Australian Politics
Homosexuals shoot themselves in the foot
They've just got the equality they agitated for but don't like it -- so now they want special privileges
July 1 should be a day of celebration for the nation's same sex couples, when their relationships will become formally recognised under many federal laws. But many gay and lesbian Australians are finding that equality comes at a price - literally. From next Wednesday, when the law starts to recognise de facto gay couples, Centrelink [Federal welfare office] will also begin taking into account gay partner's incomes when considering eligibility for benefits. So for a university student who lives with a full-time worker, they may lose their Youth Allowance cheques.
But more concerning, for the gay community, is the effect the new laws will have on elderly couples, who could be forced to go from receiving two single pensions to one couple's pension. [which is considerably lower]
Stephen Page, a partner with Harrington Family Lawyers, who runs an Australian Gay and Lesbian Law Blog, said the law change contained a clear "sting in the tail" for those now too old to return to work. "The Government's view is that when they first flagged these changes in 2007, it would allow people time to make a financial adjustment. "But the reality is people have planned their long-term futures on this and the government has changed the rules."
Ray Mackereth, publisher of Q News, a Brisbane-based gay and lesbian newspaper, said suddenly foisting equality on people who'd been discriminated against their entire lives didn't seem fair. [Good Lord! Talk about wanting to have your cake and eat it too!] He said for many years elderly gay people had missed out on family tax benefits, medicare benefits, partner benefits or family assistance. "Despite having paid higher taxes all their lives and not being recognised as a same sex couple, now they're going to receive less money in their retirement when their planning was done many years ago," Mr Mackereth said.
"Gay and lesbian people don't want any more than equality; they don't want special rights; they just want to be treated the same as everybody else. "But when somebody's been treated poorly for their entire life and then suddenly the laws are going to treat them poorly again, that makes it awfully tough on those people, especially older people.
Mr Page called on the government to install a grandfather clause, so that people affected kept their current benefits until their situation changed. He said he realised it could be politically difficult to continue paying a gay couple more than a heterosexual couple when they were now recognised as the same by the law. "I can understand the argument but when (a heterosexual couple) decided to retire they would have done research and assessed their finances and they knew what the rules were," Mr Page said. "Gay and lesbian couples did the same thing but now the government has changed the rules. "It's sad that this is happening."
Mr Mackereth said he hoped the issue wouldn't cloud what should otherwise be a great day for the gay and lesbian community. "Equality is a huge thing to celebrate and for most people this is truly a wonderful time," he said. "However there are a few people that will be extremely adversely affected financially, despite their best planning, and we can't let those people fall through the cracks."
SOURCE
An amusing but accurate recollection of Australia's sad gastronomic past
"When I was a kid, lamb was something you had two or three times a week. Lamb chops were overcooked and dished out with terrible mashed potato and frozen peas."
SOURCE
Nowadays I see toddlers around the place eating sushi!
RAKING IN THE CASH: Fury over "Green" Senator Bob Brown’s fundraising scam
Last week Senator Brown, in a soap opera type performance, publicly appealed for donations supposedly to stave off imminent bankruptcy and consequent expulsion from the Senate—a claim backed up dramatically by no less an authority than the Clerk of the Senate, although it is there in black and white in the Constitution, section 44, (iii). Even the hapless lawyer of The Castle could have told Senator Brown that.
Senator Brown’s alleged financial plight was due to having to pay $239,000 in legal costs incurred because of his own personal ill-considered legal challenge to selective logging in the Wielangta forest. This $239,000 comes on top of Senator Brown’s personal costs. According to the Age, Senator Brown said “he had $10,000 cash to his name, and little chance of selling remaining property by the due date. He has already raised more than $600,000 in costs for the case that was lost in the High Court. “I don’t have the money,” he said.
GREEN BROWN’S DOUBLESPEAK
You probably missed it, but Senator Brown slipped into his YouTube broadcast that he actually meant ‘technical bankruptcy’—by which I assume he means not actual or real bankruptcy—but there was no such disclosure in his media release which was faithfully regurgitated by many of the fawning members of the media.
Nor was there any challenge, by the way, to Senator Brown’s vehement condemnation of people who take legal action against him. Legal action against Senator Brown by its very definition, it seems, must be bad. And, of course, legal action, no matter how ill-advised, taken by Senator Brown is also by very definition good. The double standard is easy to ignore if consistency and intellectual rigour and integrity are not part of the framework under which you operate.
WHAT’S HE HIDING?
We are told Senator Brown’s public appeal resulted in a deluge of support. But what would-be donors were not told last week was that, as at October 2008, Senator Brown’s so-called Wielangta forest fund—but actually the RJ Brown forest account—had already raised $739,000 at a bare minimum. How do we know this? Because, after being shamed into disclosing this fund’s receipts to the register of senators’ interests, Senator Brown had disclosed at least $739,000 in donations by October 2008. Even then he did not detail donations for May to July 2008, nor has he disclosed donations received in the seven months since October 2008. In other words, there are up to 10 months missing.
Clearly the senator does not abide by the same accountability rules he so self-righteously insists be imposed on everybody else. For example, Senator Brown has not disclosed the proceeds of his allegedly successful Wild Photos exhibition held earlier this year. So it follows that prior to his public appeal Senator Brown’s account had undoubtedly received more than the $739,000 he has to date disclosed, and probably significantly more.
IT DOESN’T ADD UP
Which brings me to the question of Senator Brown’s personal legal costs. So far as the register of senators’ interests is concerned, Senator Brown has only disclosed legal costs of $35,000 for the six months from 1 July 2005 to January 2006. A press release issued by Senator Brown said:
The High Court awarded no costs against Senator Brown because of the public interest of the case … However, the Federal Court’s decision to award costs against Senator Brown may leave him with a bill, including his own representation, of $200,000 to $300,000. However, numerous recent briefings by Senator Brown put his personal legal costs at $600,000.
When pressed on exactly this point last Wednesday evening by Gerard McManus from the Herald Sun, Senator Brown’s office confirmed his personal legal costs were $600,000. Even on this basis, when making his recent appeal he needed less than $100,000 to pay legal costs and maybe nothing at all.
FUNNELLING FUNDS TO MILITANTS
It is extraordinary that, immediately the Herald Sun probed and questioned the apparent healthy state of his fund and the veracity of his claims to be on the verge of bankruptcy, Senator Brown closed down his appeal, saying there had been a huge public response and that any extra money would be put into the campaign to save Australia’s forests.
This includes, the so-called Triabunna 13, individuals facing the Supreme Court for blockading and chaining themselves to machinery, costing struggling contractors tens of thousands of dollars. I wonder how many well-meaning people who gave to save Senator Brown from phantom bankruptcy knew their donations could be used to defend these irresponsible antics.
WHEN IN A HOLE KEEP DIGGING
I understand that Senator Brown is now explaining the discrepancy between what he raised and what he owes by claiming to journalists that his personal legal costs are not $600,000 but $1 million.
Like many of Senator Brown’s claims, this latest claim to be on the verge of personal bankruptcy just does not add up. His approach to fundraising and accountability is reminiscent of Max Bialystok of The Producers.
BROWN MUST DISCLOSE HIS FUNDRAISING ACTIVITIES IN FULL
Senator Brown must now come clean, become accountable, cease flouting his obligations to the Senate and disclose all amounts he has received, when he received them and the amounts paid out and to whom.
The fact is Senator Brown’s legal challenge to selective logging in Wielangta was always ill-advised and dubious.
Sadly, some so-called environmental activists have in the past put cuddly animals on their websites to solicit donations for what are essentially scams, preying upon people’s good nature and gullibility. This latest stunt by Senator Brown, crying poor over legal costs, will be seen in the same light or worse.
THE HIGH PRICE OF GREENS PARTY PROPAGANDA
For all his talk about Wielangta’s wedge-tailed eagle, the marvellous swift parrot and the ancient stag beetle, the policies advocated by the senator actually contributed to the destruction of their habitat. By this I mean Senator Brown’s calls against selective logging and hyperbole about the mushroom clouds of fuel reduction burns.
Such measures, if allowed, would have mitigated the almost total destruction of Wielangta and the wildlife contained therein in the devastating 2006 bushfire, which killed more stag beetles and destroyed more swift parrot habitat than 100 years of selective harvesting ever did.
The fact is Senator Brown’s legal challenge lost not on a technicality but on the law. Remember the law? It is what everyone else has to abide by unless, it seems, they are a Green crusader. Regrettably, to Senator Brown and his gullible followers, science, the rule of law, accountability and, above all, truth are often relative concepts.
Sadly it seems that, if you bang on enough about how much you really care about forests, some misguided people will give you money—even if you may not need it and even if your policies and legal challenges would see those same forest habitats destroyed.
BROWN’S ETHICAL BANKRUPTCY
My challenge to Senator Brown is this: be accountable. Immediately disclose to the Senate, as is required, exactly how much your fund raised prior to last week’s appeal, and disclose and substantiate your progressive personal legal costs. Anything less, Mr President, will be a wholesale abrogation of his duties as a senator and ethically bankrupt.
SOURCE
A most revealing ultimatum from the Victoria Police
Cops told to choose sides -- the crooks or the law! Amazing that such an ultimatum needed to be issued
The state's top anti-corruption cop has warned police who are mates with criminals they must decide between the force and their friends. Assistant Commissioner Luke Cornelius revealed he was also concerned at links between serving members who were being used by disgraced former colleagues. "If someone feels that passionately about maintaining a relationship - and I want to be clear here, we're talking about avoidable relationships, we're not in the business of busting up families - it comes down to a choice," Mr Cornelius told the Herald Sun in an exclusive interview. "If you value your friendship more highly than your profession, you need to choose between your profession or that relationship."
Since last December, officers have been ordered to make known relationships with criminals, accused criminals, former members convicted or suspected of criminal behaviour and serving members under suspension. Officers' managers can direct a relationship to cease if they deem there is a risk.
The Police Association yesterday said the rules were a "sledgehammer to crack a walnut" but Mr Cornelius said almost all available officers had complied with the system. "It's also given a number of members the courage to say to these individuals, 'We're ruling a line here and I'm not going to associate with you any more'," he said.
Mr Cornelius added: "There are a number of former members convicted of serious criminal offences or suspected of serious criminal offences who seek to actively maintain relationships with serving police. "If there is any serving officer who thinks that relationship is being sought to be maintained for purely social or altruistic reasons, they're kidding themselves. They're being used."
The vast majority of disclosures were of unavoidable links with family members or people from community groups, he said. Mr Cornelius said most of the avoidable associations were with suspended serving police, relationships that are the subject of management plans. "Often these people have worked together for some time, indeed they might be friends, long-standing associates. You need to approach that with some sensitivity. "The critical thing is to make sure we know about it," he said. Mr Cornelius said the policy did not regulate professional contact with criminals - but professional officers were not friends with their informers.
Police Association secretary Sen-Sgt Greg Davies said he supported any measure aimed at stopping police fraternising with criminals. But he said the Police Regulations Act already had rules to deal with the wrongful release of confidential information. "This is all part of a very unhealthy, unhelpful and incorrect perception that there are corrupt police under every bed," Sen-Sgt Davies said. "It's a sledgehammer to crack a walnut."
Mr Cornelius said in the first six months of the policy there had been instances where police had been caught leaking confidential information to "persons of interest to us". "It's clear to us that in those cases, the individual police officers have not submitted declarable association reports in relation to those individuals. "Here is clear evidence that the member knew he or she was doing the wrong thing," Mr Cornelius said.
SOURCE
Another blot on justice in Victoria: A crooked Ombudsman, of all things!
A Labor party worker was fired on the basis of a totally unfounded Ombudsman's report. Crooked police; a bigoted "anti-discrimination" Tribunal: Where will it end? Has Victoria become part of the Middle East? Judging by the level of corruption, it is beginning to look like it
VEXNEWS has obtained a copy of the Department of Justice investigation into the Ombudsman’s allegations regarding Hakki Suleyman, who was adversely named in a recent report by the Ombudsman into the Brimbank council. So much so that in effect some in the media were impliedly arguing that Suleyman had forfeited his right to a) hold a job for which he is well qualified and ideally suited and had performed well in, b) participate in the political party of his choice and c) be involved in his local council.
It is a conclusion they must now reconsider unless they wish to be embroiled in defamation proceedings, in light of the findings of this independent investigation into the Ombudsman’s sensational claims.
Simply, the report vindicates and exonerates Suleyman from the serious claims made against him. It says he was involved - although makes it clear there’s no real evidence of it - in a move by some on the council to break a funding commitment to a soccer club. Hardly the biggest scandal in the world, even if it happened. The independent report makes it very clear that the move by some on the council was reconsidered by those pushing it once they had obtained advice on it. The path to hell may be paved with good intentions but in this case intending to make a council decision for political reasons but then thinking better of it can hardly be said to disqualify Hakki from his full civic rights to be a member of our community. Particularly given that he wasn’t even on the Brimbank council in the first place.
The independent report by the advisory panel damns and expressly repudiates the Ombudsman’s report in terms that most political observers will find stunning.
The advisory panel included a former Victorian Government Solicitor and an ex Chairman of the State Services Authority, two of the exact kind of people who would find themselves appointed Ombudsman should there be a vacancy.
They were investigating whether Suleyman should continue as a JP and found he ought not but that predictable finding is not really the most interesting part of the report.
Its their evaluation of the Ombudsman’s evidence and conclusions that is the juicy part.
Seldom has someone’s removal from office been such good fortune. [For the public light it shines on the Ombudsman]
More HERE.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Sunday, June 21, 2009
An Open Letter to All Members of the Australian Federal Parliament
Soon our elected representatives will be asked to vote on Senator Wong’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
This scheme is not about carbon or pollution. Its main effect is to provide for a cap on the human production of carbon dioxide, a colourless harmless natural gas. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than oxygen or water, the other two atmospheric gases on which all life on earth relies.
The bill will also levy a tax on whatever carbon dioxide is produced, and levy an excess production tax on anyone whose production exceeds the legal cap. It is a carbon dioxide Cap-n-Tax Bill.
There is no human activity whatsoever that does not generate carbon dioxide. Therefore any attempt to measure, cap and tax human production of carbon dioxide must eventually extend to every human activity (the UK government already floated the idea that every person be issued with a personal carbon ration card).
This is a very serious proposal, with wide-ranging implications for all aspects of economic life and personal freedoms. It could only be justified if there was a clear and urgent danger that additional human production of carbon dioxide is highly likely to cause dangerous global warming. There is no evidence that this is the case – just computer models and scare forecasts.
Neither the scientific questions, nor the cost benefit analysis has been subject to any critical independent analysis.
The diagram below illustrates the sequence of decisions that should be made before this bill gets assent. If the answer to ANY ONE of the boxed questions is “NO”, there is no justification for Australia rushing ahead with its Cap-n-Tax Bill.
This diagram, although light-hearted, has a factual basis and conveys some very serious messages.
It is highly unlikely that anyone could honestly answer “Yes” to every question, which is what is required to justify passage of the bill. This suggests that there is a high likelihood that the bill will have NO CLIMATE EFFECT WHATSOEVER and thus be a costly exercise in self delusion.
