have extremely liberal attitudes towards sex and marriage, with 86 percent of women and 88 percent of men agreeing that sex before marriage is acceptable.
Source
Saturday, March 22, 2008
The German Kriegsmarine (navy) men were frank and truthful
This is a follow-up to my post yesterday about the sinking of the HMAS Sydney by sustained heavy fire from the German raider Kormoran. Because it was a converted freighter, there seems to be a common assumption that the Kormoran was lightly armed. It in fact deployed very extensive and heavy armament, all of which was very effective at the close range incautiously offered by the Captain of HMAS Sydney. Above is the flag the Kormoran fought under
The exact location of the HMAS Sydney was given to Australian authorities seven days after the ship's sinking. The captain of the German raider, the Kormoran, which had fired on the Sydney off the West Australian coast, gave the co-ordinates of the battle to a Royal Australian Navy officer after German survivors were picked up at sea. "I told him immediately, as I had made up my mind to do: 111 degrees E by 26 degrees 34' S," Captain Theodor Detmers wrote in his book The Raider Kormoran. "I knew that the search would now take place where it would be most effective and perhaps save the lives of more of my men."
But it appears that Captain Detmers was not believed, neither in November 1941 when he made his initial report, nor when his book was published, first in German and then in English in 1959. Instead, it took 66 years before searchers found the Sydney's wreck where Captain Detmers had pinpointed, 150km off the coast in 2468m of water. All 645 crew members of the Sydney perished. About 80 of the Kormoran's crew were killed and 317 survived.
The wreck of the Sydney was found this week, near the Kormoran, as the result of a taxpayer-funded search by the Finding Sydney Foundation. Yesterday, the search vessel Geosounder returned to the WA port of Geraldton after the successful mission.
Source
An interesting excerpt from another report on the subject:
On the night of January 10, 1945, Detmers and 19 others escaped into the countryside. He was on the run for eight days before being arrested in Shepparton. When he was searched, authorities found a small, coded notebook. It was immediately seized and sent for decryption and analysis. What the authorities did not know was that Detmers had left behind a small brown German-English dictionary at the camp, in which he had used a pencil to put faint dots under letters on each page, giving the same details of the Kormoran's co-ordinates and log details as were in his seized notebook.
The war ended and Detmers was repatriated in 1947. He returned to Germany, debilitated by a stroke down his left side. His dictionary was his most prized possession. But in 1990, Brisbane author Barbara Poniewierski, on a research trip to Germany, uncovered the existence of Detmers's dictionary while attending a reunion of Kormoran survivors. Detmers had apparently bequeathed the dictionary to his sister's son and, when Poniewierski got a phone call from famed shipwreck hunter David Mearns seeking confirmation that the dictionary existed, she gave him the name of Detmers's relatives in Hamburg.
When Mearns got his hands on the dictionary, he engaged former Royal Navy captain and linguist Peter Hore to crack the code. It wasn't hard. It was just a matter of, quite literally, joining the dots. They spelled out a few words a page, detailing the battle, the co-ordinates, and all the log details of arguably Australia's most famous naval encounter. It confirmed Detmers's original notes seized from him at Shepparton more than 60 years earlier.
Mearns has said he used Detmers's dictionary as "factual ground zero". And he knew if the dictionary could lead him to the Kormoran, it would also reveal to him the final resting place of HMAS Sydney. "Captain Detmers's versions were nearly always identical, so I concluded he was always telling the truth," Mearns told journalist Carmelo Amalfi. "No other shipwreck hunter has had so many vital clues about the Sydney's resting place."
Man sues over amazing 13-hour ambulance wait
A grandfather who will spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state is suing Victoria's ambulance service after waiting 13 hours for help after hitting his head. Katrina Marinovic is bringing the Supreme Court action - believed to be potentially worth more than $1 million - on behalf of her father, Ilija, who now has little brain function and is fed through a tube. Ms Marinovic says her father fell and hit his head at 8pm on October 26, 2006, but was forced to wait until 9.30am the next day for treatment after a mix-up meant an ambulance was sent but then cancelled.
"He was such a big character and such a strong person, it's hard for us to see him now compared to what he was before," Ms Marinovic said. "Thinking that he was left for all those hours, it really affects us. "He would give you the shirt off his back - he was that sort of man." The plasterer, 56, lost his balance outside his Preston home and fell down steps on to concrete. A neighbour immediately called 000.
The statement of claim alleges an ambulance was dispatched then cancelled and the matter was handed over to police to investigate whether medical help was needed - which did not occur.
The Marinovic family, who are represented by law firm Arnold, Thomas and Becker, are suing the Metropolitan Ambulance Service, the Emergency Services Telecommunication Authority and the State of Victoria. The writ alleges that the ambulance service and its dispatcher, along with the police who were contacted after the 000 call, were negligent in failing to follow up the request for help. It claims police did not comprehend the urgency or send an officer to check whether an ambulance was needed.
Father of three Mr Marinovic, who also has two grandsons, had emergency skull and brain surgery but was left in a vegetative state, with his family claiming the lengthy delay made his injuries worse. He is living in a nursing home near his family in South Morang, where he needs constant medical attention. The family are seeking medical costs, damages for loss of earnings and loss of life expectancy and for pain and suffering. A spokesman for the ambulance service said they were awaiting further details from court documents.
Source
Yet another safety report ignored by the Qld. Health Department
The Torres Strait Islands are rather idyllic places. Some good pictures here. It takes a government to make a hell of them
A THIRD report detailing how the safety of nurses in the Torres Strait was compromised has emerged, placing renewed pressure on embattled Health Minister Stephen Robertson. This latest report warns how the personal safety of health staff was at risk throughout the archipelago because of rapidly deteriorating buildings, including on Mabuiag Island where a nurse was allegedly raped last month. The report has further exposed a culture of inaction as it was written in October 2005 - a year before a damning risk report warned of the need for urgent action. Another report, commissioned in the weeks after the alleged rape, has also prompted criticism the Government still failed to act.
Amid Opposition calls for his resignation, Mr Robertson yesterday spoke of his frustration that another warning had been ignored by his department. "This is clearly just another case where a report has been commissioned and very little work has been done on it," said Mr Robertson, who again refused to accept responsibility. It comes as a walkout of nurses in the Torres Strait looms amid revelations they had written to former health director-general Uschi Schreiber in 2006 and 2007 highlighting their plight.
The newly uncovered report - conducted predominantly for workplace health and safety purposes - identified problems on all 14 islands visited. On Mabuiag, the report warned issues "revolve around personal safety and environmental issues", including lattice slats that were a ready-made ladder to the upstairs accommodation. "A duress alarm does not work in the toilet and, after visiting several other facilities, it was found there were similar problems at other facilities with the same system," it said.
Mr Robertson said it was not acceptable that neglect of the accommodation had placed staff at risk. However, the minister said he had seen Queensland Health's commitment to the area first-hand on his tour of four islands on Thursday. "Generally the standard of accommodation is pretty good," he said.
In a bid to hose down a growing furore over whether the Government acted after the alleged rape, Mr Robertson will today release the briefing notes he received after the incident on February 5. The notes - released to The Courier-Mail last night - said the incident had "reignited issues around the security and safety of staff". They also detail how assaults on Thursday Island nurses in 2007 had prompted a risk-assessment by occupational health and safety officers and the cycle was repeated after the Mabuiag Island incident.
Deputy Opposition Leader Fiona Simpson said the minister should take responsibility for his inaction and resign. But Mr Robertson rejected the call and insisted he had also acted on problems in the region highlighted by local Labor MP Jason O'Brien. "They know as well as anyone else that right throughout this whole episode, on not one occasion have I been found wanting in terms of my response when matters have been brought to my attention," he said.
Premier Anna Bligh said the Health Minister retained her full confidence. "Mr Robertson will do whatever is necessary to ensure the right response for staff and patients," Ms Bligh said.
Source
A government that can't
Nurse strike on Torres Strait Islands likely. I suppose it is very optimistic to expect promptness and efficiency from a government
A NURSE has abandoned a condemned Torres Strait health centre as frenzied repair work throughout the islands appears unlikely to be completed in time to prevent a district-wide strike next weekend. The Courier-Mail has been told it would be "almost impossible" for maintenance workers to fix all the problems which have come to light since a nurse was allegedly raped on Mabuiag Island last month. Locksmiths and carpenters have been shuttling between the islands for the past fortnight, frantically fixing broken locks, windows and doors and addressing years of unresolved maintenance requests.
On Wednesday, a nurse walked off the job after being forced to live in a condemned building on Darnley Island while a new, purpose-built clinic sat empty nearby. Sources said the nurse refused to keep working on the island until power was connected to the new building.
Queensland's Health Minister, Stephen Robertson, flew to the Torres Strait on Thursday in a bid to diffuse growing anger over worker safety in the remote region. During the trip, Mr Robertson visited several islands - including Mabuiag - to meet with Queensland Health workers. The State Government is under fire for failing to act on a report completed in late 2006 which warned about problems at work and accommodation facilities in the Torres Strait. The Queensland Nurses Union has set a March 28 deadline for the Government to fix the security issues or nurses will walk off the job across the region. QNU secretary Gay Hawksworth welcomed Mr Robertson's visit and hoped it would prompt faster repairs. "I'm pleased that he's gone there to see it first-hand and talk to nurses directly," Ms Hawksworth said. "But our deadline remains March 28."
Nurses working on 11 islands in the region have raised repeated concerns about poor security, lighting, faulty duress alarms, generators, fire and smoke alarms, broken locks and problems with sewerage systems. Premier Anna Bligh said she hoped the issues could be resolved quickly. "The most urgent matters in relation to security are being attended to first and then work is being prioritised," she said. Ms Bligh also defended Mr Robertson's handling of the issue: "The Minister for Health . . . has had what can only be described as unreliable advice out of the Torres Strait on these issues in the past, so he is personally going to satisfy himself on the progress of work and ensure that it is proceeding in the fastest possible place."
Mr Robertson said Queensland Health had to demonstrate that it was seriously addressing the problems but he urged nurses to remain. "I am hopeful that as we address these issues the level of frustration and angst and anger will reduce," he said.
Source
Australia hears some climate facts for a change
All we usually get is speculative forecasts. The article below is by popular columnist Christopher Pearson
Catastrophic predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return. Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.
Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?" She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."
Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?" Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."
Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."
Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?"
Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide. "There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."
Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?" Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."
Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?" Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."
Duffy: "From what you're saying, it sounds like the implications of this could beconsiderable ..." Marohasy: "That's right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point."
If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting. A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.
With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along.
The poorest Indians and Chinese will be left in peace to work their way towards prosperity, without being badgered about the size of their carbon footprint, a concept that for most of us will soon be one with Nineveh and Tyre, clean forgotten in six months. The scores of town planners in Australia building empires out of regulating what can and can't be built on low-lying shorelines will have to come to terms with the fact inundation no longer impends and find something more plausible to do. The same is true of the bureaucrats planning to accommodate "climate refugees".
Penny Wong's climate mega-portfolio will suddenly be as ephemeral as the ministries for the year 2000 that state governments used to entrust to junior ministers. Malcolm Turnbull will have to reinvent himself at vast speed as a climate change sceptic and the Prime Minister will have to kiss goodbye what he likes to call the great moral issue and policy challenge of our times. It will all be vastly entertaining to watch.
THE Age published an essay with an environmental theme by Ian McEwan on March 8 and its stablemate, The Sydney Morning Herald, also carried a slightly longer version of the same piece. The Australian's Cut & Paste column two days later reproduced a telling paragraph from the Herald's version, which suggested that McEwan was a climate change sceptic and which The Age had excised. He was expanding on the proposition that "we need not only reliable data but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics".
What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: "Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)"
The missing sentences do not appear anywhere else in The Age's version of the essay. The attribution reads: "Copyright Ian McEwan 2008" and there is no acknowledgment of editing by The Age. Why did the paper decide to offer its readers McEwan lite? Was he, I wonder, consulted on the matter? And isn't there a nice irony that The Age chose to delete the line about ideologues not being very good at "absorbing inconvenient fact"?
Source
This is a follow-up to my post yesterday about the sinking of the HMAS Sydney by sustained heavy fire from the German raider Kormoran. Because it was a converted freighter, there seems to be a common assumption that the Kormoran was lightly armed. It in fact deployed very extensive and heavy armament, all of which was very effective at the close range incautiously offered by the Captain of HMAS Sydney. Above is the flag the Kormoran fought under
The exact location of the HMAS Sydney was given to Australian authorities seven days after the ship's sinking. The captain of the German raider, the Kormoran, which had fired on the Sydney off the West Australian coast, gave the co-ordinates of the battle to a Royal Australian Navy officer after German survivors were picked up at sea. "I told him immediately, as I had made up my mind to do: 111 degrees E by 26 degrees 34' S," Captain Theodor Detmers wrote in his book The Raider Kormoran. "I knew that the search would now take place where it would be most effective and perhaps save the lives of more of my men."
But it appears that Captain Detmers was not believed, neither in November 1941 when he made his initial report, nor when his book was published, first in German and then in English in 1959. Instead, it took 66 years before searchers found the Sydney's wreck where Captain Detmers had pinpointed, 150km off the coast in 2468m of water. All 645 crew members of the Sydney perished. About 80 of the Kormoran's crew were killed and 317 survived.
The wreck of the Sydney was found this week, near the Kormoran, as the result of a taxpayer-funded search by the Finding Sydney Foundation. Yesterday, the search vessel Geosounder returned to the WA port of Geraldton after the successful mission.
Source
An interesting excerpt from another report on the subject:
On the night of January 10, 1945, Detmers and 19 others escaped into the countryside. He was on the run for eight days before being arrested in Shepparton. When he was searched, authorities found a small, coded notebook. It was immediately seized and sent for decryption and analysis. What the authorities did not know was that Detmers had left behind a small brown German-English dictionary at the camp, in which he had used a pencil to put faint dots under letters on each page, giving the same details of the Kormoran's co-ordinates and log details as were in his seized notebook.
The war ended and Detmers was repatriated in 1947. He returned to Germany, debilitated by a stroke down his left side. His dictionary was his most prized possession. But in 1990, Brisbane author Barbara Poniewierski, on a research trip to Germany, uncovered the existence of Detmers's dictionary while attending a reunion of Kormoran survivors. Detmers had apparently bequeathed the dictionary to his sister's son and, when Poniewierski got a phone call from famed shipwreck hunter David Mearns seeking confirmation that the dictionary existed, she gave him the name of Detmers's relatives in Hamburg.