Start from the bottom left
Start from the bottom left
SOURCE
That great government healthcare again. Broken neck? Take a Panadol
A MAN who broke his neck in a freak accident was sent home and told to take Panadol after hospital staff failed to diagnose his life-threatening injury. Paul Curtis, 31, endured two days of increasing pain and fear after a doctor in the emergency department at Sydney's Ryde Hospital sent him away without ordering an X-ray. He went back to the hospital where another doctor ordered tests. He said Mr Curtis was lucky to be alive or not in a wheelchair.
The Carlingford man went to Ryde Hospital late on Friday May 29 after he and a friend cracked their heads during a church youth group activity. "I drove home but I didn't feel right and my housemate, a nurse, thought I wasn't looking very good," he said. "I told the hospital staff I had had a serious head collision and the nurse noticed a mark on the back of my neck.
"After 2 hours I saw the doctor and told him my neck was sore. He told me I couldn't have an X-ray because the X-ray unit was shut and told me I would be fine. "He told me to go home and take some Panadol."
By Monday his condition had worsened and he returned to the hospital where another doctor ordered an X-ray and a CT scan. With the break detected, he was put in a brace and sent by ambulance to Royal North Shore Hospital, where he later had surgery and a plate inserted in his spine. "I was crapping myself when they told me my neck was broken - I had been walking around like that for two days," Mr Curtis said. "There was a chip out of my spine and the doctor said it was lucky it hadn't severed my spinal cord."
A Ryde Hospital spokeswoman said Mr Curtis had not complained of a loss of consciousness and told emergency staff he had taken Panadol for the pain. She said hospital records from the Friday night did not show any discussion about an X-ray but said radiologists could be called back to the hospital after 11pm if required. Hospital records showed he returned to Ryde at 9.08am on the Monday, and was in an ambulance en route to Royal North Shore at 9.21am.
Opposition health spokeswoman Jillian Skinner said: "It was nothing more than luck that saved this man from sustaining further damage as a result of not being treated properly - quite frankly the fact he was sent home with the injuries he had is enough to send shivers down the spine. "The Rees Labor Government has failed to provide Ryde Hospital with the resources it needs to deal with cases like this. "Ryde Hospital clearly doesn't have enough funding or staff skill mix to deal with cases like this, and that responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of Health Minister John Della Bosca and his incompetent area health services."
Ryde MP Victor Dominello, a Liberal, defended hospital staff, saying it was not their fault they did not have sufficient resources to treat patients properly.
SOURCE
Once again: The absurdity of making bureaucrats responsible for "care"
Getting them to listen is near impossible. Dad accuses DOCS of ignoring abuse
THE father of a boy who was sexually assaulted by a Government-approved foster carer has accused the Department of Community Services of ignoring continuing abuse. The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has pleaded with DOCS to remove his two young sons from their mother's care after what he claims is a series of mistreatment. He recently detailed to DOCS an incident where the boys were deadlocked in their home by their mother while she went to visit a fortune teller.
The boys had also complained of living in filth, being hit on the back of their hands with knives, and assault at the hands of one of their mother's boyfriends, their father said. A DOCS foster carer who had minded the boys for their mother in a private arrangement has been convicted of sexually abusing the younger boy and will be sentenced in August.
DOCS sent seven troubled children to stay with the man for "weekend respite care" in the more than four years it used him as an approved foster carer. A spokeswoman for the Community Services Minister, Linda Burney, said the man, who cannot be identified, was accepted by DOCS to care for kids in crisis in February 2004 after he applied for the role. "He underwent standard departmental foster-care training and assessment, as well as thorough checks regarding his background," the spokeswoman said. "All potential carers must undergo these checks … All checks … came back clear. "The department immediately suspended him from being a carer on hearing the allegations in April 2008." The spokeswoman said further investigations show no evidence has been found of "abuse of any of these other children".
The father raised concerns about the man with DOCS in September 2006, but was ignored until he took his son to police last year. They subsequently charged the man with a range of offences including having sex with a child under 10.
The father said: "DOCS ignored me when I told them my sons were at risk from a man who was acting like a classic pedophile - now they are ignoring me again. Do my kids have to be brutalised before they will do something? It seems emotional abuse and risk of harm is not sufficient to make DOCS act. The only people DOCS are concerned about protecting is themselves."
The father is pinning his hopes on a Children's Court-ordered psychiatric assessment of his former partner, which he says was promised by the DOCS director-general, Jenny Mason, in a meeting more than a month ago. Such a report could help his custody case in the Family Court.
But Ms Burney's spokeswoman said a psychiatric assessment had been discussed, not promised. "It was raised as one of a number of possible options available pending a full case review and investigation of his concerns," she said. "The department is taking the father's concerns very seriously, and has launched a thorough investigation in response.
"The department is maintaining regular contact with the family to ensure the children are well supported. At this point in time, there are no immediate concerns for the children's safety."
SOURCE
Revolutionary Australian Artificial heart design
Developed with no government support -- just as with the British inventors of IVF. Propping up failures is what governments do
QUEENSLANDERS have created the world's first artificial heart which fits inside a human body and can mimic the pumping fluctuations of a healthy heart. The titanium device – which is about the size of a fist – will provide an alternative to heart transplants, doctors say. It has the potential to save thousands of lives a year worldwide, and will provide significant savings for government-run and private health systems, its inventors believe.
The device – to be marketed under the name Bivacor – also will deliver an alternative for people with heart disease over the age of 65, who are currently considered by most doctors to be too old for heart transplants. The key element of the Bivacor's revolutionary design is a pump that can duplicate the function of both the left and right sides of the heart in a single, small device. Driven by tiny electromagnets, the pump's twin rotors can alter speed and position to suit blood-flow demands that fluctuate depending on a patient's activity.
Most existing artificial hearts or supportive pump devices are external, and usually pump through just one side of the heart. That places extreme limits on patient mobility and can reveal problems on the other side of a diseased heart.
The Bivacor allows patients to move around and reduces the risk of infection, by being secured inside the body and without external tubes.
A team of biomedical engineers, intensive-care specialists, cardiac surgeons and cardiologists has been working on the project for seven years at Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital, one of Australia's leading heart hospitals. One of the group, engineer Dan Timms, 30, devised key elements of the design after watching his father die of heart failure at the hospital two years ago.
He perfected the artificial heart's impeller – a twin fan inside the pump that can spin at different speeds and also tilt to adjust blood flow and pressure. Dr Timms unveiled his invention at a recent heart conference in Paris.
Professor John Fraser, 40, director of the Critical Care Research Group (CCRG) at Prince Charles and the leader of the Bivacor development team, said the invention was lauded by heart experts. "After Daniel gave his presentation, the conference concluded that the device would revolutionise artificial heart technology," Prof Fraser said. "One of the world leaders in cardiology exclaimed, 'Within 10 years, all artificial hearts will be based on this revolutionary Queensland design'."
Once in production, the Bivacor, which has been patented, is expected to cost about $60,000 a unit. That compares with external heart machines – which cost up to $600,000 each – that are currently used on patients who can wait in hospital for up to six months for a heart transplant.
Remarkably, most of the funding for the Bivacor project – about $250,000 so far – came from the Prince Charles Hospital Foundation raising funds through selling ice creams at the Ekka. [Annual agricultural show] "Despite repeated attempts, there has been no money forthcoming from Queensland Health or Government," Prof Fraser said. "Jon Roberts (chief executive of Prince Charles Hospital) has been outstanding, but can only do so much to support us."
The Bivacor is expected to be in clinical trials in the next three years if the team can secure funding of $3 million. A German company has approached the team to fund development, which has both pleased and disappointed the research team. "It would be a shame to see such a Queensland home-grown project go overseas," Prof Fraser said. Representatives of the CCRG team are in Europe this week to discuss the development of Bivacor with international companies.
SOURCE
Soon our elected representatives will be asked to vote on Senator Wong’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
This scheme is not about carbon or pollution. Its main effect is to provide for a cap on the human production of carbon dioxide, a colourless harmless natural gas. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than oxygen or water, the other two atmospheric gases on which all life on earth relies.
The bill will also levy a tax on whatever carbon dioxide is produced, and levy an excess production tax on anyone whose production exceeds the legal cap. It is a carbon dioxide Cap-n-Tax Bill.
There is no human activity whatsoever that does not generate carbon dioxide. Therefore any attempt to measure, cap and tax human production of carbon dioxide must eventually extend to every human activity (the UK government already floated the idea that every person be issued with a personal carbon ration card).
This is a very serious proposal, with wide-ranging implications for all aspects of economic life and personal freedoms. It could only be justified if there was a clear and urgent danger that additional human production of carbon dioxide is highly likely to cause dangerous global warming. There is no evidence that this is the case – just computer models and scare forecasts.
Neither the scientific questions, nor the cost benefit analysis has been subject to any critical independent analysis.
The diagram below illustrates the sequence of decisions that should be made before this bill gets assent. If the answer to ANY ONE of the boxed questions is “NO”, there is no justification for Australia rushing ahead with its Cap-n-Tax Bill.
This diagram, although light-hearted, has a factual basis and conveys some very serious messages.
It is highly unlikely that anyone could honestly answer “Yes” to every question, which is what is required to justify passage of the bill. This suggests that there is a high likelihood that the bill will have NO CLIMATE EFFECT WHATSOEVER and thus be a costly exercise in self delusion.
Start from the bottom left
Start from the bottom left
SOURCE
That great government healthcare again. Broken neck? Take a Panadol
A MAN who broke his neck in a freak accident was sent home and told to take Panadol after hospital staff failed to diagnose his life-threatening injury. Paul Curtis, 31, endured two days of increasing pain and fear after a doctor in the emergency department at Sydney's Ryde Hospital sent him away without ordering an X-ray. He went back to the hospital where another doctor ordered tests. He said Mr Curtis was lucky to be alive or not in a wheelchair.
The Carlingford man went to Ryde Hospital late on Friday May 29 after he and a friend cracked their heads during a church youth group activity. "I drove home but I didn't feel right and my housemate, a nurse, thought I wasn't looking very good," he said. "I told the hospital staff I had had a serious head collision and the nurse noticed a mark on the back of my neck.
"After 2 hours I saw the doctor and told him my neck was sore. He told me I couldn't have an X-ray because the X-ray unit was shut and told me I would be fine. "He told me to go home and take some Panadol."
By Monday his condition had worsened and he returned to the hospital where another doctor ordered an X-ray and a CT scan. With the break detected, he was put in a brace and sent by ambulance to Royal North Shore Hospital, where he later had surgery and a plate inserted in his spine. "I was crapping myself when they told me my neck was broken - I had been walking around like that for two days," Mr Curtis said. "There was a chip out of my spine and the doctor said it was lucky it hadn't severed my spinal cord."
A Ryde Hospital spokeswoman said Mr Curtis had not complained of a loss of consciousness and told emergency staff he had taken Panadol for the pain. She said hospital records from the Friday night did not show any discussion about an X-ray but said radiologists could be called back to the hospital after 11pm if required. Hospital records showed he returned to Ryde at 9.08am on the Monday, and was in an ambulance en route to Royal North Shore at 9.21am.
Opposition health spokeswoman Jillian Skinner said: "It was nothing more than luck that saved this man from sustaining further damage as a result of not being treated properly - quite frankly the fact he was sent home with the injuries he had is enough to send shivers down the spine. "The Rees Labor Government has failed to provide Ryde Hospital with the resources it needs to deal with cases like this. "Ryde Hospital clearly doesn't have enough funding or staff skill mix to deal with cases like this, and that responsibility falls squarely on the shoulders of Health Minister John Della Bosca and his incompetent area health services."
Ryde MP Victor Dominello, a Liberal, defended hospital staff, saying it was not their fault they did not have sufficient resources to treat patients properly.
SOURCE
Once again: The absurdity of making bureaucrats responsible for "care"
Getting them to listen is near impossible. Dad accuses DOCS of ignoring abuse
THE father of a boy who was sexually assaulted by a Government-approved foster carer has accused the Department of Community Services of ignoring continuing abuse. The man, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has pleaded with DOCS to remove his two young sons from their mother's care after what he claims is a series of mistreatment. He recently detailed to DOCS an incident where the boys were deadlocked in their home by their mother while she went to visit a fortune teller.
The boys had also complained of living in filth, being hit on the back of their hands with knives, and assault at the hands of one of their mother's boyfriends, their father said. A DOCS foster carer who had minded the boys for their mother in a private arrangement has been convicted of sexually abusing the younger boy and will be sentenced in August.
DOCS sent seven troubled children to stay with the man for "weekend respite care" in the more than four years it used him as an approved foster carer. A spokeswoman for the Community Services Minister, Linda Burney, said the man, who cannot be identified, was accepted by DOCS to care for kids in crisis in February 2004 after he applied for the role. "He underwent standard departmental foster-care training and assessment, as well as thorough checks regarding his background," the spokeswoman said. "All potential carers must undergo these checks … All checks … came back clear. "The department immediately suspended him from being a carer on hearing the allegations in April 2008." The spokeswoman said further investigations show no evidence has been found of "abuse of any of these other children".
The father raised concerns about the man with DOCS in September 2006, but was ignored until he took his son to police last year. They subsequently charged the man with a range of offences including having sex with a child under 10.
The father said: "DOCS ignored me when I told them my sons were at risk from a man who was acting like a classic pedophile - now they are ignoring me again. Do my kids have to be brutalised before they will do something? It seems emotional abuse and risk of harm is not sufficient to make DOCS act. The only people DOCS are concerned about protecting is themselves."
The father is pinning his hopes on a Children's Court-ordered psychiatric assessment of his former partner, which he says was promised by the DOCS director-general, Jenny Mason, in a meeting more than a month ago. Such a report could help his custody case in the Family Court.
But Ms Burney's spokeswoman said a psychiatric assessment had been discussed, not promised. "It was raised as one of a number of possible options available pending a full case review and investigation of his concerns," she said. "The department is taking the father's concerns very seriously, and has launched a thorough investigation in response.
"The department is maintaining regular contact with the family to ensure the children are well supported. At this point in time, there are no immediate concerns for the children's safety."
SOURCE
Revolutionary Australian Artificial heart design
Developed with no government support -- just as with the British inventors of IVF. Propping up failures is what governments do
QUEENSLANDERS have created the world's first artificial heart which fits inside a human body and can mimic the pumping fluctuations of a healthy heart. The titanium device – which is about the size of a fist – will provide an alternative to heart transplants, doctors say. It has the potential to save thousands of lives a year worldwide, and will provide significant savings for government-run and private health systems, its inventors believe.
The device – to be marketed under the name Bivacor – also will deliver an alternative for people with heart disease over the age of 65, who are currently considered by most doctors to be too old for heart transplants. The key element of the Bivacor's revolutionary design is a pump that can duplicate the function of both the left and right sides of the heart in a single, small device. Driven by tiny electromagnets, the pump's twin rotors can alter speed and position to suit blood-flow demands that fluctuate depending on a patient's activity.