When Mearns got his hands on the dictionary, he engaged former Royal Navy captain and linguist Peter Hore to crack the code. It wasn't hard. It was just a matter of, quite literally, joining the dots. They spelled out a few words a page, detailing the battle, the co-ordinates, and all the log details of arguably Australia's most famous naval encounter. It confirmed Detmers's original notes seized from him at Shepparton more than 60 years earlier.
Mearns has said he used Detmers's dictionary as "factual ground zero". And he knew if the dictionary could lead him to the Kormoran, it would also reveal to him the final resting place of HMAS Sydney. "Captain Detmers's versions were nearly always identical, so I concluded he was always telling the truth," Mearns told journalist Carmelo Amalfi. "No other shipwreck hunter has had so many vital clues about the Sydney's resting place."
Man sues over amazing 13-hour ambulance wait
A grandfather who will spend the rest of his life in a vegetative state is suing Victoria's ambulance service after waiting 13 hours for help after hitting his head. Katrina Marinovic is bringing the Supreme Court action - believed to be potentially worth more than $1 million - on behalf of her father, Ilija, who now has little brain function and is fed through a tube. Ms Marinovic says her father fell and hit his head at 8pm on October 26, 2006, but was forced to wait until 9.30am the next day for treatment after a mix-up meant an ambulance was sent but then cancelled.
"He was such a big character and such a strong person, it's hard for us to see him now compared to what he was before," Ms Marinovic said. "Thinking that he was left for all those hours, it really affects us. "He would give you the shirt off his back - he was that sort of man." The plasterer, 56, lost his balance outside his Preston home and fell down steps on to concrete. A neighbour immediately called 000.
The statement of claim alleges an ambulance was dispatched then cancelled and the matter was handed over to police to investigate whether medical help was needed - which did not occur.
The Marinovic family, who are represented by law firm Arnold, Thomas and Becker, are suing the Metropolitan Ambulance Service, the Emergency Services Telecommunication Authority and the State of Victoria. The writ alleges that the ambulance service and its dispatcher, along with the police who were contacted after the 000 call, were negligent in failing to follow up the request for help. It claims police did not comprehend the urgency or send an officer to check whether an ambulance was needed.
Father of three Mr Marinovic, who also has two grandsons, had emergency skull and brain surgery but was left in a vegetative state, with his family claiming the lengthy delay made his injuries worse. He is living in a nursing home near his family in South Morang, where he needs constant medical attention. The family are seeking medical costs, damages for loss of earnings and loss of life expectancy and for pain and suffering. A spokesman for the ambulance service said they were awaiting further details from court documents.
Source
Yet another safety report ignored by the Qld. Health Department
The Torres Strait Islands are rather idyllic places. Some good pictures here. It takes a government to make a hell of them
A THIRD report detailing how the safety of nurses in the Torres Strait was compromised has emerged, placing renewed pressure on embattled Health Minister Stephen Robertson. This latest report warns how the personal safety of health staff was at risk throughout the archipelago because of rapidly deteriorating buildings, including on Mabuiag Island where a nurse was allegedly raped last month. The report has further exposed a culture of inaction as it was written in October 2005 - a year before a damning risk report warned of the need for urgent action. Another report, commissioned in the weeks after the alleged rape, has also prompted criticism the Government still failed to act.
Amid Opposition calls for his resignation, Mr Robertson yesterday spoke of his frustration that another warning had been ignored by his department. "This is clearly just another case where a report has been commissioned and very little work has been done on it," said Mr Robertson, who again refused to accept responsibility. It comes as a walkout of nurses in the Torres Strait looms amid revelations they had written to former health director-general Uschi Schreiber in 2006 and 2007 highlighting their plight.
The newly uncovered report - conducted predominantly for workplace health and safety purposes - identified problems on all 14 islands visited. On Mabuiag, the report warned issues "revolve around personal safety and environmental issues", including lattice slats that were a ready-made ladder to the upstairs accommodation. "A duress alarm does not work in the toilet and, after visiting several other facilities, it was found there were similar problems at other facilities with the same system," it said.
Mr Robertson said it was not acceptable that neglect of the accommodation had placed staff at risk. However, the minister said he had seen Queensland Health's commitment to the area first-hand on his tour of four islands on Thursday. "Generally the standard of accommodation is pretty good," he said.
In a bid to hose down a growing furore over whether the Government acted after the alleged rape, Mr Robertson will today release the briefing notes he received after the incident on February 5. The notes - released to The Courier-Mail last night - said the incident had "reignited issues around the security and safety of staff". They also detail how assaults on Thursday Island nurses in 2007 had prompted a risk-assessment by occupational health and safety officers and the cycle was repeated after the Mabuiag Island incident.
Deputy Opposition Leader Fiona Simpson said the minister should take responsibility for his inaction and resign. But Mr Robertson rejected the call and insisted he had also acted on problems in the region highlighted by local Labor MP Jason O'Brien. "They know as well as anyone else that right throughout this whole episode, on not one occasion have I been found wanting in terms of my response when matters have been brought to my attention," he said.
Premier Anna Bligh said the Health Minister retained her full confidence. "Mr Robertson will do whatever is necessary to ensure the right response for staff and patients," Ms Bligh said.
Source
A government that can't
Nurse strike on Torres Strait Islands likely. I suppose it is very optimistic to expect promptness and efficiency from a government
A NURSE has abandoned a condemned Torres Strait health centre as frenzied repair work throughout the islands appears unlikely to be completed in time to prevent a district-wide strike next weekend. The Courier-Mail has been told it would be "almost impossible" for maintenance workers to fix all the problems which have come to light since a nurse was allegedly raped on Mabuiag Island last month. Locksmiths and carpenters have been shuttling between the islands for the past fortnight, frantically fixing broken locks, windows and doors and addressing years of unresolved maintenance requests.
On Wednesday, a nurse walked off the job after being forced to live in a condemned building on Darnley Island while a new, purpose-built clinic sat empty nearby. Sources said the nurse refused to keep working on the island until power was connected to the new building.
Queensland's Health Minister, Stephen Robertson, flew to the Torres Strait on Thursday in a bid to diffuse growing anger over worker safety in the remote region. During the trip, Mr Robertson visited several islands - including Mabuiag - to meet with Queensland Health workers. The State Government is under fire for failing to act on a report completed in late 2006 which warned about problems at work and accommodation facilities in the Torres Strait. The Queensland Nurses Union has set a March 28 deadline for the Government to fix the security issues or nurses will walk off the job across the region. QNU secretary Gay Hawksworth welcomed Mr Robertson's visit and hoped it would prompt faster repairs. "I'm pleased that he's gone there to see it first-hand and talk to nurses directly," Ms Hawksworth said. "But our deadline remains March 28."
Nurses working on 11 islands in the region have raised repeated concerns about poor security, lighting, faulty duress alarms, generators, fire and smoke alarms, broken locks and problems with sewerage systems. Premier Anna Bligh said she hoped the issues could be resolved quickly. "The most urgent matters in relation to security are being attended to first and then work is being prioritised," she said. Ms Bligh also defended Mr Robertson's handling of the issue: "The Minister for Health . . . has had what can only be described as unreliable advice out of the Torres Strait on these issues in the past, so he is personally going to satisfy himself on the progress of work and ensure that it is proceeding in the fastest possible place."
Mr Robertson said Queensland Health had to demonstrate that it was seriously addressing the problems but he urged nurses to remain. "I am hopeful that as we address these issues the level of frustration and angst and anger will reduce," he said.
Source
Australia hears some climate facts for a change
All we usually get is speculative forecasts. The article below is by popular columnist Christopher Pearson
Catastrophic predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return. Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.
Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?" She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."
Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?" Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."
Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary."
Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to explain the (temperature) dip?"
Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that, yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming from elevated levels of carbon dioxide. "There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."
Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?" Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."
Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?" Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."
Duffy: "From what you're saying, it sounds like the implications of this could beconsiderable ..." Marohasy: "That's right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point."
If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting. A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.
With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along.
The poorest Indians and Chinese will be left in peace to work their way towards prosperity, without being badgered about the size of their carbon footprint, a concept that for most of us will soon be one with Nineveh and Tyre, clean forgotten in six months. The scores of town planners in Australia building empires out of regulating what can and can't be built on low-lying shorelines will have to come to terms with the fact inundation no longer impends and find something more plausible to do. The same is true of the bureaucrats planning to accommodate "climate refugees".
Penny Wong's climate mega-portfolio will suddenly be as ephemeral as the ministries for the year 2000 that state governments used to entrust to junior ministers. Malcolm Turnbull will have to reinvent himself at vast speed as a climate change sceptic and the Prime Minister will have to kiss goodbye what he likes to call the great moral issue and policy challenge of our times. It will all be vastly entertaining to watch.
THE Age published an essay with an environmental theme by Ian McEwan on March 8 and its stablemate, The Sydney Morning Herald, also carried a slightly longer version of the same piece. The Australian's Cut & Paste column two days later reproduced a telling paragraph from the Herald's version, which suggested that McEwan was a climate change sceptic and which The Age had excised. He was expanding on the proposition that "we need not only reliable data but their expression in the rigorous use of statistics".
What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following: "Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community, and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)"
The missing sentences do not appear anywhere else in The Age's version of the essay. The attribution reads: "Copyright Ian McEwan 2008" and there is no acknowledgment of editing by The Age. Why did the paper decide to offer its readers McEwan lite? Was he, I wonder, consulted on the matter? And isn't there a nice irony that The Age chose to delete the line about ideologues not being very good at "absorbing inconvenient fact"?
Source
Friday, March 21, 2008
Rudd the idiot thinks Aborigines are just unlucky (or something)
They're DIFFERENT, not the same. All men are equal only in the sight of God (if God is that blind. He certainly is said to treat sinners and the virtuous differently). Rudd must know that NOTHING will bring Aborigines up to white health standards because nothing will make Aborigines behave like whites. Everything that could be tried has been tried. The Aborigines were healthier BEFORE the government started intervening in fact.
But even under the missionary supervision of yesteryear Aborigines had lots of health problems due to poor levels of hygeine etc. If people insist on living unheathy and risky lifestyles it is their right but they ARE going to die younger because of it.
There must be something about being a Labor Prime minister that brings on delusions of omnipotence. A lot of us still remember Bob Hawke's declaration that "By the year 2000, no Australian child will be living in poverty". Nothing remotely like that change happened, of course. Same will go for this load of baloney
OK: I know Rudd's not an idiot. He's just cynically buying applause from gullible people
Programs to tackle smoking and to train more indigenous health workers are the first down payments on reaching the Federal Government's target of ending the health and life expectancy gaps between indigenous and non-indigenous people. At the Close The Gap summit in Parliament House in Canberra yesterday, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, signed a statement of intent with health and indigenous groups, promising to bring equality to health standards by 2030. Mr Rudd has pledged to end the 17-year life-expectancy gap within the next generation and halve the infant mortality gap within the decade. [How??]
The Olympians Cathy Freeman and Ian Thorpe attended the event. Freeman urged the Government to "stay focused" on its commitment. Mr Rudd announced $14.5 million in funding to tackle the high rates of smoking in indigenous communities [Are you going to forbid it?] which contribute to chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease. Another $19 million was announced to encourage more indigenous people to become health workers.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, hailed the statement of intent as a "monumental development". "Benchmarks and targets for achieving these fundamental human rights for indigenous Australians are not only possible, but are now firm commitments. Let us hope that an indigenous baby born in 2030 has the same life expectation, the same access to quality health services and the same life outcomes as non-indigenous Australians," Mr Calma said.
But the Opposition said the Government had breached its claimed bipartisan approach to indigenous issues by leaving it until the last minute to consult it about the pledge to close the gap. The Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, was invited to speak at yesterday's event, but Mr Rudd left the function as he started to speak. A spokesman for Dr Nelson said that if the Opposition had been consulted it would have suggested the pledge to achieve health equity should have referred to the importance of addressing alcohol abuse, school attendance, policing, home ownership and employment outcomes. "We want to see this initiative work yet some people would question whether this was truly reflecting the spirit of bipartisanship," the spokesman said.
Source
Correction:
The year nominated by Hawke was 1990
Leftist wants to thwart white flight
How these animals hate ordinary people who are just trying to keep their kids safe!
Refugees should be settled in a wider spread of locations to avoid large-scale withdrawal of Anglo-European children from government schools, a senior government MP says. In a phenomenon known as "white flight", some parents send their children to private schools rather to state schools with a high proportion of pupils of other racial backgrounds, parliamentary secretary for multicultural affairs Laurie Ferguson said.
He told Fairfax white flight had become a big challenge for multicultural Australia. "People fear there is a monoculture in some suburbs. They believe there is an over-dominance of some cultures in schools which is denigrating the quality of education," Mr Ferguson said. "So they are withdrawing their kids from government schools and sending them to religious or selective high schools. "This leads to further concentration of marginalised communities in government schools and the further stigmatisation of these schools.''
The term white flight was first coined in the US in the 1960s, when white parents sent their children to private schools instead of keeping them at newly-desegregated public schools.
White flight was a big challenge, especially in western Sydney and parts of Melbourne, Mr Ferguson said. "Deliberate policy decisions" needed to be made to diversify the location of housing for refugees and humanitarian entrants, including many settlers from Africa whose children grew up in refugee camps and had limited education, Mr Ferguson said.
Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals president Brian Burgess said that in Victoria, the phenomenon was "more like a middle-class flight" than a white flight. But teachers at "radically diverse" schools said white flight was alive and well in Melbourne.
Source
The HMAS Sydney story
There has been great excitement in the press recently over the discovery of the wreckage of the WWII Australian cruiser "Sydney". See here, for example. The wreck has been touted as perhaps solving the "mystery" of how the ship was sunk. But it is not much of a mystery. Below is a excerpt from the summary of what the German survivors of the battle that sank the Sydney said at the time
On November 19, as the Kormoran approached the area off Shark’s Bay from the south-west in warm sunshine and perfect visibility, Detmers decided to maintain his course and wait until dark before turning eastwards towards the coast. At five minutes to four in the afternoon, as he was enjoying a cup of coffee in the wardroom, the alarm bells sounded, and a ship, thought to be a sailing ship, was reported approaching through the shimmering light on the horizon.