Most existing artificial hearts or supportive pump devices are external, and usually pump through just one side of the heart. That places extreme limits on patient mobility and can reveal problems on the other side of a diseased heart.
The Bivacor allows patients to move around and reduces the risk of infection, by being secured inside the body and without external tubes.
A team of biomedical engineers, intensive-care specialists, cardiac surgeons and cardiologists has been working on the project for seven years at Brisbane's Prince Charles Hospital, one of Australia's leading heart hospitals. One of the group, engineer Dan Timms, 30, devised key elements of the design after watching his father die of heart failure at the hospital two years ago.
He perfected the artificial heart's impeller – a twin fan inside the pump that can spin at different speeds and also tilt to adjust blood flow and pressure. Dr Timms unveiled his invention at a recent heart conference in Paris.
Professor John Fraser, 40, director of the Critical Care Research Group (CCRG) at Prince Charles and the leader of the Bivacor development team, said the invention was lauded by heart experts. "After Daniel gave his presentation, the conference concluded that the device would revolutionise artificial heart technology," Prof Fraser said. "One of the world leaders in cardiology exclaimed, 'Within 10 years, all artificial hearts will be based on this revolutionary Queensland design'."
Once in production, the Bivacor, which has been patented, is expected to cost about $60,000 a unit. That compares with external heart machines – which cost up to $600,000 each – that are currently used on patients who can wait in hospital for up to six months for a heart transplant.
Remarkably, most of the funding for the Bivacor project – about $250,000 so far – came from the Prince Charles Hospital Foundation raising funds through selling ice creams at the Ekka. [Annual agricultural show] "Despite repeated attempts, there has been no money forthcoming from Queensland Health or Government," Prof Fraser said. "Jon Roberts (chief executive of Prince Charles Hospital) has been outstanding, but can only do so much to support us."
The Bivacor is expected to be in clinical trials in the next three years if the team can secure funding of $3 million. A German company has approached the team to fund development, which has both pleased and disappointed the research team. "It would be a shame to see such a Queensland home-grown project go overseas," Prof Fraser said. Representatives of the CCRG team are in Europe this week to discuss the development of Bivacor with international companies.
SOURCE
Saturday, June 20, 2009
Education and politics: Like oil and water
By Jennifer Buckingham, a Research Fellow at CIS -- speaking of bureaucratic waste of Federal "stimulus" spending
If ever there was evidence that politics and education don’t mix, the fiasco of the Building the Education Revolution program is it. How did this policy, which should have been a political slam-dunk, go so spectacularly wrong?
First, it was never about education. According to a 14 June media release from the Minister Gillard’s office, ‘The Guidelines for the Building the Education Revolution are clear and were developed to ensure that this investment supported as many jobs, in as many communities and as quickly as possible, to cushion the effects of the global recession on the Australian economy.’ Nothing there about teaching, learning, student achievement, or anything even remotely scholastic.
To meet the economic stimulus objective, the time frame has been extremely short, and schools have had to accept what would normally be unacceptable in nature and in cost, or risk missing out altogether. But just to confuse matters, in a bid to make the program sound education-friendly, all building works must be mainly for student use, which presents schools with a fairly narrow range of options and not necessarily the most useful ones.
For example, a school in my area already has a new hall/gymnasium and library, so it is using its BER funding to build more new classrooms when it already has several unused ones. What this school really needs is better staff facilities and a building that could be used both in and out-of-school hours to increase parental and community involvement in the school, which is sorely lacking. This does not meet the criteria, however.
On top of all that, the cost of the buildings for public schools is being inflated by the use of state government contractors, substantial project-management costs extracted by state governments, and the price premiums caused by urgency.
Second, by maintaining a sector-neutral approach and offering funding to all schools, the size of the building grants are dependent only on school size. This means that schools that already have every kind of building they could possibly need have been given millions of dollars to build more. Yes, there have been some stuff-ups, with a number of terminal schools being given money for new buildings, but rushing out a funding program of this scope will inevitably get it wrong in some cases. However, the broader issue of school need is fundamental and should have been foreseen.
It is hard not to see this as a missed opportunity for education. Granted, it wasn’t really about schools, it was about creating jobs. In this program, schools were just a politically safe place to dump some money. Nonetheless, a better program could have served both purposes with a much smaller price tag.
The above is a press release from the "Centre for Independent Studies" dated June 19th.
Corrupt Queensland cops whitewash their misuse of Tasers
COMPLAINTS about Queensland police officers' alleged misuse of Tasers are routinely being investigated - and dismissed - by police. Of the 13 complaints made about Tasers since July 2007, only three have been finalised, with two of those found to be unsubstantiated.
Police also dismissed the third complaint - relating to the use of a Taser of a 16-year-old girl at South Bank - finding the constable involved had displayed sound judgment in his actions. However, the Crime and Misconduct Commission disagreed with that finding and conducted its own investigation, which resulted in harsh criticism of police "for failing to learn from their mistakes". Police are still investigating nine other complaints received about the use of Tasers, with the CMC overseeing the latest investigation into the possible Taser-related death of Antonio Galeano, 39, in north Queensland this month.
A CMC spokeswoman said the commission was generally only involved in complaints "of acomplex nature".
Family and friends of Galeano farewelled the 39-year-old yesterday in Ayr, about 5km from Brandon, where he collapsed and died shortly after his confrontation with police on Friday, June 12. Although officers involved have said he was Tasered no more than five times, data from the weapon revealed it was discharged 28 times. An autopsy has found the man suffered a heart attack, but it is not yet clear if the taser triggered that. [Would 28 rapidly repeated high voltage shocks from a Taser cause a heart attack? Nah! Just ONE shot is usually disabling. It's the goon concerned who should be shot]
The incident has prompted a four-week review of Tasers in the Queensland Police Service and temporarily halted the statewide rollout of the weapons.
Civil libertarians have called for an independent investigation into the death, but Queensland Police Union acting president Ian Leavers said investigators should be left to do their job without comment. "Only at the conclusion of all these tests will the actual cause of death be known, and only then will the actions of the officers be able to be properly assessed," Mr Leavers said.
SOURCE
An old, old story: Cops lying to protect fellow cops
HE WAS a friend and colleague - a fellow police officer, with whom Greg Brown was prone to have a beer. And after an inquiry by the Police Integrity Commission into alleged criminality, he is free. Brown, by contrast, is looking at jail for lying to protect him.
Gregory John Brown, a senior constable from Fairfield Police Station, was sentenced to eight months and two days protective custody yesterday for lying to the commission about plans to buy a brothel, covering up for a colleague who was later found to have done nothing wrong.
He was denied an adjournment by Chief Magistrate Graeme Henson, but immediately lodged an appeal and was granted bail unopposed. He will re-appear on August 3. After making bail, Brown refused to say whether there was an unspoken code among police - one where an officer might lie for another.
In sentencing Brown, Chief Magistrate Henson drew on the sentencing of the disgraced former judge Marcus Einfield. "As has often been said," he read from Justice Bruce James's judgment, "each of the offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice strike at the heart of the administration of justice." Being a police officer did not change this, he said. The supposed nobility of the act - of covering for a mate - made no difference.
On December 4, 2007, Brown lied five times at an Integrity Commission investigation into whether Constable Rick Perchtold was involved in criminal activity or serious police misconduct. He had been under oath. Constable Perchtold was a friend - a "professional and social acquaintance", as Chief Magistrate Henson put it - who worked with Brown at Fairfield Police Station. Brown had introduced Constable Perchtold to the brothel owner Sam Lapa at the Marconi Club. He spoke to Constable Perchtold about the latter's plans to buy a brothel.
But when questioned under oath he failed to mention any of this. It was not until the commission heard recordings of conversations he had with Constable Perchtold that Brown conceded it was not an exhaust business his friend was trying to buy. The brothel turned out to be a legal business operation.
SOURCE
School bullying: Qld. Education Dept. trying to shoot the messenger
Because effective discipline has been outlawed, many schools are now unsafe for weaker children but only an ideological backflip could cure that so the Dept. just averts its eyes from the problem. The NSW Education Dept. recently had to fork out $468,000 as a result of a lawsuit by a victim of school bullying so the Qld. mob might find that their victory is a very Pyrrhic one if they successfully prosecute this guy
A BRISBANE dad who took his daughter out of school because she was being bullied has been charged with failing to ensure she participates in full-time education. Vanessa McKenna, 10, has not returned to Sunnybank State Primary School on Brisbane's southside since March 24 2008, after suffering multiple physical attacks.
Her father John McKenna told The Courier-Mail the school had failed to adequately address his concerns about his daughter's safety, despite his numerous calls and letters. "It's been going on for several years," said Mr McKenna. "Her glasses got broken, three boys ran her into a pole chasing her into the toilet and one boy pulled his pants down in front of her in the classroom. "Instead of taking action against the boy responsible, the teacher made Vanessa sit next to him."
Mr McKenna said he had been told the school had no record of the assaults against his daughter. "The teachers have developed a code of silence and cover-ups and it makes parents believe their children are liars," he said. "I don't believe my child is a liar. I've seen the marks on her body. What's got to happen? Does a child have to die?"
Although Vanessa has not attended Sunnybank State School since last March, Mr McKenna said he did not hear from Education Queensland until September. An official from the district office contacted the family to try to get Vanessa into other schools in the area, but Mr McKenna said one "just didn't seem good enough" and the other couldn't promise his daughter would be safe from bullies. "The bloke up there was a very decent gentleman, he was very honest. He said he had five boys who were worse than the boy who assaulted Vanessa and he couldn't guarantee her safety."
Police charged Mr McKenna last Friday with failing to ensure a child in his care was participating in full-time education. He is due to appear in Richlands Magistrate's Court on July 3 and, if convicted, faces a maximum fine of $450. An Education Queensland spokesman said the department was unable to comment on the case because it was now before court. But the spokesman stressed that prosecution of parents over a student's attendance at school was a "last resort".
SOURCE
By Jennifer Buckingham, a Research Fellow at CIS -- speaking of bureaucratic waste of Federal "stimulus" spending
If ever there was evidence that politics and education don’t mix, the fiasco of the Building the Education Revolution program is it. How did this policy, which should have been a political slam-dunk, go so spectacularly wrong?
First, it was never about education. According to a 14 June media release from the Minister Gillard’s office, ‘The Guidelines for the Building the Education Revolution are clear and were developed to ensure that this investment supported as many jobs, in as many communities and as quickly as possible, to cushion the effects of the global recession on the Australian economy.’ Nothing there about teaching, learning, student achievement, or anything even remotely scholastic.
To meet the economic stimulus objective, the time frame has been extremely short, and schools have had to accept what would normally be unacceptable in nature and in cost, or risk missing out altogether. But just to confuse matters, in a bid to make the program sound education-friendly, all building works must be mainly for student use, which presents schools with a fairly narrow range of options and not necessarily the most useful ones.
For example, a school in my area already has a new hall/gymnasium and library, so it is using its BER funding to build more new classrooms when it already has several unused ones. What this school really needs is better staff facilities and a building that could be used both in and out-of-school hours to increase parental and community involvement in the school, which is sorely lacking. This does not meet the criteria, however.
On top of all that, the cost of the buildings for public schools is being inflated by the use of state government contractors, substantial project-management costs extracted by state governments, and the price premiums caused by urgency.
Second, by maintaining a sector-neutral approach and offering funding to all schools, the size of the building grants are dependent only on school size. This means that schools that already have every kind of building they could possibly need have been given millions of dollars to build more. Yes, there have been some stuff-ups, with a number of terminal schools being given money for new buildings, but rushing out a funding program of this scope will inevitably get it wrong in some cases. However, the broader issue of school need is fundamental and should have been foreseen.
It is hard not to see this as a missed opportunity for education. Granted, it wasn’t really about schools, it was about creating jobs. In this program, schools were just a politically safe place to dump some money. Nonetheless, a better program could have served both purposes with a much smaller price tag.
The above is a press release from the "Centre for Independent Studies" dated June 19th.
Corrupt Queensland cops whitewash their misuse of Tasers
COMPLAINTS about Queensland police officers' alleged misuse of Tasers are routinely being investigated - and dismissed - by police. Of the 13 complaints made about Tasers since July 2007, only three have been finalised, with two of those found to be unsubstantiated.
Police also dismissed the third complaint - relating to the use of a Taser of a 16-year-old girl at South Bank - finding the constable involved had displayed sound judgment in his actions. However, the Crime and Misconduct Commission disagreed with that finding and conducted its own investigation, which resulted in harsh criticism of police "for failing to learn from their mistakes". Police are still investigating nine other complaints received about the use of Tasers, with the CMC overseeing the latest investigation into the possible Taser-related death of Antonio Galeano, 39, in north Queensland this month.
A CMC spokeswoman said the commission was generally only involved in complaints "of acomplex nature".
Family and friends of Galeano farewelled the 39-year-old yesterday in Ayr, about 5km from Brandon, where he collapsed and died shortly after his confrontation with police on Friday, June 12. Although officers involved have said he was Tasered no more than five times, data from the weapon revealed it was discharged 28 times. An autopsy has found the man suffered a heart attack, but it is not yet clear if the taser triggered that. [Would 28 rapidly repeated high voltage shocks from a Taser cause a heart attack? Nah! Just ONE shot is usually disabling. It's the goon concerned who should be shot]
The incident has prompted a four-week review of Tasers in the Queensland Police Service and temporarily halted the statewide rollout of the weapons.
Civil libertarians have called for an independent investigation into the death, but Queensland Police Union acting president Ian Leavers said investigators should be left to do their job without comment. "Only at the conclusion of all these tests will the actual cause of death be known, and only then will the actions of the officers be able to be properly assessed," Mr Leavers said.
SOURCE
An old, old story: Cops lying to protect fellow cops
HE WAS a friend and colleague - a fellow police officer, with whom Greg Brown was prone to have a beer. And after an inquiry by the Police Integrity Commission into alleged criminality, he is free. Brown, by contrast, is looking at jail for lying to protect him.
Gregory John Brown, a senior constable from Fairfield Police Station, was sentenced to eight months and two days protective custody yesterday for lying to the commission about plans to buy a brothel, covering up for a colleague who was later found to have done nothing wrong.
He was denied an adjournment by Chief Magistrate Graeme Henson, but immediately lodged an appeal and was granted bail unopposed. He will re-appear on August 3. After making bail, Brown refused to say whether there was an unspoken code among police - one where an officer might lie for another.
In sentencing Brown, Chief Magistrate Henson drew on the sentencing of the disgraced former judge Marcus Einfield. "As has often been said," he read from Justice Bruce James's judgment, "each of the offences of perjury and perverting the course of justice strike at the heart of the administration of justice." Being a police officer did not change this, he said. The supposed nobility of the act - of covering for a mate - made no difference.
On December 4, 2007, Brown lied five times at an Integrity Commission investigation into whether Constable Rick Perchtold was involved in criminal activity or serious police misconduct. He had been under oath. Constable Perchtold was a friend - a "professional and social acquaintance", as Chief Magistrate Henson put it - who worked with Brown at Fairfield Police Station. Brown had introduced Constable Perchtold to the brothel owner Sam Lapa at the Marconi Club. He spoke to Constable Perchtold about the latter's plans to buy a brothel.