With the foretop lookout initially unable to identify what type of ship it was through the heat haze, but maintaining a running commentary on what he thought he could see, Detmers, called the crew to action stations, turned the Kormoran about through 260 degrees and called for full speed. Studying the approaching vessel through the sighting telescope of the gunnery control point on the signal deck, his worst fears were soon realised as the ominous shape of the approaching vessel became clearer. Detmers knew that with four hours to go until nightfall, he had nowhere to hide, and with what was becoming clearer by the second in the gunnery glasses capable of a top speed that was twice that of his own ship, he also knew that evasive action would be out of the question.
Bearing down on the Kormoran was a 6,830-ton Perth-class light cruiser, armed with eight six-inch guns, and a top speed of over 32 knots. Although the Kormoran was also armed with six-inch guns, they did not have the range of those on the cruiser which could easily bombard her from a range of 10,000 metres with all the advantages of modern fire-control and four twin turrets, without ever having to come within range of her guns.
Disregarding the fact that as a converted freighter with an unarmoured wafer-thin hull, she was unlikely to have any chance against an armoured regular warship of this type anyway, Detmers felt that unless he could somehow get within 6,000 or even 8,000 metres, where the advantages of the cruiser’s fire-control system would be far less significant, he knew that his position would be hopeless. Apart from anything else, one stray shell into the 420 high-explosive mines she was carrying and the Kormoran, like the Pinguin, would be blown to smithereens.
Knowing that his chances of survival were virtually nil, Detmers resolved to ensure that he would at least be in a good opening position should it come to a fight, and hoped that the enemy might make a mistake that he could exploit. Playing for time, during which the cruiser might just come closer, he knew he had to rely heavily on his disguise and pray for luck. Dropping the foretop lookout and lowering the crow’s nest so as not to arouse too much suspicion, Detmers had groups of seamen deployed among the ‘shipping crates’ around the decks in civilian clothing, altered course to present his stern to the oncoming cruiser, and slightly increased his speed.
When the signal N.N.J. was repeatedly flashed from the cruiser, neither Detmers, his Chief Signalman, Erich Ahlbach, nor anyone else on the Kormoran’s bridge had a clue what it meant, so it was ignored, but when it was followed by the demand ‘What ship?’, Detmers astonished his signalman, who was about to morse the response with either the ship’s searchlight or her top lamp, by instructing him to reply with ‘flag wagging’, merchant-navy fashion … slowly and awkwardly. In the meantime the cruiser was coming steadily closer.
It was abundantly clear to Detmers that as he had no alternatives and was going to have to fight this cruiser, he wanted her as close as possible to remove some, if not all, of her advantages. The more confusion his signalmen could create with their flags, and the longer they took to respond to the enemy’s signals, the less time he would have to ask awkward questions that Detmers could not answer.
With the cruiser now about 15,000 metres off the starboard quarter, approaching at a speed of about 20 knots and, by the amount of smoke she was making, clearly firing up her engines, Detmers replied to the ‘What ship’ demand, by instructing the signal-code pennant to be hoisted half-way, meaning, ‘I can see your signal, but I can’t make out what it is’, after which he allowed some more time to elapse before flagging that he now understood, followed, a little later, but very slowly, first with one flag missing, and then with several tangled flags, by the Straat Malakka’s recognition signal. This last ruse was one of Leutnant Ahlbach’s own ideas, as he skillfully assisted his commander in his playing for time, slowly lowering the entangled flags before hoisting them again so clumsily that the obviously highly-irritated officers on the bridge of the cruiser had to signal twice to get him to hoist his signal clear.
With the cruiser now 12,000 metres away, she acknowledged receipt of the ‘Dutchman’s’ identification signal, and flashed a further signal requesting his port of destination. Detmers, who couldn’t understand why the enemy ship was still maintaining radio silence and why he hadn’t yet been asked to heave to, could only assume that her captain did not consider the Kormoran as a suspicious ship, replied ‘Batavia’. By this time the cruiser was between 8,000 and 9,000 metres and closing. Viewing her through the less conspicuous and portable anti-aircraft rangefinder from the bridge, Detmers could see that her four twin 6-inch turrets as well as her port torpedo tubes, were all trained on him, but noted that none of her 4-inch anti-aircraft guns were manned.
Without any noticable reduction in speed, and showing the narrowest of profiles, the cruiser continued to close with the Kormoran, while flashing a further signal, this time requesting the nature of her cargo. In replying ‘Piece Goods’, the German signalmen worked so inefficiently and so slowly that it was virtually incomprehensible to the enemy. To add to the confusion, at about five o’clock, Detmers ordered that the Dutch flag be raised and instructed his Radio Officer, Reinhold von Malapert, to transmit a ‘QQQ Straat Malakka’ distress signal, which was picked up and acknowledged by the Perth station.
Conscious of the fact that his crew had been at action stations for over an hour, and that for all of that time they could see and hear nothing, Detmers spoke to them quietly over the intercom. Telling them that they were about to go into action against ‘a small cruiser’ that they should be well able to dispose of, he received an answering cheer that told him all he needed to know about their state of readiness.
Noticing that the cruiser’s seaplane was on it’s catapult being prepared for take off, Detmers realised that the Kormoran would not stand close scrutiny from the air, but on the other hand, it’s mother ship was now only 3,000 metres away, and turning slightly to starboard, thus presenting a little more of her silhouette. As 3,000 metres was the extreme effective range of the Kormoran’s anti-aircraft guns, ideally, he wanted the distance between the two ships to close even further so that when the time came for action he could bring all his guns to bear at their maximum effectiveness, and so, he left the initiative with the enemy captain.
Unable to believe the enemy’s total lack of caution in approaching what was an unidentified ship, the officers on the bridge of the Kormoran had for some time expected the cruiser to call their bluff by requesting their secret call sign letters, which of course they did not know. But at last, it came. Hoisting the letters ‘IK’, part of the Straat Malakka’s four-letter secret call sign, the cruiser came abeam of the Kormoran no more that 1,000 metres away, at a reduced speed, and so close that the Germans could see members of her crew leaning on the rails staring at this strange ‘Dutch’ freighter.
Reminding Ahlbach to keep it slow with the flags, Detmers watched as the cruiser repeated the demand for the secret letters, this time in clear, and wondered if he now needed to go through the whole time-wasting routine of demanding the cruiser’s name, as any self-respecting Dutch captain might be expected to do in such circumstances, and as he would certainly have done had she asked for his secret call sign earlier, but decided that he no longer needed to. He needed no more time.
The cruiser was now sailing directly abeam of the Kormoran at a greatly reduced speed and at a range of under 1,000 metres. At exactly 17.30, within the space of a record six seconds, Detmers crew dropped the Dutch flag and their camouflage and ran up the German battle flag. On hearing Ahlbach report ‘War flag flying!’ he gave Skeries the order to fire at will, with the starboard 37mm guns and three of the first 150mm salvo scoring hits on the cruiser’s bridge and forward gunnery fire-control position.
As the raider’s second 150mm salvo was fired, the cruiser opened up with a full eight-gun broadside, which passed harmlessly high over the Kormoran’s stern. The Kormoran then fired eight salvos in succession, at six second intervals, without any fire coming back, due to the damage done to the enemy’s fire-control centre by her first salvo. At this range it was virtually impossible for the German gunners to miss, with every 155mm shell scoring a direct hit. While the twin 37mm AA guns pumped shells into the cruiser’s bridge and the 20mm flak and machine guns hammered away at her upper decks, preventing her crew from manning their anti-aircraft weapons and torpedo batteries.
Leutnant Greter got two torpedos away, one of which struck the cruiser below the forward gun turret, putting both turrets, A and B, out of action and staggering the ship, causing her to slow still further, leaving just the two after turrets, X and Y, firing independently, scoring three direct hits. The first went through the Kormoran’s funnel, and exploded on the disengaged side of the ship, killing two men in the radio shack, the second exploded in the auxiliary boiler-room and oil bunker amidships, starting a fire and putting her fire-fighting system out of action and most significantly, the third destroyed the sensitive transformers of the main engines.
With the engine room soon fiercely ablaze from ruptured oil pipelines, and the personnel desperately trying to control the fire, by 1745 hours the Kormoran’s engines were inaccessible. But her gunners kept up their merciless barrage, doing a tremendous amount of damage and slowly reducing the cruiser to a blazing wreck. The roof was blown off turret B, the Walrus seaplane was blown off it’s catapult into the sea, and flames were shooting up everywhere. The German anti-aircraft and heavy machine-gun fire was so intense that no one could move on the cruiser’s decks and not one torpedo was fired at the raider.
Turning slowly towards her, the crippled and burning ship appeared to be trying to ram her tormentor, but with so little speed and already down by the stern, she passed harmlessly behind her, with all her turrets pointing to leeward and out of action, and exposing her hitherto undamaged starboard side to the ferocity of the Kormoran’s anti-aircraft guns.
Enjoying a brief respite as she passed astern of the raider, during which Detmers maintained his course to present the smallest possible target in case of a torpedo attack, and the German gunners took the opportunity to cool their overheated gun barrels with water, the shattered cruiser was subjected to another onslaught as she appeared in the sights of Skeries’ port side 155mm guns. Intending to turn to follow the crippled enemy ship to finish her off, Detmers found that his ship was slowing, as the engine-room telegraph reported that both diesels were losing power and that contact with the engine-room had been lost.
Fortunately for him and for the Kormoran, the ship still had some way on her, as someone on the cruiser managed to fire a spread of four torpedoes, all of which passed harmlessly astern, just as the ship shuddered as her engines finally failed.
Having given instructions that the Chief was to use his discretion as to whether or not to abandon the control room, the messenger returned to report that the engine room was out of action and that there was no reply from anyone. It began to look as if Chief Engineer Scheer and all of his control room and engine room crew had lost their lives in the flames.
Meanwhile the gunners kept up their devastating fire, scoring direct hit after direct hit, reducing the shattered and hapless cruiser to a mass of flames. At 1825 hours, with the daylight rapidly fading and the burning warship drifting over 10,000 metres away, the German guns, having fired 450 shells, registering over fifty 150mm hits, fell silent, as Detmers ordered a cease fire.
For the next two and a half hours the crew of the Kormoran, which was almost as badly ablaze as her enemy, could see the glow of the fires ravaging what was left of the cruiser disappearing slowly into the gathering gloom, until suddenly, they saw one massive flame, as if from a gigantic explosion, and after that, nothing.
They're DIFFERENT, not the same. All men are equal only in the sight of God (if God is that blind. He certainly is said to treat sinners and the virtuous differently). Rudd must know that NOTHING will bring Aborigines up to white health standards because nothing will make Aborigines behave like whites. Everything that could be tried has been tried. The Aborigines were healthier BEFORE the government started intervening in fact.
But even under the missionary supervision of yesteryear Aborigines had lots of health problems due to poor levels of hygeine etc. If people insist on living unheathy and risky lifestyles it is their right but they ARE going to die younger because of it.
There must be something about being a Labor Prime minister that brings on delusions of omnipotence. A lot of us still remember Bob Hawke's declaration that "By the year 2000, no Australian child will be living in poverty". Nothing remotely like that change happened, of course. Same will go for this load of baloney
OK: I know Rudd's not an idiot. He's just cynically buying applause from gullible people
Programs to tackle smoking and to train more indigenous health workers are the first down payments on reaching the Federal Government's target of ending the health and life expectancy gaps between indigenous and non-indigenous people. At the Close The Gap summit in Parliament House in Canberra yesterday, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, signed a statement of intent with health and indigenous groups, promising to bring equality to health standards by 2030. Mr Rudd has pledged to end the 17-year life-expectancy gap within the next generation and halve the infant mortality gap within the decade. [How??]
The Olympians Cathy Freeman and Ian Thorpe attended the event. Freeman urged the Government to "stay focused" on its commitment. Mr Rudd announced $14.5 million in funding to tackle the high rates of smoking in indigenous communities [Are you going to forbid it?] which contribute to chronic diseases such as cancer and heart disease. Another $19 million was announced to encourage more indigenous people to become health workers.
The Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma, hailed the statement of intent as a "monumental development". "Benchmarks and targets for achieving these fundamental human rights for indigenous Australians are not only possible, but are now firm commitments. Let us hope that an indigenous baby born in 2030 has the same life expectation, the same access to quality health services and the same life outcomes as non-indigenous Australians," Mr Calma said.
But the Opposition said the Government had breached its claimed bipartisan approach to indigenous issues by leaving it until the last minute to consult it about the pledge to close the gap. The Opposition Leader, Brendan Nelson, was invited to speak at yesterday's event, but Mr Rudd left the function as he started to speak. A spokesman for Dr Nelson said that if the Opposition had been consulted it would have suggested the pledge to achieve health equity should have referred to the importance of addressing alcohol abuse, school attendance, policing, home ownership and employment outcomes. "We want to see this initiative work yet some people would question whether this was truly reflecting the spirit of bipartisanship," the spokesman said.
Source
Correction:
The year nominated by Hawke was 1990
Leftist wants to thwart white flight
How these animals hate ordinary people who are just trying to keep their kids safe!
Refugees should be settled in a wider spread of locations to avoid large-scale withdrawal of Anglo-European children from government schools, a senior government MP says. In a phenomenon known as "white flight", some parents send their children to private schools rather to state schools with a high proportion of pupils of other racial backgrounds, parliamentary secretary for multicultural affairs Laurie Ferguson said.
He told Fairfax white flight had become a big challenge for multicultural Australia. "People fear there is a monoculture in some suburbs. They believe there is an over-dominance of some cultures in schools which is denigrating the quality of education," Mr Ferguson said. "So they are withdrawing their kids from government schools and sending them to religious or selective high schools. "This leads to further concentration of marginalised communities in government schools and the further stigmatisation of these schools.''
The term white flight was first coined in the US in the 1960s, when white parents sent their children to private schools instead of keeping them at newly-desegregated public schools.
White flight was a big challenge, especially in western Sydney and parts of Melbourne, Mr Ferguson said. "Deliberate policy decisions" needed to be made to diversify the location of housing for refugees and humanitarian entrants, including many settlers from Africa whose children grew up in refugee camps and had limited education, Mr Ferguson said.