But when questioned under oath he failed to mention any of this. It was not until the commission heard recordings of conversations he had with Constable Perchtold that Brown conceded it was not an exhaust business his friend was trying to buy. The brothel turned out to be a legal business operation.
SOURCE
School bullying: Qld. Education Dept. trying to shoot the messenger
Because effective discipline has been outlawed, many schools are now unsafe for weaker children but only an ideological backflip could cure that so the Dept. just averts its eyes from the problem. The NSW Education Dept. recently had to fork out $468,000 as a result of a lawsuit by a victim of school bullying so the Qld. mob might find that their victory is a very Pyrrhic one if they successfully prosecute this guy
A BRISBANE dad who took his daughter out of school because she was being bullied has been charged with failing to ensure she participates in full-time education. Vanessa McKenna, 10, has not returned to Sunnybank State Primary School on Brisbane's southside since March 24 2008, after suffering multiple physical attacks.
Her father John McKenna told The Courier-Mail the school had failed to adequately address his concerns about his daughter's safety, despite his numerous calls and letters. "It's been going on for several years," said Mr McKenna. "Her glasses got broken, three boys ran her into a pole chasing her into the toilet and one boy pulled his pants down in front of her in the classroom. "Instead of taking action against the boy responsible, the teacher made Vanessa sit next to him."
Mr McKenna said he had been told the school had no record of the assaults against his daughter. "The teachers have developed a code of silence and cover-ups and it makes parents believe their children are liars," he said. "I don't believe my child is a liar. I've seen the marks on her body. What's got to happen? Does a child have to die?"
Although Vanessa has not attended Sunnybank State School since last March, Mr McKenna said he did not hear from Education Queensland until September. An official from the district office contacted the family to try to get Vanessa into other schools in the area, but Mr McKenna said one "just didn't seem good enough" and the other couldn't promise his daughter would be safe from bullies. "The bloke up there was a very decent gentleman, he was very honest. He said he had five boys who were worse than the boy who assaulted Vanessa and he couldn't guarantee her safety."
Police charged Mr McKenna last Friday with failing to ensure a child in his care was participating in full-time education. He is due to appear in Richlands Magistrate's Court on July 3 and, if convicted, faces a maximum fine of $450. An Education Queensland spokesman said the department was unable to comment on the case because it was now before court. But the spokesman stressed that prosecution of parents over a student's attendance at school was a "last resort".
SOURCE
Friday, June 19, 2009
Killer Queensland police goons: 'I begged them to stop'
A woman claiming to have witnessed a fatal Taser incident in north Queensland last week says she begged police to stop continuously zapping him with the electric stun gun moments before he died. Antonio Galeano, 39, died after being shot with a 50,000-volt Taser stun gun during a violent confrontation with police at a unit in Brandon, near Townsville last Friday. Police initially said Mr Galeano was shot three times but data recorded by the Taser showed it operated on 28 separate cycles during the confrontation.
The Australian newspaper says a post-mortem examination by pathologists found the man - had a pre-existing heart condition - died in handcuffs just 10 minutes after being shot with the Taser. A police source told brisbanetimes.com.au Mr Galeano was "talking and lucid" before he suffered the heart attack.
Brandon woman Sandra Winn - who has made a statement to the Queensland Police Ethical Standards unit - reportedly said she saw police Taser Mr Galeano seven times, and begged the officers to stop. "The police officer states that he only used that Taser ... three times," Ms Winn told The Townsville Bulletin. "He hit him through the window here, the first time, hit him in the chest. "Toni fell down, he hit the ground, I heard him."
Ms Winn declined to speak to brisbanetimes.com.au when contacted this morning, as she was on her way to Mr Galeano's funeral, to be held at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Ayr. Mr Galeano's parents Carmelo and Agata said their son was "dearly loved". His son Blake and sister Giovanna and extended family will pay their final respects at Ayr Cemetery.
Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson last week said Mr Galeano, who was clutching shards of glass and an iron bar, had assaulted a woman before she ran to a nearby unit and called police. However, police have been unable to confirm how many people were in the unit at the time of the incident.
"I stood up on that chair (and looked through the window from outside) by that time they'd gone in," Ms Winn told The Townsville Bulletin. "The police officer was standing over him and going (makes Taser motions) on his back. "I was screaming (at) this window ... at the police officer stop, stop, stop you are supposed to be helping me. How many times can you hit him with that before you're going to kill him?"
Ethical Standards Command Assistant Commissioner Peter Martin said an investigation into the man's death would endeavour to compare the number of Taser "bite marks" on Mr Galeano's body with the data obtained from the Taser.
More HERE
Wong is wrong
Actually, she is just a loyal apparatchik doing the bidding of her political master, Kevin Rudd. She is completely out of her depth in anything other than politics
By Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth
Steve Fielding recently attended a climate change conference in Washington, DC. Listening to the papers presented, the Family First senator became puzzled that the scientific analyses they provided directly contradicted the reasons the Australian government had been giving as the justification for its emissions trading legislation. Fielding heard leading atmospheric physicist Dick Lindzen, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describe evidence that the warming effect of carbon dioxide was much overestimated by computer climate models and remark: "What we see, then, is that the very foundation of the issue of global warming is wrong. "In a normal field, these results would pretty much wrap things up, but global warming-climate change has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own quite removed from science."
Another scientist, astrophysicist Willie Soon, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, commented: "A magical CO2 knob for controlling weather and climate simply does not exist." Think about that for a moment with respect to our government's climate policy.
On his return to Canberra Fielding asked Climate Change Minister Penny Wong to answer three simple questions about the relationship between human carbon dioxide emissions and alleged dangerous global warming. Fielding was seeking evidence, as opposed to unvalidated computer model projections, that human carbon dioxide emissions are driving dangerous global warming, to help him, and the public, assess whether cutting emissions would be a cost-effective environmental measure.
After all, the cost to Australian taxpayers of the planned emissions trading bill is about $4000 a family a year for a carbon dioxide tax of $30 a tonne. The estimated benefit of such a large tax increase is that it may perhaps prevent an unmeasurable one-ten-thousandth of a degree of global warming from occurring. Next year? No, by 2100. The questions posed were:
* Is it the case that CO2 increased by 5 percent since 1998 while global temperature cooled during the same period? If so, why did the temperature not increase, and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?
* Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998 (the late 20th-century phase of global warming) were not unusual as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth's history? If the warming was not unusual, why is it perceived to have been caused by human CO2 emissions and, in any event, why is warming a problem if the Earth has experienced similar warmings in the past?
* Is it the case that all computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990 to 2008, whereas in fact there were only eight years of warming followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling? If so, why is it assumed that long-term climate projections by the same models are suitable as a basis for public policy-making?
As independent scientists attending the meeting, we found the minister's advisers unable, indeed in some part unwilling, to answer the questions. We were told that the first question needed rephrasing because it did not take account of the global thermal balance and the fact much of the heat that drives the climate system is lodged in the ocean.
Que? What is it about "carbon dioxide has increased and temperature has decreased" that the minister's science advisers don't understand?
The second question was dismissed with the comment that climatic events that occurred in the distant geological past were not relevant to policy concerned with contemporary climate change. Try telling that to geologist Ian Plimer. And regarding the accuracy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's computer models, we were assured that better models were in the pipeline. So the minister's advisers apparently concede that the models that have guided preparation of the emissions trading scheme legislation are inadequate.
These are not adequate responses.
It was reported in the Business Age last July that the ministry of climate change's green paper on climate change, which was issued as a prelude to carbon dioxide taxation legislation, contained scientific errors and over-simplifications. Almost 12 months on, our experience confirms that the scientific advice Wong is receiving is inadequate to justify the exorbitantly costly upheaval of our society's energy usage that will be driven by the government's ETS legislation.
All Australians owe Fielding a vote of thanks for having had the political courage to ask in parliament where the climate empress's clothes have gone. Together with the senator, and the public, we await with interest any further answers to his questions that Wong's advisers may yet provide.
Geologist Bob Carter, carbon modeller David Evans, hydrologist-climatologist Stewart Franks and meteorologist-climatologist Bill Kininmonth attended the meeting between Steve Fielding, Penny Wong, Chief Scientist Penny Sackett and ANU Climate Change Institute executive director Will Steffen. Sackett has so far declined to answer Fielding's questions on this page.
SOURCE
How times have changed: Chinese give PM Kevin Rudd lesson on neoliberalism
KEVIN Rudd has been accused by a leading Chinese economist of being "either short of economic knowledge or misleading his readers" in his famous essay attacking neoliberalism. In a scathing assessment, Xu Xaonian, economics professor at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, lambasts the essay, now translated and published in China, as "shallow and crude", The Australian reports.
Dr Xu says "Lu Kewen" - Mr Rudd's Chinese name - made a "big, big mistake" in forming his "confident opinions" based on "the observation that the crisis came as a result of neoliberalism and the absence of supervision".
Dr Xu, one of China's leading liberal economists, has savaged the Rudd essay in the weekly Chinese newspaper The Economic Observer after the Prime Minister's work was translated and reprinted in China's leading business magazine, Caijing. Dr Xu, who has a doctorate from the University of California and was formerly managing director of the country's biggest investment bank, says it is not time to resurrect Keynesianism, as Mr Rudd proposes. "Instead, it's time to announce Keynesianism's failure, time to announce the emperor Lord Keynes has no clothes."
He says the Prime Minister "has used electioneering-style tactics to brand neoliberalism as dogmatic, to paint a clownish portrait of it, seeking to pioneer popular antipathy to this artificial enemy, casting a moral verdict without seeming to care about truth or logic". Dr Xu says: "Lu Kewen defined Alan Greenspan as a neoliberal, and claiming that his failure and that of the neoliberals is a failure of the market.
"Lu is either short of economic knowledge or is misleading his readers. Greenspan is a Keynesian, and a thoroughgoing one, not a neoliberal. Lu smartly transformed a failure of government into a failure of the market - a form of propaganda by him and his social democrat comrades which now looks as if it is working."
Dr Xu says that Mr Rudd "views himself as an heir of Franklin Roosevelt and Keynes - he wants to use expansionary financial policies to pull the economy out of recession". "Instead, it will only add a fresh failure to the Keynesian list, while piling up votes, in the meantime, for the social democrats," he says. "Although filled with conclusions contrary to facts and unfounded policy prescriptions, it represents a popular post-downturn trend, especially because it comes from a country's prime minister."
SOURCE
Amazing: Tough new Australian laws to make homebirths illegal
Only a few generations ago, all of us came into the world at home. How can something so natural be made illegal?
HOMEBIRTHS will become illegal under tough new laws that prevent women using midwives to have children outside hospitals. The move is set to drive homebirths underground, with expectant mothers and their babies at risk. There are fears women determined to have a homebirth will "go it alone" like birthing advocate Janet Fraser, whose baby died during a natural water birth in April, The Daily Telegraph reports.
Under the draft Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, released last week, a midwife cannot be registered unless she has insurance. But with insurance companies and the Government so far refusing to include homebirths in the indemnity scheme, midwives will face being de-registered if they attend a homebirth.
Women's groups accuse the Rudd Government of stripping women of rights by forcing them into hospitals. Australian College of Midwives boss Dr Barbara Vernon said the Government's intention was obvious. "I had been optimistic until now when you can see it in black and white," she said. "Even though only less than half a per cent of women have homebirths, they should have the same rights as a woman who chooses to have a caesarean. Homebirths won't stop."
About 150 midwives do homebirths in Australia. Called independent or private midwives, most do not work in a hospital and are uninsured. But from July 2010, they will no longer be able to call themselves midwives even though they are trained. Only those insured and registered can use the term midwife, otherwise they face a $30,000 fine.
There are about 700 homebirths a year but some say this may be as high as 2100 as they are under-reported. For TV presenter and marriage celebrant Elizabeth Trevan, giving birth to her 18-month old twins Nash and Harvey at home was an "overwhelming experience." "It breaks my heart to hear that the Government will do this," she said. "This is about choice. "The Government should be driving this and helping midwives who want to (do) homebirths. They will never be able to afford insurance."
Home Births Australia secretary Justine Caines said the new law took away the rights of women. "It technically makes homebirthing illegal," she said. The Royal Australasian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is against homebirths. [Well, they would be, wouldn't they? It is competition for them]
SOURCE
A woman claiming to have witnessed a fatal Taser incident in north Queensland last week says she begged police to stop continuously zapping him with the electric stun gun moments before he died. Antonio Galeano, 39, died after being shot with a 50,000-volt Taser stun gun during a violent confrontation with police at a unit in Brandon, near Townsville last Friday. Police initially said Mr Galeano was shot three times but data recorded by the Taser showed it operated on 28 separate cycles during the confrontation.
The Australian newspaper says a post-mortem examination by pathologists found the man - had a pre-existing heart condition - died in handcuffs just 10 minutes after being shot with the Taser. A police source told brisbanetimes.com.au Mr Galeano was "talking and lucid" before he suffered the heart attack.
Brandon woman Sandra Winn - who has made a statement to the Queensland Police Ethical Standards unit - reportedly said she saw police Taser Mr Galeano seven times, and begged the officers to stop. "The police officer states that he only used that Taser ... three times," Ms Winn told The Townsville Bulletin. "He hit him through the window here, the first time, hit him in the chest. "Toni fell down, he hit the ground, I heard him."
Ms Winn declined to speak to brisbanetimes.com.au when contacted this morning, as she was on her way to Mr Galeano's funeral, to be held at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Ayr. Mr Galeano's parents Carmelo and Agata said their son was "dearly loved". His son Blake and sister Giovanna and extended family will pay their final respects at Ayr Cemetery.
Police Commissioner Bob Atkinson last week said Mr Galeano, who was clutching shards of glass and an iron bar, had assaulted a woman before she ran to a nearby unit and called police. However, police have been unable to confirm how many people were in the unit at the time of the incident.
"I stood up on that chair (and looked through the window from outside) by that time they'd gone in," Ms Winn told The Townsville Bulletin. "The police officer was standing over him and going (makes Taser motions) on his back. "I was screaming (at) this window ... at the police officer stop, stop, stop you are supposed to be helping me. How many times can you hit him with that before you're going to kill him?"
Ethical Standards Command Assistant Commissioner Peter Martin said an investigation into the man's death would endeavour to compare the number of Taser "bite marks" on Mr Galeano's body with the data obtained from the Taser.
More HERE
Wong is wrong
Actually, she is just a loyal apparatchik doing the bidding of her political master, Kevin Rudd. She is completely out of her depth in anything other than politics
By Bob Carter, David Evans, Stewart Franks and Bill Kininmonth
Steve Fielding recently attended a climate change conference in Washington, DC. Listening to the papers presented, the Family First senator became puzzled that the scientific analyses they provided directly contradicted the reasons the Australian government had been giving as the justification for its emissions trading legislation. Fielding heard leading atmospheric physicist Dick Lindzen, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, describe evidence that the warming effect of carbon dioxide was much overestimated by computer climate models and remark: "What we see, then, is that the very foundation of the issue of global warming is wrong. "In a normal field, these results would pretty much wrap things up, but global warming-climate change has developed so much momentum that it has a life of its own quite removed from science."