Victorian Association of State Secondary Principals president Brian Burgess said that in Victoria, the phenomenon was "more like a middle-class flight" than a white flight. But teachers at "radically diverse" schools said white flight was alive and well in Melbourne.
Source
The HMAS Sydney story
There has been great excitement in the press recently over the discovery of the wreckage of the WWII Australian cruiser "Sydney". See here, for example. The wreck has been touted as perhaps solving the "mystery" of how the ship was sunk. But it is not much of a mystery. Below is a excerpt from the summary of what the German survivors of the battle that sank the Sydney said at the time
On November 19, as the Kormoran approached the area off Shark’s Bay from the south-west in warm sunshine and perfect visibility, Detmers decided to maintain his course and wait until dark before turning eastwards towards the coast. At five minutes to four in the afternoon, as he was enjoying a cup of coffee in the wardroom, the alarm bells sounded, and a ship, thought to be a sailing ship, was reported approaching through the shimmering light on the horizon.
With the foretop lookout initially unable to identify what type of ship it was through the heat haze, but maintaining a running commentary on what he thought he could see, Detmers, called the crew to action stations, turned the Kormoran about through 260 degrees and called for full speed. Studying the approaching vessel through the sighting telescope of the gunnery control point on the signal deck, his worst fears were soon realised as the ominous shape of the approaching vessel became clearer. Detmers knew that with four hours to go until nightfall, he had nowhere to hide, and with what was becoming clearer by the second in the gunnery glasses capable of a top speed that was twice that of his own ship, he also knew that evasive action would be out of the question.
Bearing down on the Kormoran was a 6,830-ton Perth-class light cruiser, armed with eight six-inch guns, and a top speed of over 32 knots. Although the Kormoran was also armed with six-inch guns, they did not have the range of those on the cruiser which could easily bombard her from a range of 10,000 metres with all the advantages of modern fire-control and four twin turrets, without ever having to come within range of her guns.
Disregarding the fact that as a converted freighter with an unarmoured wafer-thin hull, she was unlikely to have any chance against an armoured regular warship of this type anyway, Detmers felt that unless he could somehow get within 6,000 or even 8,000 metres, where the advantages of the cruiser’s fire-control system would be far less significant, he knew that his position would be hopeless. Apart from anything else, one stray shell into the 420 high-explosive mines she was carrying and the Kormoran, like the Pinguin, would be blown to smithereens.
Knowing that his chances of survival were virtually nil, Detmers resolved to ensure that he would at least be in a good opening position should it come to a fight, and hoped that the enemy might make a mistake that he could exploit. Playing for time, during which the cruiser might just come closer, he knew he had to rely heavily on his disguise and pray for luck. Dropping the foretop lookout and lowering the crow’s nest so as not to arouse too much suspicion, Detmers had groups of seamen deployed among the ‘shipping crates’ around the decks in civilian clothing, altered course to present his stern to the oncoming cruiser, and slightly increased his speed.
When the signal N.N.J. was repeatedly flashed from the cruiser, neither Detmers, his Chief Signalman, Erich Ahlbach, nor anyone else on the Kormoran’s bridge had a clue what it meant, so it was ignored, but when it was followed by the demand ‘What ship?’, Detmers astonished his signalman, who was about to morse the response with either the ship’s searchlight or her top lamp, by instructing him to reply with ‘flag wagging’, merchant-navy fashion … slowly and awkwardly. In the meantime the cruiser was coming steadily closer.
It was abundantly clear to Detmers that as he had no alternatives and was going to have to fight this cruiser, he wanted her as close as possible to remove some, if not all, of her advantages. The more confusion his signalmen could create with their flags, and the longer they took to respond to the enemy’s signals, the less time he would have to ask awkward questions that Detmers could not answer.
With the cruiser now about 15,000 metres off the starboard quarter, approaching at a speed of about 20 knots and, by the amount of smoke she was making, clearly firing up her engines, Detmers replied to the ‘What ship’ demand, by instructing the signal-code pennant to be hoisted half-way, meaning, ‘I can see your signal, but I can’t make out what it is’, after which he allowed some more time to elapse before flagging that he now understood, followed, a little later, but very slowly, first with one flag missing, and then with several tangled flags, by the Straat Malakka’s recognition signal. This last ruse was one of Leutnant Ahlbach’s own ideas, as he skillfully assisted his commander in his playing for time, slowly lowering the entangled flags before hoisting them again so clumsily that the obviously highly-irritated officers on the bridge of the cruiser had to signal twice to get him to hoist his signal clear.
With the cruiser now 12,000 metres away, she acknowledged receipt of the ‘Dutchman’s’ identification signal, and flashed a further signal requesting his port of destination. Detmers, who couldn’t understand why the enemy ship was still maintaining radio silence and why he hadn’t yet been asked to heave to, could only assume that her captain did not consider the Kormoran as a suspicious ship, replied ‘Batavia’. By this time the cruiser was between 8,000 and 9,000 metres and closing. Viewing her through the less conspicuous and portable anti-aircraft rangefinder from the bridge, Detmers could see that her four twin 6-inch turrets as well as her port torpedo tubes, were all trained on him, but noted that none of her 4-inch anti-aircraft guns were manned.
Without any noticable reduction in speed, and showing the narrowest of profiles, the cruiser continued to close with the Kormoran, while flashing a further signal, this time requesting the nature of her cargo. In replying ‘Piece Goods’, the German signalmen worked so inefficiently and so slowly that it was virtually incomprehensible to the enemy. To add to the confusion, at about five o’clock, Detmers ordered that the Dutch flag be raised and instructed his Radio Officer, Reinhold von Malapert, to transmit a ‘QQQ Straat Malakka’ distress signal, which was picked up and acknowledged by the Perth station.
Conscious of the fact that his crew had been at action stations for over an hour, and that for all of that time they could see and hear nothing, Detmers spoke to them quietly over the intercom. Telling them that they were about to go into action against ‘a small cruiser’ that they should be well able to dispose of, he received an answering cheer that told him all he needed to know about their state of readiness.
Noticing that the cruiser’s seaplane was on it’s catapult being prepared for take off, Detmers realised that the Kormoran would not stand close scrutiny from the air, but on the other hand, it’s mother ship was now only 3,000 metres away, and turning slightly to starboard, thus presenting a little more of her silhouette. As 3,000 metres was the extreme effective range of the Kormoran’s anti-aircraft guns, ideally, he wanted the distance between the two ships to close even further so that when the time came for action he could bring all his guns to bear at their maximum effectiveness, and so, he left the initiative with the enemy captain.
Unable to believe the enemy’s total lack of caution in approaching what was an unidentified ship, the officers on the bridge of the Kormoran had for some time expected the cruiser to call their bluff by requesting their secret call sign letters, which of course they did not know. But at last, it came. Hoisting the letters ‘IK’, part of the Straat Malakka’s four-letter secret call sign, the cruiser came abeam of the Kormoran no more that 1,000 metres away, at a reduced speed, and so close that the Germans could see members of her crew leaning on the rails staring at this strange ‘Dutch’ freighter.
Reminding Ahlbach to keep it slow with the flags, Detmers watched as the cruiser repeated the demand for the secret letters, this time in clear, and wondered if he now needed to go through the whole time-wasting routine of demanding the cruiser’s name, as any self-respecting Dutch captain might be expected to do in such circumstances, and as he would certainly have done had she asked for his secret call sign earlier, but decided that he no longer needed to. He needed no more time.
The cruiser was now sailing directly abeam of the Kormoran at a greatly reduced speed and at a range of under 1,000 metres. At exactly 17.30, within the space of a record six seconds, Detmers crew dropped the Dutch flag and their camouflage and ran up the German battle flag. On hearing Ahlbach report ‘War flag flying!’ he gave Skeries the order to fire at will, with the starboard 37mm guns and three of the first 150mm salvo scoring hits on the cruiser’s bridge and forward gunnery fire-control position.
As the raider’s second 150mm salvo was fired, the cruiser opened up with a full eight-gun broadside, which passed harmlessly high over the Kormoran’s stern. The Kormoran then fired eight salvos in succession, at six second intervals, without any fire coming back, due to the damage done to the enemy’s fire-control centre by her first salvo. At this range it was virtually impossible for the German gunners to miss, with every 155mm shell scoring a direct hit. While the twin 37mm AA guns pumped shells into the cruiser’s bridge and the 20mm flak and machine guns hammered away at her upper decks, preventing her crew from manning their anti-aircraft weapons and torpedo batteries.
Leutnant Greter got two torpedos away, one of which struck the cruiser below the forward gun turret, putting both turrets, A and B, out of action and staggering the ship, causing her to slow still further, leaving just the two after turrets, X and Y, firing independently, scoring three direct hits. The first went through the Kormoran’s funnel, and exploded on the disengaged side of the ship, killing two men in the radio shack, the second exploded in the auxiliary boiler-room and oil bunker amidships, starting a fire and putting her fire-fighting system out of action and most significantly, the third destroyed the sensitive transformers of the main engines.
With the engine room soon fiercely ablaze from ruptured oil pipelines, and the personnel desperately trying to control the fire, by 1745 hours the Kormoran’s engines were inaccessible. But her gunners kept up their merciless barrage, doing a tremendous amount of damage and slowly reducing the cruiser to a blazing wreck. The roof was blown off turret B, the Walrus seaplane was blown off it’s catapult into the sea, and flames were shooting up everywhere. The German anti-aircraft and heavy machine-gun fire was so intense that no one could move on the cruiser’s decks and not one torpedo was fired at the raider.
Turning slowly towards her, the crippled and burning ship appeared to be trying to ram her tormentor, but with so little speed and already down by the stern, she passed harmlessly behind her, with all her turrets pointing to leeward and out of action, and exposing her hitherto undamaged starboard side to the ferocity of the Kormoran’s anti-aircraft guns.
Enjoying a brief respite as she passed astern of the raider, during which Detmers maintained his course to present the smallest possible target in case of a torpedo attack, and the German gunners took the opportunity to cool their overheated gun barrels with water, the shattered cruiser was subjected to another onslaught as she appeared in the sights of Skeries’ port side 155mm guns. Intending to turn to follow the crippled enemy ship to finish her off, Detmers found that his ship was slowing, as the engine-room telegraph reported that both diesels were losing power and that contact with the engine-room had been lost.
Fortunately for him and for the Kormoran, the ship still had some way on her, as someone on the cruiser managed to fire a spread of four torpedoes, all of which passed harmlessly astern, just as the ship shuddered as her engines finally failed.
Having given instructions that the Chief was to use his discretion as to whether or not to abandon the control room, the messenger returned to report that the engine room was out of action and that there was no reply from anyone. It began to look as if Chief Engineer Scheer and all of his control room and engine room crew had lost their lives in the flames.
Meanwhile the gunners kept up their devastating fire, scoring direct hit after direct hit, reducing the shattered and hapless cruiser to a mass of flames. At 1825 hours, with the daylight rapidly fading and the burning warship drifting over 10,000 metres away, the German guns, having fired 450 shells, registering over fifty 150mm hits, fell silent, as Detmers ordered a cease fire.
For the next two and a half hours the crew of the Kormoran, which was almost as badly ablaze as her enemy, could see the glow of the fires ravaging what was left of the cruiser disappearing slowly into the gathering gloom, until suddenly, they saw one massive flame, as if from a gigantic explosion, and after that, nothing.
Thursday, March 20, 2008
Postmodernism in Australian education and culture
By Sydney's premier Leftist bookseller, Bob Gould (above). I remember Bob well. He is an old Marxist (and one-time Marist?) who still has that real respect for working class people and their aspirations that the best of the Left once had. He accurately identifies how the modern "intellectual" Left have degenerated into sneering, supercilious and incoherent babblers. I was sad to see one of my ex-girlfriends identified among the sneerers. She is no fool but life must have disappointed her. Introduction to the article only below. It was written in 1999 but I think things have got worse since then
Over the past 15 years the rise of postmodernism and cultural theory has had a devastating impact on the intellectual life of the left in Australia. It has drastically affected the humanities, it has contributed substantially, along with some other factors, to the elimination of narrative Australian history as an academic discipline in some universities. The effect of this sweeping intellectual fashion in the humanities can only be compared with the impact of the cane toad on Australian fauna and the prickly pear on the flora. Like those two pests, the high theory of postmodernism tends to wipe out everything else in the cultural territory through which it sweeps.
Discussion of this phenomenon presents certain difficulties to me at a personal level. Several of the high priests and priestesses of the new clerisy are old personal friends, or at least, not particularly unfriendly old acquaintances. I have witnessed this bizarre beast grow and grow, right from its first landing in Australia via the works of Althusser, Foucault, Thomas Szas and Roland Barthes in the early 1970s.
For my sins, I sold in my bookshop hundreds of copies of books by the above, in the old Paladin and Verso editions, when they were the new and coming thing. They of course competed in those days with such writers as Hunter S. Thompson, Carlos Castenada and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
Surveying the cultural devastation caused by the structuralists and postmodernists, I now believe that, by comparison, Hunter S. Thompson, Castenada and Robert Pirsig, who, after all, don't claim that their writings are some sort of science or history, are much less damaging to the cultural landscape than the high theorists. Castenada et al at least have some virtue as entertainers if your tastes lie in their direction.
Witnessing the devastation of the intellectual terrain by postmodernism, structuralism and the high theory, and having played a part in the wide distribution of many of these texts when they first hit our shores, I now feel a bit like the people must have felt later, who, with the best of intentions, introduced the rabbit or the cane toad to Australia.
I remember when Andre Frankovits (now the companion of Meaghan Morris) who, with his mate Arthur King, had been battling along making hammocks for a living, got the quite smart idea that he would reprint in Australia the works of Baudrillard, one of the early structuralists, partly as a business venture and partly because he agreed with the works intellectually.
I never heard that Andre made much out of the books as a business venture He priced them a bit too cheaply. But they certainly made a considerable impact in academe, and other publishers came along publishing the same and similar books at far higher prices, as the postmodernist intellectual fashion developed.
I have been a bit amazed to observe the rise and rise of my old acquaintance Meaghan Morris, as the Pirate Queen of the new high theory. When I knew Meaghan a bit in the early 1970s, she was a warm-hearted, affectionate, rather insecure, slightly neurotic person (as we all were to some degree in those days), already a considerable polymath, with an enormous but then rather undirected knowledge of Western literature.
I have been positively awed by her rise to become the Australian megastar of cultural theory of this whole discipline, which has devastated the humanities rather more effectively than the Nato bombs devastated the Serbian military machine. At a human level, I'm impressed and pleased by the worldly success of an old friend, but intellectually my reaction is a good deal more ambivalent. I find Meaghan Morris's writings witty and entertaining and, thank heaven, a good deal less obscure than most practitioners of postmodernism, but even in her work I am irritated by the reduction of many questions that require social and human activity and intervention, to witty abstractions.
Most Australian postmodernists and high theorists are far more obscure and pretentious than Morris, and I suspect the popularity of Morris's work rests in the fact that she at least can be understood most of the time.
In a similar way I have known John Docker, another significant Australian postmodernist, and his wife, Anne Curthoys, a respected academic historian turned fellow traveller with postmodernism, most of my adult life. They are old friends. It is a bit cruel to be joining a crusade against a cultural fashion partly created by old friends and acquaintances, but I suppose that is one of the hazards of political and cultural life.
Keith Windschuttle and Alan Sokal
In intellectual activity it's usually fraudulent to lay claim to too much individuality. In developing ideas we always stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, and we are always influenced by the books we have read. We usually proceed, if we've got any common sense, by way of study, analysis and, ultimately, criticism of other people's ideas, if we come to disagree with them or grow beyond them. Knowledge is a spiral. If we don't proceed like this and claim too much special individual intellectual discovery, we are usually either (1) plagiarising others without acknowledgement or (2) mad.
In this spirit, I hereby introduce into this narrative the two major recent introductions to and critiques of postmodernism and high theory. They are both, in their own special ways, indispensible for any serious person who wants to come to grips with this cultural phenomenon. The first book is The Killing of History by Australian Keith Windschuttle. This book is extremely valuable because:
(a) it provides an extremely lucid and understandable introduction to the ideas of the high theorists. In fact, it makes many things that are almost unintelligible, intelligible to the reasonably educated reader, no mean feat in this territory.
(b) It provides a very effective deconstruction of these ideas from the standpoint of defending the Western cultural tradition, the enlightenment, and the narrative historical sciences.
I disagree profoundly with Windschuttle's rejection of Marxism in the social sciences. In retrospect, his work on this book and the book itself, took place during a major transition in Windschuttle's outlook. He has now shifted over totally and spectacularly to the neoconservative right in politics. (One wonders whether Windschuttle would now repudiate the explicit defence of the Enlightenment in The Killing of History, from his new, ultra-neoconservative standpoint.)
Nevertheless, despite his subsequent transition to neoconservatism, The Killing of History remains a unique and important book. Its defence of the enlightenment and narrative history is persuasive and extremely useful. There is no book quite like Windschuttle's (which has just been reprinted in the United States) in rebutting the havoc wreaked by postmodernism in the historical and social sciences.
The second book is Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. This is the book that stems from the magnificent, seriously intended deception perpetrated by Sokal on the postmodernist journal Social Text in 1996. Sokal, a physicist, submitted to Social Text a 35-page article, titled Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. This piece included many of the most extravagant and mad reworkings of the physical sciences perpetrated by postmodernists, in one article, with prodigious authentic footnotes at the end.
One of the conclusions of the article was that material reality doesn't really exist! Nevertheless, Social Text did not wake up to the spoof aspect and published the piece seriously as a contribution to intellectual discourse. The Sokal/Bricmont book is mainly concerned with the madness of cultural theory applied to the natural sciences and mathematics. Like Windschuttle, they initially summarise the views of the high theorists that they intend to critique.
They then reproduce their Social Text article as a kind of demolition job, and draw out the lesson that the uncritical acceptance by the journal of their reductio ad absurdum article underlines the potential damage to the natural sciences from indiscriminate application of cultural "theory". One would be very hesitant to fly in an aircraft built or designed by a postmodernist.
More here
Far-Left journalists trying to cover up abuses in black communities
Award-winning journalist Paul Toohey has handed back his prestigious Walkley Award to protest against a push by the journalists' union to make media representatives outline their intentions to authorities before being granted access to Aboriginal communities. The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, led by federal secretary Christopher Warren, last week released an additional "code of conduct" for journalists entering and reporting on Aboriginal communities. It calls for reporters to contact "police and council at the first opportunity and inform them what they intend doing in the community".
Toohey, who was named Australian Journalist of the Year in 2000 for his reporting from northern Australia and won a Walkley Award in 2002 for a magazine article on petrol sniffing in Aboriginal communities, said yesterday that the MEAA "was now actively working against media freedom in favour of what it mistakenly believes are the interests of Aborigines". "It shows, surprisingly, a profound ignorance of how journalists work. And of how Aboriginal communities work," said Toohey, The Australian's chief Darwin correspondent. "Would the MEAA suggest to correspondents in China that they should first consult authorities before seeking out Tibetan dissidents? What if the journalist wants to do a story about the local police, or corruption in the local council? Since when does the independent media announce its intentions to the state?"
Central Australian Aboriginal Labor politician Alison Anderson yesterday described the MEAA's proposed "code of conduct" as a sham. Ms Anderson, who favours the removal of the permit system for Aboriginal communities because she believes it works towards shielding predators and exposes women and children to abuse, said the code was "absurd". "Communities have to be opened up like every other town. And we have to be treated like equals. Journalists don't ask police in country Victoria for permission to speak to someone in that town," Ms Anderson said.
The MEAA, which runs the Walkley Awards, developed this revised code of conduct for journalists following the Rudd Government's decision to wind back the previous government's changes to the Northern Territory Land Rights Act, which would have seen Northern Territory communities open to all comers.
The Rudd Government has reinstated the permit system so communities will remain closed. The only exception to the new rule is that government workers and journalists would not need permits.
"The Government thinks the media should be grateful for this, but anyone who takes a broader view must have genuine concerns that communities will remain secretive, steel-trap worlds," Toohey said. "Instead of taking the sensible course and replying that it would suffice for journalists to adhere to its existing 12-point code of ethics - which outlines how journalists should act with honesty, fairness, independence and show respect for the rights of others - the MEAA's response was to come up with new ways to restrict journalists going about their business."
But Mr Warren said the proposed code was meant to be "situational, and attempts to take into account the particular cultural sensitivities presented when operating on Aboriginal land". In a letter to The Australian, Mr Warren writes: "In our experience - and that of our colleagues on the ground in the Northern Territory - to consult with local authorities before entering indigenous communities is an expedient which can usually help, rather than hinder, the reporter in the performance of his or her duties."
The permit system has caused difficulties for Toohey in the past. In October 2002, he travelled to Wadeye, about 400km south of Darwin, after a young Aboriginal man had been shot dead by a policeman. Toohey was the first journalist to report on the killing and the gangs of Wadeye, and went to the community after becoming aware of a planned heavy police presence on the day of the victim's funeral.
Toohey applied for a permit to enter the community. He was unable to secure one but made the long journey anyway. Police at the community arrested and detained Toohey and fingerprinted him, and he was charged and prosecuted for infringing the laws governing access to Aboriginal land. In the Darwin courts, magistrate David Loadman found Toohey guilty but did not convict or fine him. The DPP appealed, and a conviction was recorded. Ultimately, the Territory's Court of Criminal Appeal reinstated the magistrate's ruling.
Ms Anderson opposed any restrictions on journalists' access to communities. "There has to be no scrutiny on journalists. They have to be able to drive in, do their job and get out. This is just another hindering factor which is closing the communities up to abuse and lack of transparency," she said. Toohey said last night he had sent his 2002 Walkley Award to Mr Warren's office in Sydney in protest at the MEAA's proposal.
Source
More revelations about disgusting health bureaucracy
QUEENSLAND Health Minister Stephen Robertson is in the Torres Strait today to get a first-hand look at security for health workers. Nurses are threatening to strike from March 28 if security does not improve in the state's remote north. A nurse was raped on remote Mabuiag Island in the Torres Strait last month and was told to return to work after the attack, receiving no help to leave the island. Mr Robertson has been under fire this week over his handling of health workers' security issues. A spokesman said the minister was visiting a number of islands in the region to inspect progress on security improvements.
Yesterday remote area nurse Janine Evans, 43, broke her silence to reveal how health authorities exposed her to danger by failing to tell her about a written threat to her safety while working at Hopevale, on Cape York; and later heartlessly hauled her through the courts over taking a work vehicle to escape another community.
It took at least three weeks before a Cairns-based manager informed Ms Evans about the letter, from the family of a patient, which warned she should never work with Aboriginal people again and "if we see her on her days off she should watch out". In an extraordinary admission last night, Queensland Health said it had no specific policy for staff if they received written or verbal threats. "Anyone with fears for their safety should contact police," a spokeswoman said. Ms Evans said: "I just think it's terrible to leave me in there when they knew about the threats," she said.
Ms Evans was later taken to court over a work vehicle she used to escape Coen, on Cape York. She fled because she was struggling to cope, blaming a lack of support. The latest allegations show that the crisis in remote health is not just confined to the Torres Strait, where nurses are threatening to strike from March 28 if conditions do not improve.
Source
Child welfare agency meltdown revealed
The special commission of inquiry into DOCS has been told many people have lost faith in the agency and a staff shortage is impacting on its ability to care for children. The inquiry was set up last year after two children known to the department died within weeks of each other.
Yesterday, public hearings were held in the northern New South Wales town of Moree. Staff from the Community Options program, based at Gunnedah, spoke passionately about the decline in DOCS services. Christina Adams told the hearing the community has lost faith in DOCS and people are not reporting children at risk because of a lack of action. Another worker said she had reported children in danger and it had taken DOCS two years to respond. The family is now living in squalor.
The member for Barwon, Kevin Humphries, said the service is chronically underfunded. "You're not going to get people to work for a service that generally the community does not have confidence in," he said. Mr Humphries warned the inquiry's findings would have to be taken seriously. "If his [the Commissoner's] recommendations are not adopted, the next inquiry that people like myself and the community will be calling for will be a war crimes tribunal," he said. "That'll be something that the minister, I can guarantee you, will lose his job over." He also called for NSW to engage the Federal Government's Northern Territory Intervention strategy at a local level
The hearing also heard there were strains on the service at Narrabri and a shortage of foster carers. A worker from the only refuge in the town said there is only one alcohol and drug counsellor in the town and she is pushed to capacity. A representative from Moree Plains Shire Council told the inquiry it wants to re-enact the parental responsibility legislation. The act allows police to remove children from the streets and return them to their home or a safe place.
Source
By Sydney's premier Leftist bookseller, Bob Gould (above). I remember Bob well. He is an old Marxist (and one-time Marist?) who still has that real respect for working class people and their aspirations that the best of the Left once had. He accurately identifies how the modern "intellectual" Left have degenerated into sneering, supercilious and incoherent babblers. I was sad to see one of my ex-girlfriends identified among the sneerers. She is no fool but life must have disappointed her. Introduction to the article only below. It was written in 1999 but I think things have got worse since then
Over the past 15 years the rise of postmodernism and cultural theory has had a devastating impact on the intellectual life of the left in Australia. It has drastically affected the humanities, it has contributed substantially, along with some other factors, to the elimination of narrative Australian history as an academic discipline in some universities. The effect of this sweeping intellectual fashion in the humanities can only be compared with the impact of the cane toad on Australian fauna and the prickly pear on the flora. Like those two pests, the high theory of postmodernism tends to wipe out everything else in the cultural territory through which it sweeps.
Discussion of this phenomenon presents certain difficulties to me at a personal level. Several of the high priests and priestesses of the new clerisy are old personal friends, or at least, not particularly unfriendly old acquaintances. I have witnessed this bizarre beast grow and grow, right from its first landing in Australia via the works of Althusser, Foucault, Thomas Szas and Roland Barthes in the early 1970s.
For my sins, I sold in my bookshop hundreds of copies of books by the above, in the old Paladin and Verso editions, when they were the new and coming thing. They of course competed in those days with such writers as Hunter S. Thompson, Carlos Castenada and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig.
Surveying the cultural devastation caused by the structuralists and postmodernists, I now believe that, by comparison, Hunter S. Thompson, Castenada and Robert Pirsig, who, after all, don't claim that their writings are some sort of science or history, are much less damaging to the cultural landscape than the high theorists. Castenada et al at least have some virtue as entertainers if your tastes lie in their direction.
Witnessing the devastation of the intellectual terrain by postmodernism, structuralism and the high theory, and having played a part in the wide distribution of many of these texts when they first hit our shores, I now feel a bit like the people must have felt later, who, with the best of intentions, introduced the rabbit or the cane toad to Australia.
I remember when Andre Frankovits (now the companion of Meaghan Morris) who, with his mate Arthur King, had been battling along making hammocks for a living, got the quite smart idea that he would reprint in Australia the works of Baudrillard, one of the early structuralists, partly as a business venture and partly because he agreed with the works intellectually.
I never heard that Andre made much out of the books as a business venture He priced them a bit too cheaply. But they certainly made a considerable impact in academe, and other publishers came along publishing the same and similar books at far higher prices, as the postmodernist intellectual fashion developed.
I have been a bit amazed to observe the rise and rise of my old acquaintance Meaghan Morris, as the Pirate Queen of the new high theory. When I knew Meaghan a bit in the early 1970s, she was a warm-hearted, affectionate, rather insecure, slightly neurotic person (as we all were to some degree in those days), already a considerable polymath, with an enormous but then rather undirected knowledge of Western literature.
I have been positively awed by her rise to become the Australian megastar of cultural theory of this whole discipline, which has devastated the humanities rather more effectively than the Nato bombs devastated the Serbian military machine. At a human level, I'm impressed and pleased by the worldly success of an old friend, but intellectually my reaction is a good deal more ambivalent. I find Meaghan Morris's writings witty and entertaining and, thank heaven, a good deal less obscure than most practitioners of postmodernism, but even in her work I am irritated by the reduction of many questions that require social and human activity and intervention, to witty abstractions.
Most Australian postmodernists and high theorists are far more obscure and pretentious than Morris, and I suspect the popularity of Morris's work rests in the fact that she at least can be understood most of the time.