Another scientist, astrophysicist Willie Soon, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics, commented: "A magical CO2 knob for controlling weather and climate simply does not exist." Think about that for a moment with respect to our government's climate policy.
On his return to Canberra Fielding asked Climate Change Minister Penny Wong to answer three simple questions about the relationship between human carbon dioxide emissions and alleged dangerous global warming. Fielding was seeking evidence, as opposed to unvalidated computer model projections, that human carbon dioxide emissions are driving dangerous global warming, to help him, and the public, assess whether cutting emissions would be a cost-effective environmental measure.
After all, the cost to Australian taxpayers of the planned emissions trading bill is about $4000 a family a year for a carbon dioxide tax of $30 a tonne. The estimated benefit of such a large tax increase is that it may perhaps prevent an unmeasurable one-ten-thousandth of a degree of global warming from occurring. Next year? No, by 2100. The questions posed were:
* Is it the case that CO2 increased by 5 percent since 1998 while global temperature cooled during the same period? If so, why did the temperature not increase, and how can human emissions be to blame for dangerous levels of warming?
* Is it the case that the rate and magnitude of warming between 1979 and 1998 (the late 20th-century phase of global warming) were not unusual as compared with warmings that have occurred earlier in the Earth's history? If the warming was not unusual, why is it perceived to have been caused by human CO2 emissions and, in any event, why is warming a problem if the Earth has experienced similar warmings in the past?
* Is it the case that all computer models projected a steady increase in temperature for the period 1990 to 2008, whereas in fact there were only eight years of warming followed by 10 years of stasis and cooling? If so, why is it assumed that long-term climate projections by the same models are suitable as a basis for public policy-making?
As independent scientists attending the meeting, we found the minister's advisers unable, indeed in some part unwilling, to answer the questions. We were told that the first question needed rephrasing because it did not take account of the global thermal balance and the fact much of the heat that drives the climate system is lodged in the ocean.
Que? What is it about "carbon dioxide has increased and temperature has decreased" that the minister's science advisers don't understand?
The second question was dismissed with the comment that climatic events that occurred in the distant geological past were not relevant to policy concerned with contemporary climate change. Try telling that to geologist Ian Plimer. And regarding the accuracy of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's computer models, we were assured that better models were in the pipeline. So the minister's advisers apparently concede that the models that have guided preparation of the emissions trading scheme legislation are inadequate.
These are not adequate responses.
It was reported in the Business Age last July that the ministry of climate change's green paper on climate change, which was issued as a prelude to carbon dioxide taxation legislation, contained scientific errors and over-simplifications. Almost 12 months on, our experience confirms that the scientific advice Wong is receiving is inadequate to justify the exorbitantly costly upheaval of our society's energy usage that will be driven by the government's ETS legislation.
All Australians owe Fielding a vote of thanks for having had the political courage to ask in parliament where the climate empress's clothes have gone. Together with the senator, and the public, we await with interest any further answers to his questions that Wong's advisers may yet provide.
Geologist Bob Carter, carbon modeller David Evans, hydrologist-climatologist Stewart Franks and meteorologist-climatologist Bill Kininmonth attended the meeting between Steve Fielding, Penny Wong, Chief Scientist Penny Sackett and ANU Climate Change Institute executive director Will Steffen. Sackett has so far declined to answer Fielding's questions on this page.
SOURCE
How times have changed: Chinese give PM Kevin Rudd lesson on neoliberalism
KEVIN Rudd has been accused by a leading Chinese economist of being "either short of economic knowledge or misleading his readers" in his famous essay attacking neoliberalism. In a scathing assessment, Xu Xaonian, economics professor at China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, lambasts the essay, now translated and published in China, as "shallow and crude", The Australian reports.
Dr Xu says "Lu Kewen" - Mr Rudd's Chinese name - made a "big, big mistake" in forming his "confident opinions" based on "the observation that the crisis came as a result of neoliberalism and the absence of supervision".
Dr Xu, one of China's leading liberal economists, has savaged the Rudd essay in the weekly Chinese newspaper The Economic Observer after the Prime Minister's work was translated and reprinted in China's leading business magazine, Caijing. Dr Xu, who has a doctorate from the University of California and was formerly managing director of the country's biggest investment bank, says it is not time to resurrect Keynesianism, as Mr Rudd proposes. "Instead, it's time to announce Keynesianism's failure, time to announce the emperor Lord Keynes has no clothes."
He says the Prime Minister "has used electioneering-style tactics to brand neoliberalism as dogmatic, to paint a clownish portrait of it, seeking to pioneer popular antipathy to this artificial enemy, casting a moral verdict without seeming to care about truth or logic". Dr Xu says: "Lu Kewen defined Alan Greenspan as a neoliberal, and claiming that his failure and that of the neoliberals is a failure of the market.
"Lu is either short of economic knowledge or is misleading his readers. Greenspan is a Keynesian, and a thoroughgoing one, not a neoliberal. Lu smartly transformed a failure of government into a failure of the market - a form of propaganda by him and his social democrat comrades which now looks as if it is working."
Dr Xu says that Mr Rudd "views himself as an heir of Franklin Roosevelt and Keynes - he wants to use expansionary financial policies to pull the economy out of recession". "Instead, it will only add a fresh failure to the Keynesian list, while piling up votes, in the meantime, for the social democrats," he says. "Although filled with conclusions contrary to facts and unfounded policy prescriptions, it represents a popular post-downturn trend, especially because it comes from a country's prime minister."
SOURCE
Amazing: Tough new Australian laws to make homebirths illegal
Only a few generations ago, all of us came into the world at home. How can something so natural be made illegal?
HOMEBIRTHS will become illegal under tough new laws that prevent women using midwives to have children outside hospitals. The move is set to drive homebirths underground, with expectant mothers and their babies at risk. There are fears women determined to have a homebirth will "go it alone" like birthing advocate Janet Fraser, whose baby died during a natural water birth in April, The Daily Telegraph reports.
Under the draft Health Practitioner Regulation National Law, released last week, a midwife cannot be registered unless she has insurance. But with insurance companies and the Government so far refusing to include homebirths in the indemnity scheme, midwives will face being de-registered if they attend a homebirth.
Women's groups accuse the Rudd Government of stripping women of rights by forcing them into hospitals. Australian College of Midwives boss Dr Barbara Vernon said the Government's intention was obvious. "I had been optimistic until now when you can see it in black and white," she said. "Even though only less than half a per cent of women have homebirths, they should have the same rights as a woman who chooses to have a caesarean. Homebirths won't stop."
About 150 midwives do homebirths in Australia. Called independent or private midwives, most do not work in a hospital and are uninsured. But from July 2010, they will no longer be able to call themselves midwives even though they are trained. Only those insured and registered can use the term midwife, otherwise they face a $30,000 fine.
There are about 700 homebirths a year but some say this may be as high as 2100 as they are under-reported. For TV presenter and marriage celebrant Elizabeth Trevan, giving birth to her 18-month old twins Nash and Harvey at home was an "overwhelming experience." "It breaks my heart to hear that the Government will do this," she said. "This is about choice. "The Government should be driving this and helping midwives who want to (do) homebirths. They will never be able to afford insurance."
Home Births Australia secretary Justine Caines said the new law took away the rights of women. "It technically makes homebirthing illegal," she said. The Royal Australasian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists is against homebirths. [Well, they would be, wouldn't they? It is competition for them]
SOURCE
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Boom gate madness
And it's not always the drivers at fault. It's the incompetent government railway gate controllers. I have myself driven around lowered boomgates. Why? Because they are often poorly synchronized with train movements. After waiting for some time in front of a lowered gate with no train in sight, I have looked carefully for a train coming and, seeing none, I have driven around the gates. And as long as I could see the crossing in my rear vision mirror there was still no train.
It's about time the media stopped blaming the public and started blaming the incompetent bureaucrats who undermine all faith in the signalling system. And I WELCOME any prosecution over my admission that I have broken the law. I would just LOVE to have an incentive to go to the dangerous crossings with my stopwatch and time what happens there
TWO people were lucky to escape with minor injuries when their car was hit by a train in Brisbane's north in another crash involving boom gates. About 7.30pm the car went around level crossing boom gates on Glenholm St, Mitchelton and was struck from behind by an inbound train.
Local resident David O'Sullivan said he was standing outside his house when the crash happened. "The car was stopped there, the boom was down and the train had already tooted," he said. "The car has pulled out and around the boom gates and half lined up to miss the other boom gate." He saw the train hit the car from the driver's side. "It's right about the slow-motion thing. It felt like forever but it was over in an instant."
He said the man and the woman in the car were very lucky to survive but he often saw people driving and walking around the lowered boom gates. [Obviously one of the mismanaged sites] Both the driver and passenger were taken by ambulance to the Royal Brisbane Hospital with minor injuries.
A Translink spokeswoman said the crash had caused disruptions to night services. "The passengers on that train were transported by bus and we are expecting buses to run for the rest of the night between Mitchelton and Ferny Grove stations," she said. The spokeswoman said services should be returned to normal before the morning peak period.
Despite a $1 million advertising campaign this year warning of the danger of attempting to beat oncoming trains, motorists continue to disobey lowered boom gates at alarming rates. [Funny, that] The first three months of the year saw 53 collisions with boom gates - a rate of four a week.
The T-intersection on Telegraph Rd in Bald Hills, also on Brisbane's north, has had more near-misses and boom gate collisions than anywhere else in the southeast. [So look into the timing there] In the past 16 months, 12 boom gates were hit and broken by motorists and in the past year three near misses with trains were recorded.
SOURCE
Big problems with the latest Qantas airbuses
It's getting bad when business passengers refuse to fly on them. I said from the beginning that I would never fly on one. I think my prophecy that they will become a second De Havilland Comet is becoming ever more likely. Reliance on computerization has been problematic enough on earlier airbuses and the computerization on the new planes is bound to be even more complex and hence more bug-susceptible
Disgruntled passengers on the new Qantas A380 luxury superjumbos have started calling it the A3-Lately or the A-180 (as in degrees), because of delays as long as eight hours. And, according to one Qantas insider, premium business passengers are demanding to be on the old Boeing 747, saying there is "absolutely no way" they are travelling on the Airbus A380 because of the unreliable departures.
The A-180 nickname stuck after one plane, bound for Los Angeles last month, came out of the hangar, loaded up with passengers, had technical problems, unloaded and went back to the hangar - a 180-degree turn. According to one business class passenger, that QF 11 flight took off eight hours late. After several attempts to rectify technical problems, the pilot told passengers he was not happy and unloaded them onto another A380 that took off just before 9pm.
A week later, QF 12 from Los Angeles to Sydney was three hours late due to what the pilot told passengers was an electrical fault with the A380 air-conditioning. Another passenger reported an A380 flying to LA earlier last month had a faulty fuel gauge which showed a full tank halfway into the flight.
There appear to be issues with plane layout as well. According to one flight attendant, when Russell Crowe was travelling in first class in the A380 recently, he complained about the noise from people walking up and down a set of stairs next to the first class suites. (The actor did not return a call yesterday.) The A380 is so quiet first class passengers could hear any clatter nearby. A barrier has since been erected to stop business class passengers using the stairs to access first class toilets.
And while pilots who fly the A380 say they are confident in the planes, the Air France A330 crash last month and other recent incidents involving high tech Airbuses have sparked concerns about over-reliance on technology which has essentially "pilot-proofed" aircraft. Around the world, aviation experts and pilots are debating whether planes are becoming too automated for pilots to control in emergencies, in which computers override pilots.
Essentially pilots are flying a computer in the sky. "And sometimes things go wrong with your computer," says the A380 captain Barry Jackson, president of the Australian and International Pilots Association. "It's pretty hard to reset something in the air." But he says he is "confident going to work" on the A380, that the aircraft is safe, and he will be flying one to Singapore on Sunday. He stressed that the A380 is different from the Air France A330, and in particular that the speed sensor system that appears to have been one of the causes of the Air France crash is not the same. But he agreed airbuses "haven't been having a good run lately".
The problem with the A380 fuel gauge was a design problem that Qantas engineers have since developed a maintenance procedure to prevent. "Technically the A380 has had its teething problems," he said yesterday. But he says 747s had similar teething problems when they were introduced by Boeing.
Investigators of the Air France Airbus A330-200 flight 447 from Rio to Paris which disappeared on May 31 with 228 people, have been looking at technological malfunctions, beginning with the plane's speed sensors, combined with stormy weather, as the cause of the crash. The A330 is typical of the fly-by-wire aircraft that use electronic systems to control the plane rather than hydraulic or mechanical devices.
According to The Sunday Times the pilot's instruments were giving "inconsistent" readings of the plane's speed. And an internal Air France report, quoted by the British newspaper, said "the reliability of these [fly-by-wire] aircraft has the consequence of reducing the pilots' appreciation of risk".
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has also been investigating recent incidents caused by computer glitches on high tech planes. There was the Qantas Airbus A330-303 "in-flight upset" on October 7 last year when the plane surged up and down over Western Australia, before pilots were able to wrest control from the computer and bring it down safely. The aircraft, en route from Singapore to Perth, "abruptly pitched nose-down twice while in normal cruise flight". A flight attendant and 11 passengers were seriously injured. The bureau found the autopilot had disconnected after the aircraft's computer systems started receiving "erroneous data" from the so-called air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs). The bureau also reported "other occurrences" involving similar anomalous ADIRU behaviour" in September 2006 and December 2008. "But in neither case was there an in-flight upset."
In March the bureau investigated another computer glitch which led to a tail strike involving a United Arab Emirates Airbus A340-500 during take-off at Melbourne Airport. The investigation found "an incorrect weight had been inadvertently entered into the laptop when completing the take-off performance calculation prior to departure based on a take-off weight that was 100 tonnes below the actual take-off weight of the aircraft". The result was the plane did not produce enough power to take off and although the pilots managed to override the computer and apply maximum thrust, the plane's tail hit the runway.
Then there was the Air New Zealand A320 Airbus that crashed off southern France on November 28 after what French investigators described as a power surge which made it fly sharply upwards, stall and crash as it was landing in Perpignan.
Jackson says the concern is the prospect that, as planes become more automated, financially strapped airlines will devalue pilot skills. Just this January, flight engineers were phased out of Qantas flight decks because their functions had been automated.
After 22 years with Qantas, Jackson says experience in flying light planes or in the air force is superior to simulator training. "Those skills are still needed no matter how automated planes are." Yet cheaper pilots, with fewer "real world" flying hours are replacing experienced pilots around the world, he says. The importance of pilot skill was clear in the emergency landing of a US Airways plane on New York's Hudson River in January. In this high-tech age we can't forget that the most important safety equipment is a well-trained pilot.