In a similar way I have known John Docker, another significant Australian postmodernist, and his wife, Anne Curthoys, a respected academic historian turned fellow traveller with postmodernism, most of my adult life. They are old friends. It is a bit cruel to be joining a crusade against a cultural fashion partly created by old friends and acquaintances, but I suppose that is one of the hazards of political and cultural life.
Keith Windschuttle and Alan Sokal
In intellectual activity it's usually fraudulent to lay claim to too much individuality. In developing ideas we always stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before us, and we are always influenced by the books we have read. We usually proceed, if we've got any common sense, by way of study, analysis and, ultimately, criticism of other people's ideas, if we come to disagree with them or grow beyond them. Knowledge is a spiral. If we don't proceed like this and claim too much special individual intellectual discovery, we are usually either (1) plagiarising others without acknowledgement or (2) mad.
In this spirit, I hereby introduce into this narrative the two major recent introductions to and critiques of postmodernism and high theory. They are both, in their own special ways, indispensible for any serious person who wants to come to grips with this cultural phenomenon. The first book is The Killing of History by Australian Keith Windschuttle. This book is extremely valuable because:
(a) it provides an extremely lucid and understandable introduction to the ideas of the high theorists. In fact, it makes many things that are almost unintelligible, intelligible to the reasonably educated reader, no mean feat in this territory.
(b) It provides a very effective deconstruction of these ideas from the standpoint of defending the Western cultural tradition, the enlightenment, and the narrative historical sciences.
I disagree profoundly with Windschuttle's rejection of Marxism in the social sciences. In retrospect, his work on this book and the book itself, took place during a major transition in Windschuttle's outlook. He has now shifted over totally and spectacularly to the neoconservative right in politics. (One wonders whether Windschuttle would now repudiate the explicit defence of the Enlightenment in The Killing of History, from his new, ultra-neoconservative standpoint.)
Nevertheless, despite his subsequent transition to neoconservatism, The Killing of History remains a unique and important book. Its defence of the enlightenment and narrative history is persuasive and extremely useful. There is no book quite like Windschuttle's (which has just been reprinted in the United States) in rebutting the havoc wreaked by postmodernism in the historical and social sciences.
The second book is Intellectual Impostures by Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont. This is the book that stems from the magnificent, seriously intended deception perpetrated by Sokal on the postmodernist journal Social Text in 1996. Sokal, a physicist, submitted to Social Text a 35-page article, titled Transgressing the boundaries: Toward a transformative hermeneutics of quantum gravity. This piece included many of the most extravagant and mad reworkings of the physical sciences perpetrated by postmodernists, in one article, with prodigious authentic footnotes at the end.
One of the conclusions of the article was that material reality doesn't really exist! Nevertheless, Social Text did not wake up to the spoof aspect and published the piece seriously as a contribution to intellectual discourse. The Sokal/Bricmont book is mainly concerned with the madness of cultural theory applied to the natural sciences and mathematics. Like Windschuttle, they initially summarise the views of the high theorists that they intend to critique.
They then reproduce their Social Text article as a kind of demolition job, and draw out the lesson that the uncritical acceptance by the journal of their reductio ad absurdum article underlines the potential damage to the natural sciences from indiscriminate application of cultural "theory". One would be very hesitant to fly in an aircraft built or designed by a postmodernist.
More here
Far-Left journalists trying to cover up abuses in black communities
Award-winning journalist Paul Toohey has handed back his prestigious Walkley Award to protest against a push by the journalists' union to make media representatives outline their intentions to authorities before being granted access to Aboriginal communities. The Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, led by federal secretary Christopher Warren, last week released an additional "code of conduct" for journalists entering and reporting on Aboriginal communities. It calls for reporters to contact "police and council at the first opportunity and inform them what they intend doing in the community".
Toohey, who was named Australian Journalist of the Year in 2000 for his reporting from northern Australia and won a Walkley Award in 2002 for a magazine article on petrol sniffing in Aboriginal communities, said yesterday that the MEAA "was now actively working against media freedom in favour of what it mistakenly believes are the interests of Aborigines". "It shows, surprisingly, a profound ignorance of how journalists work. And of how Aboriginal communities work," said Toohey, The Australian's chief Darwin correspondent. "Would the MEAA suggest to correspondents in China that they should first consult authorities before seeking out Tibetan dissidents? What if the journalist wants to do a story about the local police, or corruption in the local council? Since when does the independent media announce its intentions to the state?"
Central Australian Aboriginal Labor politician Alison Anderson yesterday described the MEAA's proposed "code of conduct" as a sham. Ms Anderson, who favours the removal of the permit system for Aboriginal communities because she believes it works towards shielding predators and exposes women and children to abuse, said the code was "absurd". "Communities have to be opened up like every other town. And we have to be treated like equals. Journalists don't ask police in country Victoria for permission to speak to someone in that town," Ms Anderson said.
The MEAA, which runs the Walkley Awards, developed this revised code of conduct for journalists following the Rudd Government's decision to wind back the previous government's changes to the Northern Territory Land Rights Act, which would have seen Northern Territory communities open to all comers.
The Rudd Government has reinstated the permit system so communities will remain closed. The only exception to the new rule is that government workers and journalists would not need permits.
"The Government thinks the media should be grateful for this, but anyone who takes a broader view must have genuine concerns that communities will remain secretive, steel-trap worlds," Toohey said. "Instead of taking the sensible course and replying that it would suffice for journalists to adhere to its existing 12-point code of ethics - which outlines how journalists should act with honesty, fairness, independence and show respect for the rights of others - the MEAA's response was to come up with new ways to restrict journalists going about their business."
But Mr Warren said the proposed code was meant to be "situational, and attempts to take into account the particular cultural sensitivities presented when operating on Aboriginal land". In a letter to The Australian, Mr Warren writes: "In our experience - and that of our colleagues on the ground in the Northern Territory - to consult with local authorities before entering indigenous communities is an expedient which can usually help, rather than hinder, the reporter in the performance of his or her duties."
The permit system has caused difficulties for Toohey in the past. In October 2002, he travelled to Wadeye, about 400km south of Darwin, after a young Aboriginal man had been shot dead by a policeman. Toohey was the first journalist to report on the killing and the gangs of Wadeye, and went to the community after becoming aware of a planned heavy police presence on the day of the victim's funeral.
Toohey applied for a permit to enter the community. He was unable to secure one but made the long journey anyway. Police at the community arrested and detained Toohey and fingerprinted him, and he was charged and prosecuted for infringing the laws governing access to Aboriginal land. In the Darwin courts, magistrate David Loadman found Toohey guilty but did not convict or fine him. The DPP appealed, and a conviction was recorded. Ultimately, the Territory's Court of Criminal Appeal reinstated the magistrate's ruling.
Ms Anderson opposed any restrictions on journalists' access to communities. "There has to be no scrutiny on journalists. They have to be able to drive in, do their job and get out. This is just another hindering factor which is closing the communities up to abuse and lack of transparency," she said. Toohey said last night he had sent his 2002 Walkley Award to Mr Warren's office in Sydney in protest at the MEAA's proposal.
Source
More revelations about disgusting health bureaucracy
QUEENSLAND Health Minister Stephen Robertson is in the Torres Strait today to get a first-hand look at security for health workers. Nurses are threatening to strike from March 28 if security does not improve in the state's remote north. A nurse was raped on remote Mabuiag Island in the Torres Strait last month and was told to return to work after the attack, receiving no help to leave the island. Mr Robertson has been under fire this week over his handling of health workers' security issues. A spokesman said the minister was visiting a number of islands in the region to inspect progress on security improvements.
Yesterday remote area nurse Janine Evans, 43, broke her silence to reveal how health authorities exposed her to danger by failing to tell her about a written threat to her safety while working at Hopevale, on Cape York; and later heartlessly hauled her through the courts over taking a work vehicle to escape another community.
It took at least three weeks before a Cairns-based manager informed Ms Evans about the letter, from the family of a patient, which warned she should never work with Aboriginal people again and "if we see her on her days off she should watch out". In an extraordinary admission last night, Queensland Health said it had no specific policy for staff if they received written or verbal threats. "Anyone with fears for their safety should contact police," a spokeswoman said. Ms Evans said: "I just think it's terrible to leave me in there when they knew about the threats," she said.
Ms Evans was later taken to court over a work vehicle she used to escape Coen, on Cape York. She fled because she was struggling to cope, blaming a lack of support. The latest allegations show that the crisis in remote health is not just confined to the Torres Strait, where nurses are threatening to strike from March 28 if conditions do not improve.
Source
Child welfare agency meltdown revealed
The special commission of inquiry into DOCS has been told many people have lost faith in the agency and a staff shortage is impacting on its ability to care for children. The inquiry was set up last year after two children known to the department died within weeks of each other.
Yesterday, public hearings were held in the northern New South Wales town of Moree. Staff from the Community Options program, based at Gunnedah, spoke passionately about the decline in DOCS services. Christina Adams told the hearing the community has lost faith in DOCS and people are not reporting children at risk because of a lack of action. Another worker said she had reported children in danger and it had taken DOCS two years to respond. The family is now living in squalor.
The member for Barwon, Kevin Humphries, said the service is chronically underfunded. "You're not going to get people to work for a service that generally the community does not have confidence in," he said. Mr Humphries warned the inquiry's findings would have to be taken seriously. "If his [the Commissoner's] recommendations are not adopted, the next inquiry that people like myself and the community will be calling for will be a war crimes tribunal," he said. "That'll be something that the minister, I can guarantee you, will lose his job over." He also called for NSW to engage the Federal Government's Northern Territory Intervention strategy at a local level
The hearing also heard there were strains on the service at Narrabri and a shortage of foster carers. A worker from the only refuge in the town said there is only one alcohol and drug counsellor in the town and she is pushed to capacity. A representative from Moree Plains Shire Council told the inquiry it wants to re-enact the parental responsibility legislation. The act allows police to remove children from the streets and return them to their home or a safe place.
Source
Wednesday, March 19, 2008
The ANZACs are not dead
The old warrior genes are still there. It is unusual for someone of such a senior rank to lead his men from the front. Major is the highest field rank. This is probably a good moment to remember another heroic Australian of that ilk, Major Peter Badcoe, VC
A QUEENSLANDER and former Australian Digger has forged a name for himself while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan, earning the Military Cross for gallantry. Major Mike Aston was awarded the third-highest award for bravery for leading his company through three months on the front-lines under "some of the most intense close combat the British Army has experienced for some years".
Major Aston, who spent 11 years with the Australian Army at Duntroon, said he was "speechless" when he received the award. "It was unique for a company out there to do so many things," he said. "During our time we were moving around doing a lot of strike operations. "We were a very aggressive company, always on the front foot, and we took the fight to the enemy . . . and sadly did suffer a number of casualties."
Major Aston grew up in Toowoomba, 200km west of Brisbane, and entered the Australian Defence Force after completing high school at Centenary Heights State High. During his time in the Australian Defence Force he was awarded Soldier of the Year in 1990 and was nominated for the Sword of Honour.
His mother, Yvonne Aston, told The Courier-Mail she always knew her son would achieve in the army but was worried about him while he was fighting in Afghanistan. "It was very tense because several men in his battalion were killed, first his (second-in-command) and then another major was killed, which upset him," she said. "That was the only time I was worried about him."
She said he had come a long way since his early days in the Australian Army. "I can remember him sneaking off and ringing me and saying it was so hard." Major Aston is now serving as a staff officer with a UK armoured division in northwest Germany.
Source
'More clerks than nurses' in NSW health system
The NSW health system employs more clerks than nurses, and continues to obstruct desperately needed reform, the former director-general of the Premier's Department said yesterday. Ken Baxter, who ran the agency under Labor premier Bob Carr, yesterday released an Australian Centre for Health Research report calling for a federal takeover of public hospital funding, saying the scale of state bureaucracies, cost-shifting and woefully inadequate reporting data justified the overhaul. He cited annual report data that showed more than a third of NSW's 90,997 health staff were classified "administrative or other". "In the NSW health system, there are more clerks than there are nurses," Mr Baxter said, estimating nurse numbers at 30,000.
In Tasmania, the system was even more heavily weighted towards office workers, with 45 per cent of the 8992 full-time equivalent staff classified as administrative or other, his figures show. Administrative jobs accounted for a quarter of positions in the Northern Territory and a fifth in Queensland and the ACT, with data from Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia non-existent or incomplete. "A number of the states can't give you accurate figures and certainly none of them (are) comparable," Mr Baxter said.
Many of the jobs in health had gone to IT support, despite the fact that more than $2 billion had been spent on IT systems throughout the Australian health sector "without delivering any real improvements" in performance data or services, he said.
The ACHR report into the future of Australia's federal-state healthcare agreements argues for a slimmed-down system where area health services and local boards run public hospitals, directly funded by the commonwealth based on their success in meeting performance indicators. The states would be left as owners of the hospitals, but would relinquish their current roles as co-funders and sole administrators.
Mr Baxter said more direct lines of responsibility would help reduce cost-shifting estimated at up to $500 million a year. "If we want that same level of service and we want the same standard, then some of these changes have got to be made," he said. "And none of them are going to be comfortable. But if you ask (NSW Health Minister) Reba Meagher, life is not comfortable for Reba at the moment."
Ms Meagher has faced off several scandals over substandard services at hospitals such as the busy Royal North Shore in Sydney while leading resistance to commonwealth calls to sign up to nationally consistent performance data for state hospitals. But she defended herself against Mr Baxter's claims, saying frontline clinical staff, including doctors, dentists, ambulance workers and allied health professionals, as well as nurses, outnumbered administrative staff and made up two-thirds of the system's workforce. "NSW Health has been actively restructuring the health system to shift resources away from administration into frontline health services," she said.
She also defended NSW's record in reporting on hospital performance, citing emergency and surgery data by hospitals published quarterly. But "we won't support benchmarks that are simply reporting for reporting's sake or have the potential to act as a disincentive for medical staff to report adverse events," Ms Meagher said.
Mr Baxter called the arguments against the release of hospital scorecards "nonsense". The NSW Government had surrendered in the face of bureaucratic resistance, he said.
Source
Qld. teachers join nurses' protest over Torres Strait worker safety
The deepening crisis over worker safety in the remote Torres Strait islands is fuelling threats of strike action by teachers fearful that dilapidated staff housing will fail to protect them from physical abuse. A chronic lack of maintenance has left accommodation for teachers working at many of Queensland's 180 remote schools in a poor state and unable to be secured against intruders.