SOURCE
Despicable Dearden again
A judge who just LOVES criminals
A QUEENSLAND father who bashed a man caught molesting his 10-year-old son is facing a prison sentence, while the boy's attacker walks free. In a highly unusual case, Shane Thomas Davidson was spared jail despite pleading guilty to molesting the boy on State Of Origin night last year. Judge Ian Dearden told Beenleigh District Court the sentence was reduced because the young victim's father had wrongly taken action into his own hands and badly beaten Davidson. "There is no place in our community for a vigilante approach," he said. Davidson was sentenced on Monday to a nine-month intensive corrections order.
The boy's father is awaiting trial on one count of grievous bodily harm, which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
Today, the father's brother told Radio 4BC's Greg Carey that his sibling snapped after the boy repeated his claim that he had been molested to his mother and then to friends from across the street. "My brother just lost it then; he dragged him (the sex offender) outside", the brother said. He said he arrived at the scene to discover "my brother in handcuffs sitting in the back of a police car". He said it was up to the public to decided whether the pedophile had suffered enough for his crime. The brother said the pedophile's abuse of his nephew had "absolutely put a wedge in all of our hearts".
Child safety campaigner Hetty Johnston yesterday slammed the sentence for Davidson. "In this case, they've got it woefully wrong," she said. "What the offender did was totally unnatural."
In handing down his sentence on Monday, Justice Dearden said adult offenders who committed sex offences against children must serve actual jail time – unless exceptional circumstances were found to exist. "This is one of those rare and exceptional cases," he said. "When an individual takes the matter of punishment into their own hands, the offence committed by the person may be far, far more serious and, therefore, have far more serious consequences then the original offence."
The court was told Davidson was at the child's house at Eagleby in June last year to watch the State of Origin match with the boy's father and a few other people. After the game, Davidson went into the boy's bedroom and began massaging the child's penis under his clothes. When the boy woke up, Davidson asked the boy to show him his penis and offered to do the same. The child refused and went to tell his father what happened.
The man then attacked Davidson, dragging him outside, throwing him on to a concrete path where he struck his head and repeatedly kicking him. Davidson later underwent extensive facial surgery in the Princess Alexandra Hospital.
Yesterday Davidson told The Courier-Mail he regretted what he had done but didn't think it was something he should go to jail for. "As far as these sorts of offences go, it's pretty minor," he said.
SOURCE
Bosses show bias against ethnic applicants
People are always going to be most comfortable with people like themselves. You are never going to be able to alter that
THE key to nailing a dream job may be all in a name - your name. New research has found job seekers with ethnic-sounding names have a harder time securing an interview than their Anglo-Saxon colleagues. Researchers from the Australian National University sent more than 4000 fake CVs to employers hunting for staff through job advertisements as part of a 2007 experiment.
Professor Alison Booth said the researchers varied just the names on CVs to take a gauge of "hiring discrimination" and found people with ethnic names were less likely to be called up for an interview.
Job hunters with Anglo-Saxon names had a 35 per cent hit rate with employers in getting a phone call in response to their application. But aspiring workers from different backgrounds had to work more than twice as hard in some instances to get a call back. "To get the same number of interviews as an applicant with an Anglo-Saxon name, a Chinese applicant must submit 68 per cent more applications, a Middle Eastern applicant must submit 64 per cent more applications, an Indigenous applicant must submit 35 per cent more applications, and an Italian applicant must submit 12 per cent more applications," Professor Booth said.
In Brisbane, the research suggested Chinese job hunters faced the greatest discrimination, having to send out more than double the number of applications to get the same results as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Italian workers fared better in Melbourne and Sydney but in Brisbane were forced to post almost a third more applications to get the equivalent number of interviews.
The level of discrimination also varied between job types with hospitality employers much less likely to give interviews to Middle Eastern and Chinese workers. Chinese women also had a harder time securing interviews than Chinese men. That trend was reversed for Italian women, who had a better success rate than the opposite sex.
Among the last names surveyed were Rosso, Ferrari and Romano (Italian), Chen, Huang and Chang (Chinese), Kassir and Baghdadi (Middle Eastern) and Tjungarrayi (Indigenous). They were pitted against Anglo-Saxon last names including Abbott, Adams and Johnson.
SOURCE
And it's not always the drivers at fault. It's the incompetent government railway gate controllers. I have myself driven around lowered boomgates. Why? Because they are often poorly synchronized with train movements. After waiting for some time in front of a lowered gate with no train in sight, I have looked carefully for a train coming and, seeing none, I have driven around the gates. And as long as I could see the crossing in my rear vision mirror there was still no train.
It's about time the media stopped blaming the public and started blaming the incompetent bureaucrats who undermine all faith in the signalling system. And I WELCOME any prosecution over my admission that I have broken the law. I would just LOVE to have an incentive to go to the dangerous crossings with my stopwatch and time what happens there
TWO people were lucky to escape with minor injuries when their car was hit by a train in Brisbane's north in another crash involving boom gates. About 7.30pm the car went around level crossing boom gates on Glenholm St, Mitchelton and was struck from behind by an inbound train.
Local resident David O'Sullivan said he was standing outside his house when the crash happened. "The car was stopped there, the boom was down and the train had already tooted," he said. "The car has pulled out and around the boom gates and half lined up to miss the other boom gate." He saw the train hit the car from the driver's side. "It's right about the slow-motion thing. It felt like forever but it was over in an instant."
He said the man and the woman in the car were very lucky to survive but he often saw people driving and walking around the lowered boom gates. [Obviously one of the mismanaged sites] Both the driver and passenger were taken by ambulance to the Royal Brisbane Hospital with minor injuries.
A Translink spokeswoman said the crash had caused disruptions to night services. "The passengers on that train were transported by bus and we are expecting buses to run for the rest of the night between Mitchelton and Ferny Grove stations," she said. The spokeswoman said services should be returned to normal before the morning peak period.
Despite a $1 million advertising campaign this year warning of the danger of attempting to beat oncoming trains, motorists continue to disobey lowered boom gates at alarming rates. [Funny, that] The first three months of the year saw 53 collisions with boom gates - a rate of four a week.
The T-intersection on Telegraph Rd in Bald Hills, also on Brisbane's north, has had more near-misses and boom gate collisions than anywhere else in the southeast. [So look into the timing there] In the past 16 months, 12 boom gates were hit and broken by motorists and in the past year three near misses with trains were recorded.
SOURCE
Big problems with the latest Qantas airbuses
It's getting bad when business passengers refuse to fly on them. I said from the beginning that I would never fly on one. I think my prophecy that they will become a second De Havilland Comet is becoming ever more likely. Reliance on computerization has been problematic enough on earlier airbuses and the computerization on the new planes is bound to be even more complex and hence more bug-susceptible
Disgruntled passengers on the new Qantas A380 luxury superjumbos have started calling it the A3-Lately or the A-180 (as in degrees), because of delays as long as eight hours. And, according to one Qantas insider, premium business passengers are demanding to be on the old Boeing 747, saying there is "absolutely no way" they are travelling on the Airbus A380 because of the unreliable departures.
The A-180 nickname stuck after one plane, bound for Los Angeles last month, came out of the hangar, loaded up with passengers, had technical problems, unloaded and went back to the hangar - a 180-degree turn. According to one business class passenger, that QF 11 flight took off eight hours late. After several attempts to rectify technical problems, the pilot told passengers he was not happy and unloaded them onto another A380 that took off just before 9pm.
A week later, QF 12 from Los Angeles to Sydney was three hours late due to what the pilot told passengers was an electrical fault with the A380 air-conditioning. Another passenger reported an A380 flying to LA earlier last month had a faulty fuel gauge which showed a full tank halfway into the flight.
There appear to be issues with plane layout as well. According to one flight attendant, when Russell Crowe was travelling in first class in the A380 recently, he complained about the noise from people walking up and down a set of stairs next to the first class suites. (The actor did not return a call yesterday.) The A380 is so quiet first class passengers could hear any clatter nearby. A barrier has since been erected to stop business class passengers using the stairs to access first class toilets.
And while pilots who fly the A380 say they are confident in the planes, the Air France A330 crash last month and other recent incidents involving high tech Airbuses have sparked concerns about over-reliance on technology which has essentially "pilot-proofed" aircraft. Around the world, aviation experts and pilots are debating whether planes are becoming too automated for pilots to control in emergencies, in which computers override pilots.
Essentially pilots are flying a computer in the sky. "And sometimes things go wrong with your computer," says the A380 captain Barry Jackson, president of the Australian and International Pilots Association. "It's pretty hard to reset something in the air." But he says he is "confident going to work" on the A380, that the aircraft is safe, and he will be flying one to Singapore on Sunday. He stressed that the A380 is different from the Air France A330, and in particular that the speed sensor system that appears to have been one of the causes of the Air France crash is not the same. But he agreed airbuses "haven't been having a good run lately".
The problem with the A380 fuel gauge was a design problem that Qantas engineers have since developed a maintenance procedure to prevent. "Technically the A380 has had its teething problems," he said yesterday. But he says 747s had similar teething problems when they were introduced by Boeing.
Investigators of the Air France Airbus A330-200 flight 447 from Rio to Paris which disappeared on May 31 with 228 people, have been looking at technological malfunctions, beginning with the plane's speed sensors, combined with stormy weather, as the cause of the crash. The A330 is typical of the fly-by-wire aircraft that use electronic systems to control the plane rather than hydraulic or mechanical devices.
According to The Sunday Times the pilot's instruments were giving "inconsistent" readings of the plane's speed. And an internal Air France report, quoted by the British newspaper, said "the reliability of these [fly-by-wire] aircraft has the consequence of reducing the pilots' appreciation of risk".
The Australian Transport Safety Bureau has also been investigating recent incidents caused by computer glitches on high tech planes. There was the Qantas Airbus A330-303 "in-flight upset" on October 7 last year when the plane surged up and down over Western Australia, before pilots were able to wrest control from the computer and bring it down safely. The aircraft, en route from Singapore to Perth, "abruptly pitched nose-down twice while in normal cruise flight". A flight attendant and 11 passengers were seriously injured. The bureau found the autopilot had disconnected after the aircraft's computer systems started receiving "erroneous data" from the so-called air data inertial reference units (ADIRUs). The bureau also reported "other occurrences" involving similar anomalous ADIRU behaviour" in September 2006 and December 2008. "But in neither case was there an in-flight upset."
In March the bureau investigated another computer glitch which led to a tail strike involving a United Arab Emirates Airbus A340-500 during take-off at Melbourne Airport. The investigation found "an incorrect weight had been inadvertently entered into the laptop when completing the take-off performance calculation prior to departure based on a take-off weight that was 100 tonnes below the actual take-off weight of the aircraft". The result was the plane did not produce enough power to take off and although the pilots managed to override the computer and apply maximum thrust, the plane's tail hit the runway.
Then there was the Air New Zealand A320 Airbus that crashed off southern France on November 28 after what French investigators described as a power surge which made it fly sharply upwards, stall and crash as it was landing in Perpignan.
Jackson says the concern is the prospect that, as planes become more automated, financially strapped airlines will devalue pilot skills. Just this January, flight engineers were phased out of Qantas flight decks because their functions had been automated.
After 22 years with Qantas, Jackson says experience in flying light planes or in the air force is superior to simulator training. "Those skills are still needed no matter how automated planes are." Yet cheaper pilots, with fewer "real world" flying hours are replacing experienced pilots around the world, he says. The importance of pilot skill was clear in the emergency landing of a US Airways plane on New York's Hudson River in January. In this high-tech age we can't forget that the most important safety equipment is a well-trained pilot.
SOURCE
Despicable Dearden again
A judge who just LOVES criminals
A QUEENSLAND father who bashed a man caught molesting his 10-year-old son is facing a prison sentence, while the boy's attacker walks free. In a highly unusual case, Shane Thomas Davidson was spared jail despite pleading guilty to molesting the boy on State Of Origin night last year. Judge Ian Dearden told Beenleigh District Court the sentence was reduced because the young victim's father had wrongly taken action into his own hands and badly beaten Davidson. "There is no place in our community for a vigilante approach," he said. Davidson was sentenced on Monday to a nine-month intensive corrections order.
The boy's father is awaiting trial on one count of grievous bodily harm, which carries a maximum penalty of life imprisonment.
Today, the father's brother told Radio 4BC's Greg Carey that his sibling snapped after the boy repeated his claim that he had been molested to his mother and then to friends from across the street. "My brother just lost it then; he dragged him (the sex offender) outside", the brother said. He said he arrived at the scene to discover "my brother in handcuffs sitting in the back of a police car". He said it was up to the public to decided whether the pedophile had suffered enough for his crime. The brother said the pedophile's abuse of his nephew had "absolutely put a wedge in all of our hearts".
Child safety campaigner Hetty Johnston yesterday slammed the sentence for Davidson. "In this case, they've got it woefully wrong," she said. "What the offender did was totally unnatural."
In handing down his sentence on Monday, Justice Dearden said adult offenders who committed sex offences against children must serve actual jail time – unless exceptional circumstances were found to exist. "This is one of those rare and exceptional cases," he said. "When an individual takes the matter of punishment into their own hands, the offence committed by the person may be far, far more serious and, therefore, have far more serious consequences then the original offence."
The court was told Davidson was at the child's house at Eagleby in June last year to watch the State of Origin match with the boy's father and a few other people. After the game, Davidson went into the boy's bedroom and began massaging the child's penis under his clothes. When the boy woke up, Davidson asked the boy to show him his penis and offered to do the same. The child refused and went to tell his father what happened.
The man then attacked Davidson, dragging him outside, throwing him on to a concrete path where he struck his head and repeatedly kicking him. Davidson later underwent extensive facial surgery in the Princess Alexandra Hospital.
Yesterday Davidson told The Courier-Mail he regretted what he had done but didn't think it was something he should go to jail for. "As far as these sorts of offences go, it's pretty minor," he said.
SOURCE
Bosses show bias against ethnic applicants
People are always going to be most comfortable with people like themselves. You are never going to be able to alter that
THE key to nailing a dream job may be all in a name - your name. New research has found job seekers with ethnic-sounding names have a harder time securing an interview than their Anglo-Saxon colleagues. Researchers from the Australian National University sent more than 4000 fake CVs to employers hunting for staff through job advertisements as part of a 2007 experiment.
Professor Alison Booth said the researchers varied just the names on CVs to take a gauge of "hiring discrimination" and found people with ethnic names were less likely to be called up for an interview.
Job hunters with Anglo-Saxon names had a 35 per cent hit rate with employers in getting a phone call in response to their application. But aspiring workers from different backgrounds had to work more than twice as hard in some instances to get a call back. "To get the same number of interviews as an applicant with an Anglo-Saxon name, a Chinese applicant must submit 68 per cent more applications, a Middle Eastern applicant must submit 64 per cent more applications, an Indigenous applicant must submit 35 per cent more applications, and an Italian applicant must submit 12 per cent more applications," Professor Booth said.
In Brisbane, the research suggested Chinese job hunters faced the greatest discrimination, having to send out more than double the number of applications to get the same results as their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. Italian workers fared better in Melbourne and Sydney but in Brisbane were forced to post almost a third more applications to get the equivalent number of interviews.