Education Queensland has admitted that since 2003 at least five teachers posted in the Torres Strait have sought counselling after facing physical threats, with two of them opting to be transferred immediately. There have also been at least six Workcover claims related to threats against teachers in the region.
The plight of teachers, nurses and other workers in remote communities has hit the headlines following the alleged rape of a nurse on Mabuiag Island last month. Health Minister Stephen Robertson has come under heavy political fire over his handling of the incident during which he has been regularly found wanting on the issue of worker safety in remote communities and what the Government was doing to address the issue.
Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said there was not enough accommodation for teachers and existing housing was run-down and unable to be secured. Like Queensland Health's facilities, Mr Ryan said Education Queensland's buildings commonly had missing or broken security screens - leading to break-ins and thefts from teachers' homes. The poor housing in remote communities was discouraging teachers from moving to them, he said.
The union estimates $160 million needs to be spent over the next three years to bring teacher accommodation across the state up to standard. "If strike action is the only way to get the State Government to listen, members . . . may be obliged to follow suit," Mr Ryan said. Premier Anna Bligh yesterday said: "I have absolute confidence in Stephen Robertson as the Health Minister."
Source
Rabbit fish key to saving Great Barrier Reef
What? We don't have to stop global warming after all?
A RAVENOUS weed-eating fish might be the key to saving large sections of the Great Barrier Reef from destruction, scientists say. Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University researcher Professor David Bellwood said new research had shown the herbivorous rabbit fish - capable of stripping an area of vegetation - could fight coral-stifling weeds. "When a coral reef is weakened or damaged through human activity such as climate change or pollution or by a natural disaster like a cyclone, the coral will usually recover provided it is not choked by fast-growing marine algae," Prof Bellwood said.
"The problem is that over the years we have fished down the populations of fish that normally feed on the young weed to such a degree that the weed is no longer kept in check - it can now smother the young corals and take over." He said the chances of coral re-establishing itself after such an event were small.
But in a video study in which different fish were observed grazing in overgrown areas of the reef, schools of rabbit fish (Siganus canaliculatus) were seen chomping away at 10 times the rate of other weed-eaters. "To our surprise and disappointment, the fish that usually mow the reef - parrot fish and surgeon fish - were of little help ... then, to our even greater surprise, a fish we had never seen in this area before was observed grazing on the weed," Prof Bellwood said. He said the brown, bland-looking fish had been overlooked in the past but could be an important protector of the reef.
But he said it was important other herbivores were protected so they could work alongside the rabbit fish. "In Australia these herbivore fish populations are still in fairly good shape, but around the world as the big predators are fished out, local fishermen are targeting the herbivores," he said. "In Hawaii, the Caribbean, Indonesia, Micronesia and French Polynesia there are reports of serious declines in herbivore numbers of up to 90 per cent. "By killing them, we may be unwittingly eliminating the very thing which enables coral reefs to bounce back from the sort of shocks which human activity exposes them to."
Source
The old warrior genes are still there. It is unusual for someone of such a senior rank to lead his men from the front. Major is the highest field rank. This is probably a good moment to remember another heroic Australian of that ilk, Major Peter Badcoe, VC
A QUEENSLANDER and former Australian Digger has forged a name for himself while serving with the British Army in Afghanistan, earning the Military Cross for gallantry. Major Mike Aston was awarded the third-highest award for bravery for leading his company through three months on the front-lines under "some of the most intense close combat the British Army has experienced for some years".
Major Aston, who spent 11 years with the Australian Army at Duntroon, said he was "speechless" when he received the award. "It was unique for a company out there to do so many things," he said. "During our time we were moving around doing a lot of strike operations. "We were a very aggressive company, always on the front foot, and we took the fight to the enemy . . . and sadly did suffer a number of casualties."
Major Aston grew up in Toowoomba, 200km west of Brisbane, and entered the Australian Defence Force after completing high school at Centenary Heights State High. During his time in the Australian Defence Force he was awarded Soldier of the Year in 1990 and was nominated for the Sword of Honour.
His mother, Yvonne Aston, told The Courier-Mail she always knew her son would achieve in the army but was worried about him while he was fighting in Afghanistan. "It was very tense because several men in his battalion were killed, first his (second-in-command) and then another major was killed, which upset him," she said. "That was the only time I was worried about him."
She said he had come a long way since his early days in the Australian Army. "I can remember him sneaking off and ringing me and saying it was so hard." Major Aston is now serving as a staff officer with a UK armoured division in northwest Germany.
Source
'More clerks than nurses' in NSW health system
The NSW health system employs more clerks than nurses, and continues to obstruct desperately needed reform, the former director-general of the Premier's Department said yesterday. Ken Baxter, who ran the agency under Labor premier Bob Carr, yesterday released an Australian Centre for Health Research report calling for a federal takeover of public hospital funding, saying the scale of state bureaucracies, cost-shifting and woefully inadequate reporting data justified the overhaul. He cited annual report data that showed more than a third of NSW's 90,997 health staff were classified "administrative or other". "In the NSW health system, there are more clerks than there are nurses," Mr Baxter said, estimating nurse numbers at 30,000.
In Tasmania, the system was even more heavily weighted towards office workers, with 45 per cent of the 8992 full-time equivalent staff classified as administrative or other, his figures show. Administrative jobs accounted for a quarter of positions in the Northern Territory and a fifth in Queensland and the ACT, with data from Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia non-existent or incomplete. "A number of the states can't give you accurate figures and certainly none of them (are) comparable," Mr Baxter said.
Many of the jobs in health had gone to IT support, despite the fact that more than $2 billion had been spent on IT systems throughout the Australian health sector "without delivering any real improvements" in performance data or services, he said.
The ACHR report into the future of Australia's federal-state healthcare agreements argues for a slimmed-down system where area health services and local boards run public hospitals, directly funded by the commonwealth based on their success in meeting performance indicators. The states would be left as owners of the hospitals, but would relinquish their current roles as co-funders and sole administrators.
Mr Baxter said more direct lines of responsibility would help reduce cost-shifting estimated at up to $500 million a year. "If we want that same level of service and we want the same standard, then some of these changes have got to be made," he said. "And none of them are going to be comfortable. But if you ask (NSW Health Minister) Reba Meagher, life is not comfortable for Reba at the moment."
Ms Meagher has faced off several scandals over substandard services at hospitals such as the busy Royal North Shore in Sydney while leading resistance to commonwealth calls to sign up to nationally consistent performance data for state hospitals. But she defended herself against Mr Baxter's claims, saying frontline clinical staff, including doctors, dentists, ambulance workers and allied health professionals, as well as nurses, outnumbered administrative staff and made up two-thirds of the system's workforce. "NSW Health has been actively restructuring the health system to shift resources away from administration into frontline health services," she said.
She also defended NSW's record in reporting on hospital performance, citing emergency and surgery data by hospitals published quarterly. But "we won't support benchmarks that are simply reporting for reporting's sake or have the potential to act as a disincentive for medical staff to report adverse events," Ms Meagher said.
Mr Baxter called the arguments against the release of hospital scorecards "nonsense". The NSW Government had surrendered in the face of bureaucratic resistance, he said.
Source
Qld. teachers join nurses' protest over Torres Strait worker safety
The deepening crisis over worker safety in the remote Torres Strait islands is fuelling threats of strike action by teachers fearful that dilapidated staff housing will fail to protect them from physical abuse. A chronic lack of maintenance has left accommodation for teachers working at many of Queensland's 180 remote schools in a poor state and unable to be secured against intruders.
Education Queensland has admitted that since 2003 at least five teachers posted in the Torres Strait have sought counselling after facing physical threats, with two of them opting to be transferred immediately. There have also been at least six Workcover claims related to threats against teachers in the region.
The plight of teachers, nurses and other workers in remote communities has hit the headlines following the alleged rape of a nurse on Mabuiag Island last month. Health Minister Stephen Robertson has come under heavy political fire over his handling of the incident during which he has been regularly found wanting on the issue of worker safety in remote communities and what the Government was doing to address the issue.
Queensland Teachers Union president Steve Ryan said there was not enough accommodation for teachers and existing housing was run-down and unable to be secured. Like Queensland Health's facilities, Mr Ryan said Education Queensland's buildings commonly had missing or broken security screens - leading to break-ins and thefts from teachers' homes. The poor housing in remote communities was discouraging teachers from moving to them, he said.
The union estimates $160 million needs to be spent over the next three years to bring teacher accommodation across the state up to standard. "If strike action is the only way to get the State Government to listen, members . . . may be obliged to follow suit," Mr Ryan said. Premier Anna Bligh yesterday said: "I have absolute confidence in Stephen Robertson as the Health Minister."
Source
Rabbit fish key to saving Great Barrier Reef
What? We don't have to stop global warming after all?
A RAVENOUS weed-eating fish might be the key to saving large sections of the Great Barrier Reef from destruction, scientists say. Australian Research Council (ARC) Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University researcher Professor David Bellwood said new research had shown the herbivorous rabbit fish - capable of stripping an area of vegetation - could fight coral-stifling weeds. "When a coral reef is weakened or damaged through human activity such as climate change or pollution or by a natural disaster like a cyclone, the coral will usually recover provided it is not choked by fast-growing marine algae," Prof Bellwood said.
"The problem is that over the years we have fished down the populations of fish that normally feed on the young weed to such a degree that the weed is no longer kept in check - it can now smother the young corals and take over." He said the chances of coral re-establishing itself after such an event were small.
But in a video study in which different fish were observed grazing in overgrown areas of the reef, schools of rabbit fish (Siganus canaliculatus) were seen chomping away at 10 times the rate of other weed-eaters. "To our surprise and disappointment, the fish that usually mow the reef - parrot fish and surgeon fish - were of little help ... then, to our even greater surprise, a fish we had never seen in this area before was observed grazing on the weed," Prof Bellwood said. He said the brown, bland-looking fish had been overlooked in the past but could be an important protector of the reef.
But he said it was important other herbivores were protected so they could work alongside the rabbit fish. "In Australia these herbivore fish populations are still in fairly good shape, but around the world as the big predators are fished out, local fishermen are targeting the herbivores," he said. "In Hawaii, the Caribbean, Indonesia, Micronesia and French Polynesia there are reports of serious declines in herbivore numbers of up to 90 per cent. "By killing them, we may be unwittingly eliminating the very thing which enables coral reefs to bounce back from the sort of shocks which human activity exposes them to."
Source
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Racist do-gooder judge again: Six months' jail for raping 13-year-old girl
Black kids are not entitled to the same protection as whites, apparently. This is not the first time judge Martin has put the law second to the depraved values that have become common in dysfunctional black communities. He condones the depravity instead of fulfilling his duty to correct and discourage it
The Northern Territory's chief judge has warned men in Aboriginal communities to stop condoning child abuse after a 20-year-old was sent to jail for having sex with his 13-year-old promised bride under her parents' roof. However, child abuse campaigners yesterday criticised as inadequate the six-month sentence given to the offender by Chief Justice Brian Martin, who accepted that the 13-year-old victim, who fell pregnant as a result of the abuse, had "actively encouraged" the relationship.
Yesterday, in the Supreme Court at Alice Springs, Justice Martin said senior figures in Aboriginal communities "must learn to accept" that sex with children was illegal. The judge made the comments after acknowledging that both the parents of the victim and offender, as well as senior figures in their remote Aboriginal communities, had accepted the sexual relationship between the 13-year-old child and the man, who was 19 at the time the offences took place, as normal.
The offender, who cannot be named, pleaded guilty to three charges of having sexual intercourse with a child over a two-month period in 2006. Lawyers for the offender had pointed out in submissions at his plea hearing that the victim's father was an Aboriginal community police officer in the remote central Australian settlement where the offences occurred. The Australian is unable to name that community as it would identify the victim.
In sentencing the 20-year-old man yesterday, Justice Martin accepted that the offender was a young man with an immature understanding of sexual matters who had been "subject to conflicting messages" within his community. "Those who might be expected to tell you that a sexual relationship with a child was wrong took the opposite view and encouraged your relationship," Justice Martin said. "You had approval for the relationship not only from your parents, but also from the child's parents. Their approval extended to occupying the same bed together within the homes of both sets of parents."
The court heard yesterday that the victim had been subject to violence within the relationship by her promised husband, who abused alcohol. She had also fallen pregnant as a result of the abuse, and when she was seen at a community clinic, health workers discovered that she had contracted three different sexually transmitted infections. The court was told that the young victim's baby had died in-utero.
Justice Martin said that the "tragic and traumatic" consequences of the sexual abuse were a "graphic illustration" of the dangers of such relationships within Aboriginal communities. "There is a need to send a message to men in Aboriginal communities, both young and old, that sexual intercourse with children is never acceptable and is against the law," he said. "The message must go out that whatever view may be held by a community or individual Aboriginal man about traditional marriage or traditional relationships with young children, sexual intercourse with children is against the law and will result in offenders being sent to prison."
Bernadette McMenamin, chief executive of the anti-child abuse group Child Wise, said the sentence was inadequate, and slammed Justice Martin's suggestion that the victim had "actively encouraged" the sexual relationship.
Source
Shifty Leftist politician
An empty suit trying to dodge responsibility for negligence over what IS his responsibility: The on-job safety of his Department's employees. He should resign to make way for someone who IS willing and able to get on top of his Department
BESIEGED Health Minister Stephen Robertson has come under renewed pressure for producing different versions of events surrounding his knowledge of the alleged rape of a nurse in the Torres Strait last month. The latest development in the saga came yesterday after the Opposition released a leaked Queensland Health report prepared between February 25 and 29 in response to the alleged rape on Mabuiag Island three weeks earlier.
The Occupational Health and Security Environmental Scan reveals the departmental team that prepared it was given "previous risk assessments and reports" to help them in their work. The team included a senior bureaucrat in QH headquarters in Brisbane.
Mr Robertson has repeatedly maintained he was unaware of any risk assessments written before the alleged rape occurred until media reports about the incident on March 4. He tabled in Parliament last week a 2006 risk assessment report that highlighted problems with locks, doors, windows and other security features on accommodation used by nurses in Torres Strait. However, Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg revealed the report had been sanitised and that it downplayed the urgency and seriousness of the problems.
Mr Robertson yesterday said he was told about the scan on February 27 but insisted he was not told about about the 2006 risk assessment report. He also said he did not have any contact with the bureaucrat who wrote it, principal occupational health and safety consultant Peter Clarke. However, when questioned further, Mr Robertson appeared to become confused. Asked if he found out about the alleged rape when work on the scan began, Mr Robertson said: "Yes, it would have been around about that time."
He then backed away from the comments and refused to discuss them further. "If you are now asking me for an absolute version of events about what happened when, I'll go back and check because the last thing I want to do is say something (wrong)," he said. A spokesman for Mr Robertson later changed the story again, saying the minister was told about the alleged attack on February 7, two days after the alleged rape.
The contradictions came as Mr Springborg repeated his accusations of a cover-up, saying it was no longer credible for Mr Robertson to claim the only person who knew about the 2006 report was the district manager in the Torres Strait at the time. "It wasn't 2000km away in the Torres Strait islands as the minister would have you believe," Mr Springborg said. "It was actually two floors away in his own building. His defences are crumbling by the day. He is either dishonest or incompetent."
The Queensland Nurses Union has threatened staff will walk off the job in the region unless basic security is not improved by March 28. They also want more than one nurse stationed on each island.
Source
Scum Muslim doctor still registered to practice
A doctor who was able to continue practising after sexually assaulting two patients, lied about his indiscretions in an attempt to become an eye surgeon, the Medical Tribunal has heard. Dr Fahreed Bahrami, 44, was found guilty in 2002 of rubbing his penis against a one female patient and of touching the breasts, buttocks and thighs of another female patient before placing her hand on his penis. However the former Iranian refugee was able to continue practising on the condition he have a chaperone present during intimate examinations, after the NSW Medical Tribunal in 2003 found he was unlikely to reoffend.
Bahrami was again before the NSW Medical Tribunal yesterday, accused of altering his medical registration to "conceal that his practice was conditional," according to counsel for the Health Care Complaints Commission, Philip Strickland. Mr Strickland told the tribunal that Bahrami had tried to apply for membership to the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Opthalmologists and in doing so had falsified his registration certificate to appear that he had general registration. Bahrami then signed a false statutory declaration and submitted the false registration card to the college, the tribunal heard. False applications were submitted and rejected three times before the college became aware of the discrepancy, Mr Strickland told the tribunal.
Mr Strickland said in lying about his registration status Bahrami's conduct had been "dishonest" and "deceptive" and he should be deregistered. He said Bahrami was guilty of unsatisfactory professional misconduct and that in falsifying the documents and later withholding that information from the tribunal that he was not of good character.
Dr Paul Beaumont, an opthalmologist and mentor of Bahrami's over a two-year period said his charge was "probably" a truthful and trustworthy member of the medical profession. However he agreed with Mr Strickland that Bahrami had been "repeatedly dishonest" in his dealings with the tribunal and in regards to his medical registration.
Source
Temporary work permits for immigrants heavily sought in Australia
Computing professionals led the list of top 15 occupations for primary 457 visa grants in 2006-07, the Immigration Department said. Britain contributed the most workers in the past six months, followed by India
As the new temporary foreign workers change the face of Australia's workplaces, business groups last week called for an immediate boost to skills training positions and unions expressed concern that increasing reliance on developing-country workers risked lowering general wages.
Immigration Department figures obtained by The Weekend Australian provide a snapshot of temporary foreign workers brought into the country on skilled migrant visas, which allow the employees to stay for up to four years. The figures show the breadth of the skills crisis runs across the economy, as industries ranging from the healthcare sector to communications, mining and manufacturing import skilled workers to fill vacancies.
Workers from India, China and The Philippines are flooding into Australia's hospitals, factories and construction sites as employers increasingly look to developing countries to combat chronic skills shortages. In 2006-07, 46,680 temporary permits, known as 457 visas, were issued to foreign skilled workers. Health and community services accounted for 16 per cent of all 457 visas issued, communication services 10 per cent, property and business services 10 per cent, manufacturing 9 per cent and construction 9 per cent. Professionals exceed the number of other 457 classes, making up seven of the top 10 skills categories.
But as employers search for workers, Australia is increasingly turning to developing countries to fill its vacancies. Britain contributed the most workers in the past six months (6130), followed by India (3670), The Philippines (1870), China (1850) and the US (1570). British workers were most likely to work as doctors and nurses or in the property and business service sector. Americans were concentrated in communications.
But the use of Chinese workers grew rapidly, particularly in manufacturing. Indian workers were concentrated in communications and health, while workers from The Philippines were imported for building sites and manufacturing.
The rate at which the visas are issued continues to grow. While 46,680 visas were issued in the 12 months to June 30 last year, 25,750 were issued in the six months to the end of December - a 10 per cent increase on current trends. While the resource-rich states of Western Australia and Queensland have been driving the so-called "two-speed" economy, the slower growth states of NSW and Victoria took the greatest numbers of 457 visa holders.
The chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, Heather Ridout, said the 457 program had grown quickly and business had become "dependent on it". "But the economy is also very dependent on it and we're going to be very dependent on it if we want to keep the economy growing," she said.
The director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell, said the most striking trend was the high take-up rate among citizens from the developing world. "In the six months since the end of the financial year, China has overtaken the US. That's a pretty good indication of where the program is going," he said. "Five or six years ago, that was not the case."
Source
Black kids are not entitled to the same protection as whites, apparently. This is not the first time judge Martin has put the law second to the depraved values that have become common in dysfunctional black communities. He condones the depravity instead of fulfilling his duty to correct and discourage it
The Northern Territory's chief judge has warned men in Aboriginal communities to stop condoning child abuse after a 20-year-old was sent to jail for having sex with his 13-year-old promised bride under her parents' roof. However, child abuse campaigners yesterday criticised as inadequate the six-month sentence given to the offender by Chief Justice Brian Martin, who accepted that the 13-year-old victim, who fell pregnant as a result of the abuse, had "actively encouraged" the relationship.
Yesterday, in the Supreme Court at Alice Springs, Justice Martin said senior figures in Aboriginal communities "must learn to accept" that sex with children was illegal. The judge made the comments after acknowledging that both the parents of the victim and offender, as well as senior figures in their remote Aboriginal communities, had accepted the sexual relationship between the 13-year-old child and the man, who was 19 at the time the offences took place, as normal.
The offender, who cannot be named, pleaded guilty to three charges of having sexual intercourse with a child over a two-month period in 2006. Lawyers for the offender had pointed out in submissions at his plea hearing that the victim's father was an Aboriginal community police officer in the remote central Australian settlement where the offences occurred. The Australian is unable to name that community as it would identify the victim.
In sentencing the 20-year-old man yesterday, Justice Martin accepted that the offender was a young man with an immature understanding of sexual matters who had been "subject to conflicting messages" within his community. "Those who might be expected to tell you that a sexual relationship with a child was wrong took the opposite view and encouraged your relationship," Justice Martin said. "You had approval for the relationship not only from your parents, but also from the child's parents. Their approval extended to occupying the same bed together within the homes of both sets of parents."
The court heard yesterday that the victim had been subject to violence within the relationship by her promised husband, who abused alcohol. She had also fallen pregnant as a result of the abuse, and when she was seen at a community clinic, health workers discovered that she had contracted three different sexually transmitted infections. The court was told that the young victim's baby had died in-utero.
Justice Martin said that the "tragic and traumatic" consequences of the sexual abuse were a "graphic illustration" of the dangers of such relationships within Aboriginal communities. "There is a need to send a message to men in Aboriginal communities, both young and old, that sexual intercourse with children is never acceptable and is against the law," he said. "The message must go out that whatever view may be held by a community or individual Aboriginal man about traditional marriage or traditional relationships with young children, sexual intercourse with children is against the law and will result in offenders being sent to prison."
Bernadette McMenamin, chief executive of the anti-child abuse group Child Wise, said the sentence was inadequate, and slammed Justice Martin's suggestion that the victim had "actively encouraged" the sexual relationship.
Source
Shifty Leftist politician
An empty suit trying to dodge responsibility for negligence over what IS his responsibility: The on-job safety of his Department's employees. He should resign to make way for someone who IS willing and able to get on top of his Department
BESIEGED Health Minister Stephen Robertson has come under renewed pressure for producing different versions of events surrounding his knowledge of the alleged rape of a nurse in the Torres Strait last month. The latest development in the saga came yesterday after the Opposition released a leaked Queensland Health report prepared between February 25 and 29 in response to the alleged rape on Mabuiag Island three weeks earlier.
The Occupational Health and Security Environmental Scan reveals the departmental team that prepared it was given "previous risk assessments and reports" to help them in their work. The team included a senior bureaucrat in QH headquarters in Brisbane.
Mr Robertson has repeatedly maintained he was unaware of any risk assessments written before the alleged rape occurred until media reports about the incident on March 4. He tabled in Parliament last week a 2006 risk assessment report that highlighted problems with locks, doors, windows and other security features on accommodation used by nurses in Torres Strait. However, Opposition Leader Lawrence Springborg revealed the report had been sanitised and that it downplayed the urgency and seriousness of the problems.
Mr Robertson yesterday said he was told about the scan on February 27 but insisted he was not told about about the 2006 risk assessment report. He also said he did not have any contact with the bureaucrat who wrote it, principal occupational health and safety consultant Peter Clarke. However, when questioned further, Mr Robertson appeared to become confused. Asked if he found out about the alleged rape when work on the scan began, Mr Robertson said: "Yes, it would have been around about that time."
He then backed away from the comments and refused to discuss them further. "If you are now asking me for an absolute version of events about what happened when, I'll go back and check because the last thing I want to do is say something (wrong)," he said. A spokesman for Mr Robertson later changed the story again, saying the minister was told about the alleged attack on February 7, two days after the alleged rape.
The contradictions came as Mr Springborg repeated his accusations of a cover-up, saying it was no longer credible for Mr Robertson to claim the only person who knew about the 2006 report was the district manager in the Torres Strait at the time. "It wasn't 2000km away in the Torres Strait islands as the minister would have you believe," Mr Springborg said. "It was actually two floors away in his own building. His defences are crumbling by the day. He is either dishonest or incompetent."
The Queensland Nurses Union has threatened staff will walk off the job in the region unless basic security is not improved by March 28. They also want more than one nurse stationed on each island.
Source
Scum Muslim doctor still registered to practice
A doctor who was able to continue practising after sexually assaulting two patients, lied about his indiscretions in an attempt to become an eye surgeon, the Medical Tribunal has heard. Dr Fahreed Bahrami, 44, was found guilty in 2002 of rubbing his penis against a one female patient and of touching the breasts, buttocks and thighs of another female patient before placing her hand on his penis. However the former Iranian refugee was able to continue practising on the condition he have a chaperone present during intimate examinations, after the NSW Medical Tribunal in 2003 found he was unlikely to reoffend.
Bahrami was again before the NSW Medical Tribunal yesterday, accused of altering his medical registration to "conceal that his practice was conditional," according to counsel for the Health Care Complaints Commission, Philip Strickland. Mr Strickland told the tribunal that Bahrami had tried to apply for membership to the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Opthalmologists and in doing so had falsified his registration certificate to appear that he had general registration. Bahrami then signed a false statutory declaration and submitted the false registration card to the college, the tribunal heard. False applications were submitted and rejected three times before the college became aware of the discrepancy, Mr Strickland told the tribunal.
Mr Strickland said in lying about his registration status Bahrami's conduct had been "dishonest" and "deceptive" and he should be deregistered. He said Bahrami was guilty of unsatisfactory professional misconduct and that in falsifying the documents and later withholding that information from the tribunal that he was not of good character.
Dr Paul Beaumont, an opthalmologist and mentor of Bahrami's over a two-year period said his charge was "probably" a truthful and trustworthy member of the medical profession. However he agreed with Mr Strickland that Bahrami had been "repeatedly dishonest" in his dealings with the tribunal and in regards to his medical registration.
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Temporary work permits for immigrants heavily sought in Australia
Computing professionals led the list of top 15 occupations for primary 457 visa grants in 2006-07, the Immigration Department said. Britain contributed the most workers in the past six months, followed by India
As the new temporary foreign workers change the face of Australia's workplaces, business groups last week called for an immediate boost to skills training positions and unions expressed concern that increasing reliance on developing-country workers risked lowering general wages.
Immigration Department figures obtained by The Weekend Australian provide a snapshot of temporary foreign workers brought into the country on skilled migrant visas, which allow the employees to stay for up to four years. The figures show the breadth of the skills crisis runs across the economy, as industries ranging from the healthcare sector to communications, mining and manufacturing import skilled workers to fill vacancies.
Workers from India, China and The Philippines are flooding into Australia's hospitals, factories and construction sites as employers increasingly look to developing countries to combat chronic skills shortages. In 2006-07, 46,680 temporary permits, known as 457 visas, were issued to foreign skilled workers. Health and community services accounted for 16 per cent of all 457 visas issued, communication services 10 per cent, property and business services 10 per cent, manufacturing 9 per cent and construction 9 per cent. Professionals exceed the number of other 457 classes, making up seven of the top 10 skills categories.
But as employers search for workers, Australia is increasingly turning to developing countries to fill its vacancies. Britain contributed the most workers in the past six months (6130), followed by India (3670), The Philippines (1870), China (1850) and the US (1570). British workers were most likely to work as doctors and nurses or in the property and business service sector. Americans were concentrated in communications.
But the use of Chinese workers grew rapidly, particularly in manufacturing. Indian workers were concentrated in communications and health, while workers from The Philippines were imported for building sites and manufacturing.
The rate at which the visas are issued continues to grow. While 46,680 visas were issued in the 12 months to June 30 last year, 25,750 were issued in the six months to the end of December - a 10 per cent increase on current trends. While the resource-rich states of Western Australia and Queensland have been driving the so-called "two-speed" economy, the slower growth states of NSW and Victoria took the greatest numbers of 457 visa holders.
The chief executive of the Australian Industry Group, Heather Ridout, said the 457 program had grown quickly and business had become "dependent on it". "But the economy is also very dependent on it and we're going to be very dependent on it if we want to keep the economy growing," she said.
The director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, Bob Birrell, said the most striking trend was the high take-up rate among citizens from the developing world. "In the six months since the end of the financial year, China has overtaken the US. That's a pretty good indication of where the program is going," he said. "Five or six years ago, that was not the case."
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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