The level of discrimination also varied between job types with hospitality employers much less likely to give interviews to Middle Eastern and Chinese workers. Chinese women also had a harder time securing interviews than Chinese men. That trend was reversed for Italian women, who had a better success rate than the opposite sex.
Among the last names surveyed were Rosso, Ferrari and Romano (Italian), Chen, Huang and Chang (Chinese), Kassir and Baghdadi (Middle Eastern) and Tjungarrayi (Indigenous). They were pitted against Anglo-Saxon last names including Abbott, Adams and Johnson.
SOURCE
Wednesday, June 17, 2009
Eat-your-greens fight a lost cause
George Bush Senior became a hero to little boys everywhere when he banned broccoli from all his dinners and said: "I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli"
CHILDREN really do hate their vegies and parents are apparently hopeless at doing anything about it. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's snapshot of Australian children released today shows the level of disdain children have for their greens. The report, A Picture of Australian Children 2009, citing a 2007 nutrition survey, says: "Only a very small proportion of children met the recommendations for daily serves of vegetables (excluding potatoes) - 3 per cent of 4- to 8-year-olds and 2 per cent of 9- to 13-year-olds. "Even with the inclusion of potatoes, the proportions remained low (22 per cent and 14per cent respectively).
National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines recommend one serve of fruit and two serves of vegetables a day for children aged four to seven, one serve of fruit and three serves of vegetables for those eight to 11, and three serves of fruit and four serves of vegetables for ages 12 to 18. A serve is about half a cup.
The report's author, Deanna Eldridge from the AIHW's Children Youth and Families unit, said vegetable consumption was a key concern related to children's health and wellbeing. "This is a crucial figure to highlight, because this is occurring at a time when young bodies are growing and developing," she said.
Accredited practising dietician Kate Di Prima said that however hard parents might find it to get children to eat vegetables, they must persist. "Parents find it very difficult to encourage children to eat green vegetables and fruit," Ms Di Prima said. "They are happy to eat dairy foods and soft pastas and rice, but when it comes to chewing something with more than a bland taste, parents battle."
The prime concern about low levels of vegetable consumption was the lack of fibre in children's diets and the health consequences that flowed on, such as constipation, she said. Ms Di Prima said she advised parents to start small and build up. "Put a bit of carrot and a bit of broccoli on the plate," she said. "Or grate some zucchini and put it in with the pasta. This will put some balance in their diet. It's better than nothing." Don't cave in if a child is not co-operating, she said. Let them go to bed without eating anything rather than take the easy option and fill them up with some milk or yoghurt.
Parramatta mother Alexis Henderson said she improvised to make sure her five-year-old son, Brooklyn, ate enough vegetables. "You can mash them up, hide them, you can cook a cake with pumpkin in it, or make corn muffins," Ms Henderson said. She said Brooklyn did pretty well at home, but getting him to eat vegetables at school lunch was tricky. "It's hard when most other kids are bringing chips and Nutella sandwiches and all sorts of unhealthy things."
SOURCE
Senate votes down Rudd Bank over executive pay caps
I rarely agree with the Greens but some limit on the pay of executives who have run their companies so badly that they need a taxpayer bailout does seem reasonable
THE Government's proposed commercial property bailout fund was last night voted down in the Senate by the Coalition and the Greens in a move the Government said could jeopardise thousands of construction jobs. The Government refused a Greens' demand to put a $1 million cap on the salaries of the banking and property executives whose companies would have benefited from Rudd Bank, reports The Australian.
The Rudd Bank was to have operated as "lender of last resort" for commercial property developers, with an initial capital injection of $4 billion -- $2bn from government coffers and $2bn from the big banks, who were also to have had seats on its board.
Greens leader Bob Brown said it was average citizens who ended up paying the executive salaries that the Prime Minister had labelled "extreme" but that the government was now refusing to limit. "It seems the Prime Minister is backing down from his strong words about executive salaries," Senator Brown said. He said the US and Germany had attached salary limitations to similar bailout funds.
But Assistant Treasurer Nick Sherry said the Government could not agree to the Greens' demands because it would create "legal uncertainties" for executives' employment contracts and was not in line with what had been done overseas.
Wayne Swan said the defeat of the government initiative was "yet more evidence of Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey putting their own selfish interests ahead of the jobs ... and the livelihoods of many thousands of Australians tied up in the commercial property sector, including plumbers, electricians and carpenters".
Ahmed Fahour, the interim chief executive of the Rudd Bank, said it was "extremely disappointing that the opposition and the Greens have voted against this sensible policy designed to protect the Australian economy and Australian jobs threatened by the global recession". "I am sorry for any companies and their employees who through no fault of their own have been dealt very harshly by opposition to this legislation."
The property sector was dismayed at Rudd Bank's demise. "It is extremely disappointing since in the end, the sticking point was not something to do with ABIP itself, but the issue of executive salaries, which is being dealt with by the government in other ways," said Property Council chief executive Peter Verwer.
SOURCE
Ice shelves stable over at least the last six years
Yes. Bits of ice do break off and always have but there is no increase in it happening
ANTARCTIC ice shelves are showing no sign of climate change, six years of unique research have shown. Scientists from Western Australia's Curtin University of Technology are using acoustic sensors developed to support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to listen for the sound of icebergs breaking away from the giant ice sheets of the south pole. "More than six years of observation has not revealed any significant climatic trends," CUT associate professor Alexander Gavrilov said yesterday.
Professor Gavrilov and PhD student Binghui Li are investigating whether it is possible to detect and monitor significant changes in the disintegration rate of the Antarctic ice shelf by monitoring the noise of ice breaking. The pair are using two acoustic stations, one 150km off Cape Leeuwin, the southwest tip of WA, and another off the gigantic US military base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean. "They are part of a network of underwater acoustic receivers, or hydrophones," Dr Gavrilov told The Australian yesterday.
The stations have been used to locate nuclear explosions detonated by India.
More than 100 signals from Antarctica are detected weekly by the Cape Leeuwin station. They are then transmitted to Geoscience Australia in Canberra. "Six years of results is not long in the scheme of things, so we will keep watching," Dr Gavrilov said. The pair will present their research at a conference in Europe later this month.
SOURCE
Your "stimulus" money at work again
AN undercover playground with concrete floors and no doors costs $1.8 million under the Rudd Government's schools stimulus funding, the State Opposition says. And it says that's just one example of how schools are being ripped off. Other documents obtained by The Courier-Mail showed Mulgildie State School west of Bundaberg received $250,000 to build a basic 60sq m shed, after receiving a $29,000 quote from a local shed builder for a similar structure.
Opposition education spokesman Bruce Flegg said many Queensland schools believed they were being short-changed by ill-suited and overpriced buildings under the Building the Education Revolution funding. Guidelines for BER funding stipulate schools must use a design template but Dr Flegg said this was forcing principals to accept the one size fits all model or risk missing out on the money.
Beechmont State School in the Gold Coast hinterland has received $2 million in BER funding, $100,000 of which will be used for a library extension and the rest for a multi-purpose hall. Beechmont Hall Committee treasurer Greg McKenzie said that, before the funding was announced, it had costed plans for a $1.8 million, 800sq m school and community hall, which included a sports facility, kitchen, stage, and toilet. Instead under the BER funding, builders had told the committee the same amount of money would buy a smaller, concrete-floored, undercover play area, with no doors and a toilet in a separate building.
Mr McKenzie said the committee had based its original costings and feasibility study on an almost identical hall at Moorooka State School. "With no tender process, the school was never going to get a good deal," he said. "We believe we are getting a building worth half the value we should be getting." He said the building contractor, Northbuild, was from Brisbane's north, which also meant no local jobs would be created.
Dr Flegg said many schools had also expressed concerns that they had little say over the position of new buildings. "Privately most schools will tell you they are being railroaded and they fear that if they say they don't think it's the most suitable project, that they'll get nothing," he said.
Queensland Association of State School Principals president Norm Hart said principals had expressed concerns "their voices are not being heard".
An Education Queensland spokeswoman said consultation was occurring with schools within shortened timeframes to achieve the objective of stimulating the economy and creating jobs.
SOURCE
George Bush Senior became a hero to little boys everywhere when he banned broccoli from all his dinners and said: "I'm President of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli"
CHILDREN really do hate their vegies and parents are apparently hopeless at doing anything about it. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare's snapshot of Australian children released today shows the level of disdain children have for their greens. The report, A Picture of Australian Children 2009, citing a 2007 nutrition survey, says: "Only a very small proportion of children met the recommendations for daily serves of vegetables (excluding potatoes) - 3 per cent of 4- to 8-year-olds and 2 per cent of 9- to 13-year-olds. "Even with the inclusion of potatoes, the proportions remained low (22 per cent and 14per cent respectively).
National Health and Medical Research Council guidelines recommend one serve of fruit and two serves of vegetables a day for children aged four to seven, one serve of fruit and three serves of vegetables for those eight to 11, and three serves of fruit and four serves of vegetables for ages 12 to 18. A serve is about half a cup.
The report's author, Deanna Eldridge from the AIHW's Children Youth and Families unit, said vegetable consumption was a key concern related to children's health and wellbeing. "This is a crucial figure to highlight, because this is occurring at a time when young bodies are growing and developing," she said.
Accredited practising dietician Kate Di Prima said that however hard parents might find it to get children to eat vegetables, they must persist. "Parents find it very difficult to encourage children to eat green vegetables and fruit," Ms Di Prima said. "They are happy to eat dairy foods and soft pastas and rice, but when it comes to chewing something with more than a bland taste, parents battle."
The prime concern about low levels of vegetable consumption was the lack of fibre in children's diets and the health consequences that flowed on, such as constipation, she said. Ms Di Prima said she advised parents to start small and build up. "Put a bit of carrot and a bit of broccoli on the plate," she said. "Or grate some zucchini and put it in with the pasta. This will put some balance in their diet. It's better than nothing." Don't cave in if a child is not co-operating, she said. Let them go to bed without eating anything rather than take the easy option and fill them up with some milk or yoghurt.
Parramatta mother Alexis Henderson said she improvised to make sure her five-year-old son, Brooklyn, ate enough vegetables. "You can mash them up, hide them, you can cook a cake with pumpkin in it, or make corn muffins," Ms Henderson said. She said Brooklyn did pretty well at home, but getting him to eat vegetables at school lunch was tricky. "It's hard when most other kids are bringing chips and Nutella sandwiches and all sorts of unhealthy things."
SOURCE
Senate votes down Rudd Bank over executive pay caps
I rarely agree with the Greens but some limit on the pay of executives who have run their companies so badly that they need a taxpayer bailout does seem reasonable
THE Government's proposed commercial property bailout fund was last night voted down in the Senate by the Coalition and the Greens in a move the Government said could jeopardise thousands of construction jobs. The Government refused a Greens' demand to put a $1 million cap on the salaries of the banking and property executives whose companies would have benefited from Rudd Bank, reports The Australian.
The Rudd Bank was to have operated as "lender of last resort" for commercial property developers, with an initial capital injection of $4 billion -- $2bn from government coffers and $2bn from the big banks, who were also to have had seats on its board.
Greens leader Bob Brown said it was average citizens who ended up paying the executive salaries that the Prime Minister had labelled "extreme" but that the government was now refusing to limit. "It seems the Prime Minister is backing down from his strong words about executive salaries," Senator Brown said. He said the US and Germany had attached salary limitations to similar bailout funds.
But Assistant Treasurer Nick Sherry said the Government could not agree to the Greens' demands because it would create "legal uncertainties" for executives' employment contracts and was not in line with what had been done overseas.
Wayne Swan said the defeat of the government initiative was "yet more evidence of Malcolm Turnbull and Joe Hockey putting their own selfish interests ahead of the jobs ... and the livelihoods of many thousands of Australians tied up in the commercial property sector, including plumbers, electricians and carpenters".
Ahmed Fahour, the interim chief executive of the Rudd Bank, said it was "extremely disappointing that the opposition and the Greens have voted against this sensible policy designed to protect the Australian economy and Australian jobs threatened by the global recession". "I am sorry for any companies and their employees who through no fault of their own have been dealt very harshly by opposition to this legislation."
The property sector was dismayed at Rudd Bank's demise. "It is extremely disappointing since in the end, the sticking point was not something to do with ABIP itself, but the issue of executive salaries, which is being dealt with by the government in other ways," said Property Council chief executive Peter Verwer.
SOURCE
Ice shelves stable over at least the last six years
Yes. Bits of ice do break off and always have but there is no increase in it happening
ANTARCTIC ice shelves are showing no sign of climate change, six years of unique research have shown. Scientists from Western Australia's Curtin University of Technology are using acoustic sensors developed to support the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty to listen for the sound of icebergs breaking away from the giant ice sheets of the south pole. "More than six years of observation has not revealed any significant climatic trends," CUT associate professor Alexander Gavrilov said yesterday.
Professor Gavrilov and PhD student Binghui Li are investigating whether it is possible to detect and monitor significant changes in the disintegration rate of the Antarctic ice shelf by monitoring the noise of ice breaking. The pair are using two acoustic stations, one 150km off Cape Leeuwin, the southwest tip of WA, and another off the gigantic US military base on Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean. "They are part of a network of underwater acoustic receivers, or hydrophones," Dr Gavrilov told The Australian yesterday.
The stations have been used to locate nuclear explosions detonated by India.
More than 100 signals from Antarctica are detected weekly by the Cape Leeuwin station. They are then transmitted to Geoscience Australia in Canberra. "Six years of results is not long in the scheme of things, so we will keep watching," Dr Gavrilov said. The pair will present their research at a conference in Europe later this month.
SOURCE
Your "stimulus" money at work again
AN undercover playground with concrete floors and no doors costs $1.8 million under the Rudd Government's schools stimulus funding, the State Opposition says. And it says that's just one example of how schools are being ripped off. Other documents obtained by The Courier-Mail showed Mulgildie State School west of Bundaberg received $250,000 to build a basic 60sq m shed, after receiving a $29,000 quote from a local shed builder for a similar structure.
Opposition education spokesman Bruce Flegg said many Queensland schools believed they were being short-changed by ill-suited and overpriced buildings under the Building the Education Revolution funding. Guidelines for BER funding stipulate schools must use a design template but Dr Flegg said this was forcing principals to accept the one size fits all model or risk missing out on the money.
Beechmont State School in the Gold Coast hinterland has received $2 million in BER funding, $100,000 of which will be used for a library extension and the rest for a multi-purpose hall. Beechmont Hall Committee treasurer Greg McKenzie said that, before the funding was announced, it had costed plans for a $1.8 million, 800sq m school and community hall, which included a sports facility, kitchen, stage, and toilet. Instead under the BER funding, builders had told the committee the same amount of money would buy a smaller, concrete-floored, undercover play area, with no doors and a toilet in a separate building.
Mr McKenzie said the committee had based its original costings and feasibility study on an almost identical hall at Moorooka State School. "With no tender process, the school was never going to get a good deal," he said. "We believe we are getting a building worth half the value we should be getting." He said the building contractor, Northbuild, was from Brisbane's north, which also meant no local jobs would be created.
Dr Flegg said many schools had also expressed concerns that they had little say over the position of new buildings. "Privately most schools will tell you they are being railroaded and they fear that if they say they don't think it's the most suitable project, that they'll get nothing," he said.
Queensland Association of State School Principals president Norm Hart said principals had expressed concerns "their voices are not being heard".
An Education Queensland spokeswoman said consultation was occurring with schools within shortened timeframes to achieve the objective of stimulating the economy and creating jobs.
SOURCE
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
ZEG
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG sees the latest gangland killing in Melbourne as a sign of decline in the quality of Australian life
Health nazis losing obesity war
THE Aussie pie, pizzas and sausage rolls are back in school canteens as the war against child obesity falters and threatens to collapse. Lollies, ice creams, chips and even banned sports drinks have also re-emerged on school menus because thousands of families are snubbing healthier foods.
Nutritionists and dietitians are desperately trying to rescue the $750,000 school health campaign launched five years ago by former Premier Bob Carr. They are offering "low fat" Aussie beef pies, pizzas made with wholemeal pita bread and vegetables and chicken burgers to children who turn their noses up at salads and wraps.
The anti-health push is greatest at secondary level where students leave school grounds to eat at local fast food outlets or order in takeaway pizza on their mobile phones.
Dietitians have told The Daily Telegraph some schools are offering pies to children three times a day - at breakfast, recess and lunch. In a bid to reverse the trend the Healthy Kids School Canteen Association is taking over some school food operations. Low fat pies, pizzas and sausage rolls, with ingredients that meet health guidelines and home-made lasagne are now the front line items aimed at winning customers back.
Friday is pie and pizza day at Holy Cross Primary School at Glenwood in Sydney's west - portion sizes limited to healthy amounts - and the kids are lining up to get their orders. Canteen Association dietitian Jennifer Madz said Holy Cross would become a template across the state. "The problem is parents see the canteen as a treat and expect treat food there. We are trying to change the behaviour," Ms Madz said. "High schools are a special problem where students with money in their pockets go off campus to lunch in local fast food outlets. We are working on a plan to combat that."
Canteens hit by the global recession claim profits have been eroded as students resist low-fat menus.
While most sugary drinks are banned from school canteens, the food industry has manipulated some products to get around the rules. To get a non-milk-based gelato accepted the manufacturer added calcium and reduced the portion size. Banned Powerade became "Powerade Light" and juice was carbonated and sold in a can so children would think it was a softdrink. Under the nutrition rules foods are divided into red (no more than twice a term), amber (to be selected carefully and in smaller servings) and green (fill the menu) categories.
But enforcement has been almost non-existent and the Catholic and independent school sectors are not bound by them.
SOURCE
Black drunk driver negligently burnt to death in a prison van
This is a truly horrible story. Prosecutions must follow
THE Director of Public Prosecutions will be asked to consider criminal charges in the case of an Aboriginal elder who was effectively cooked in the back of a prison van on a scorching day in the West Australian outback. WA Coroner Alastair Hope said yesterday he would ask the DDP to consider whether charges should be laid after finding the death of Mr Ward, 46, whose first name cannot be released for cultural reasons, was “unnecessary and wholly avoidable”.
Mr Hope found “inhumane treatment” led to Mr Ward's death from heat stroke in the pod of the commercially owned prison van, which had no air conditioning and little or no air flow. He criticised the transport company, Global Solutions Ltd (GSL), for arranging Mr Ward's horror 360km journey between the Goldfields towns of Laverton and Kalgoorlie, and accused its custodial guards of colluding in their evidence.
He found the company, the two guards, Nina Stokoe and Graham Powell, and the Department of Corrective Services had all contributed to Mr Ward's “terrible death” on January 27 last year. The coroner found the father of four, from the Goldfields town of Warburton, died of heat stroke when he succumbed to temperatures of 50C inside the van on a searing day, after being picked up for drink-driving the previous day.
Mr Hope said Ms Stokoe and Mr Powell, who provided Mr Ward with only a 600ml bottle of water and did not check on him throughout the journey, had breached their duty of care. He said Mr Ward had no proper method of communicating with the guards, who had colluded before giving unreliable evidence to police about the death. The hearing was told that when Mr Ward eventually arrived unconscious at Kalgoorlie hospital, his body was so hot that staff had been unable to cool him down. Even after an ice bath he had a body temperature of 41.7C. He had a laceration to his head from falling in the vehicle and a 9cm third degree burn to his stomach from lying on its hot metal floor.
Mr Hope said the department had failed to provide GSL with proper means of transport and that the vehicle was “not fit for humans”. The prison van did not have a spare tyre, indicating GSL's “reckless approach” towards the transport of prisoners, he said. “In my view, it is a disgrace that a prisoner in the 21st Century, particularly a prisoner who has not been convicted of any crime, was transported for a long distance in high temperatures in this pod,” Mr Hope said. Among his 14 recommendations, he said the state government must improve its handling of prisoners and review its justice system.
In response, WA Attorney-General Christian Porter said action had already been taken to prevent another “tragic incident” and pledged $3 million and a rollout of 40 new custodial vehicles by December 2010. “Things have improved substantially and I intend to see they improve further,” Mr Porter said. “But it now falls to this government to repair the system that allowed this quite shocking event to occur.”
About 40 protesters demonstrated outside Perth's Central Law Courts, where the coroner delivered his findings. The Deaths in Custody Watch Committee called for improved human rights for Aboriginal people, while Amnesty International called it “a disgrace that a prisoner should be transported in this way in the 21st century”. Aboriginal Legal Services of WA CEO Dennis Eggington said Mr Ward's family was happy with the recommendations but wanted criminal charges laid against the Government.
SOURCE
Victorian government hospital gives woman fatal overdose
Mogadon is well known as a powerful sleeping pill. Why would anybody be given three of them? This sounds deliberate, not accidental. It's not even indicated for depression
A family say they could only watch their mother slowly die after staff at Casey Hospital allegedly gave her an accidental overdose of a sleeping pill. The coroner is investigating the March 30 death of Elsinor Mitchell, 74, who was allegedly given three Mogadon tablets on March 27 when she was not supposed to receive any medication. Ms Mitchell's family say that within 15 minutes of the medication she fell into a coma while being transferred in an ambulance, and they could only watch as her organs shut down over the next three days because doctors were powerless to reverse the damage.
Victoria police have prepared a brief for the coroner, who is reviewing medical records and referring the information to the clinical liaison service for a medical opinion. Southern Health, which runs Casey Hospital, yesterday declined to comment on the incident, saying it was standard procedure not to discuss matters before the coroner. Other medical sources have told the Herald Sun it would typically require a greater dose of Mogadon to overdose.
Ms Mitchell's brother, Alf Hulland, his sister's power of attorney while in hospital, said Ms Mitchell was diagnosed as suffering depression by Casey Hospital doctors and given medication just before being placed in an ambulance to travel to a Heatherton clinic. He claims the hospital's doctors later admitted they realised the mistake only while Ms Mitchell was in transit, but she had already slipped into a coma before they could alert paramedics to the problem.
The Narre Warren mother of five adult children was later rushed to Monash Medical Centre but could not be saved. "A doctor took her youngest son into a room and told us somebody had made a terrible error at Casey Hospital," Mr Hulland said. "She said there would be a big inquiry and it would not be covered up, but apart from that there was nothing more she could do and her organs would shut down so she had 24 to 48 hours at the most to live.
"It is the most distressing thing I have ever had to endure in my entire life - to sit there and watch her die. I think it is absolutely disgraceful. "They had told me that within a fortnight she would be home and back to her normal self again. There was no reason for her to die. "A doctor came over from Casey Hospital the next day and apologised. It is the first time I have seen a doctor cry." Mr Hulland said he could barely recognise his sister in her final hours because her transformation was so severe. "She was a bubbly, happy-go-lucky person who always helped anybody," he said. "She absolutely had a heart of gold."
SOURCE
Pervasive violence is part of traditional Aboriginal life
And only integration and assimilation into mainstream culture offers any prospect of reducing it
In his address to the National Press Club in 2003, Mick Dodson claimed that "violence is not and never was part of Aboriginal tradition ... We have no cultural traditions based on humiliation, degradation, and violation. Let me make this point abundantly clear. Most of the violence, if not all, that Aboriginal communities are experiencing today [is] not part of Aboriginal tradition or culture."
That denies the reality. Pre-contact Aboriginal society was very violent, and that violence and the cultural norms that sustained it continue to generate the extreme levels of violence in today's remote communities.
There is little point in criticising traditional Aboriginal Australia, unless traditions pose dangers for today's Aborigines, and unless we incorporate this reality into policy responses.
Despite considerable evidence that pre-contact Aboriginal Australia had high levels of violence, and that traditional norms concerning violence still operate, policy distortion continues because of a resistance to consider traditional norms of violence.
Even among intellectuals such as Joan Kimm and Louis Nowra, who have bravely pointed to pre-contact origins of today's high rate of Aboriginal violence, evoking the policy implications is resisted.
To secure a less violent, more positive future for Aborigines, today's restrictive conditions on inquiry and policy need to end.
The particularly high level of violence against women in pre-contact Aboriginal Australia can no longer be denied. First-contact explorers and colonists noted with distress the terrible scars and bruises that marked the women due to the frequent brutality of their menfolk.
Stephen Webb's palaeopathology studies of cranial and post-cranial remains verify that before European arrival, violence against Aboriginal women was prevalent across the mainland continent, with women suffering significantly more cranial injuries than men.
The level of Aboriginal violence particularly against women remains shocking. In 2004-05 across four states where records were kept, "indigenous females were 44.1 times more likely to be hospitalised for assault than non-Indigenous females".
To open up this restrictive research climate, we need to de-couple some falsely linked concepts.
In his book Race and Culture, African-American economist and social commentator Thomas Sowell writes that the horror of racial oppression and hatred cannot be denied: "It is difficult to survey the history of racial or ethnic relations without being appalled by the inhumanity, brutality, and viciousness of it all.
"But there are no more futile or dangerous efforts than attempts to redress the wrongs of history."
Sowell also argues that morality and causation are confused: "What is most morally revolting, or morally inspiring, about a given situation may not be what is the most important causal factor" and that "no group was a tabula rasa to begin with".
In the case of Aboriginal Australians, the most "morally revolting factor" might well be the white colonisation of this country.
However, insistent blaming of white colonisation as a primary generator of high Aboriginal violence suppresses the uncomfortable fact that within Aboriginal culture, violence continues to have strong, traditional legitimacy.
Hence, reducing Aboriginal violence to around mainstream levels will entail further shifts away from traditional beliefs, norms, power structures and behaviours.
A key upsetting aspect about critical assessment by Westerners and their intervention in Aboriginal violence is that it seems to ring hollow. What allows westerners to take the moral high ground given their history of imperialism and violence?
People are very malleable regarding their attitude and capacity to tolerate violence. It is culture and its associated belief systems, power structures and norms that largely determine people's tolerance and attitudes concerning violence. The key difference between the West and traditional Aboriginal culture is that only very recently, Western culture developed effective philosophies and associated political and legal systems that could effectively reduce violence.
In contemporary liberal democracies, violence is forbidden. For private citizens there is no legitimised violence apart from self-defence. Within traditional Aboriginal culture, there was considerable legitimate scope for people to use violence. Dreamtime law functioned above all else to protect country against sacrilege and to uphold the social order. Enforcement of correct ceremonial procedures and obligations included harsh violent punishment, sometimes death. Moreover, violence as a means to set things right extended beyond the sacred, rendering family and kinship conflict a dangerous realm too. In this traditional zeitgeist, there was no "individual right" to counter this.
Ceremonial mistakes and violations were very frightening events for traditional Aborigines because they triggered the wrath of the powerful ancestral creation beings, threatening the country on which life depended.
In such a context, causation rather than intention was the primary consideration, and members of the tribe, particularly male elders, had the right and obligation to carry out punishment against the wrongdoers. Even accidental sacrilegious acts could be subject to the death penalty.
Furthermore, the identity of a guilty party could be determined through irrational sorcerous or magical means. In one instance described by T.G.H. Strehlow, relatives make a spindle from a murdered man's hair, and watch for when it breaks while it spins into a hair string.
The distance and the direction of the spindle's travel indicate the murderer. Disputes regarding the identity of culprits identified through sorcery could lead to deadly vendettas.
Sacred law discriminated on the basis of sex, with more prohibitions placed on women. Certainly, men faced restrictions on pain of death to many sacred places, objects and ceremonies. However, for a woman, there were more sacred objects that she could not see or touch, more sacred sites that she could not be in or near, and more sacred ceremonies that she should not participate in or witness, even accidentally, on pain of death.
Surely most nerve-racking, this could affect essential daily tasks such as water collection. As noted by the Strehlows, "even waters open to women and children, if they were at all near a sacred site, had to be approached carefully".
W. Lloyd Warner detailed several examples of east Arnhem Land's Murnjin men and women being killed for willing or accidental totemic and ceremonial transgressions, noting that "if women look at a totemic emblem they are killed by their own group".
Even husbands were expected not to save their "guilty" wife, although there were brave husbands who did.
Despite the misogyny of the 18th and 19th century western world, white colonial officials and explorers were shocked by what they saw.
In the 1840s, explorer and magistrate Edward John Eyre wrote very critically of the white occupation of Australia, which he called aggression: "To sanction this aggression, we have not, in the abstract, the slightest shadow of either right or justice; we have not even the extenuation of endeavouring to compensate those we have injured, or the merit of attempting to mitigate the sufferings our presence inflicts."
Eyre's ability to see the colonial injustice and aggression against Aboriginal Australia did not compromise his ability to decry the subjugated status of the Aboriginal women.
"Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands or friends, in addition to the dreadful life of drudgery, and privation, and hardship they always have to undergo; they are frequently beaten about the head, with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences.
"No one takes the part of the weak or the injured, or ever attempts to interfere with the infliction of such severe punishments ... Few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head, or the marks of spear wounds about the body.
"I have seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear wounds."
Sadly there are thousands of examples of legitimised injurious violence, debilitating beliefs and misogyny of traditional origin that continue to give power to some and to hurt many others in Australia's remote Aboriginal communities.
What shocks outsiders is often seen as ordinary by the communities. This other country is a dangerous country.
Joan Kimm and David McKnight, within their respective fields of legal history and anthropology, recount how the tolerance of violence or thepropensity to behave violently can increase markedly in the same people when they move out of the mainstream and into traditional community. In his book From Hunting to Drinking, McKnight relates how Mornington Island youths were able to treat their white girlfriends well in the mainstream context but became violent towards them in the traditional context.
This suggests that when and where to be violent is a matter of choice. It is a strong indicator that the violence has less to do with Aboriginal men's loss or brokenness due to white colonisation, such as separation from their spiritual lands or being directly affected by the Stolen Generation; or the need for anger management or cultural healing; or even the curse of alcohol or other violence-promoting substance abuse.
No doubt these realities can be contributing factors. Nevertheless, it has more to do with traditional expectations, mores and permissions to be violent.
No matter how unfairly they, their family or their community have been treated or continue to be treated by mainstream Australia, it is - in seeming irony - the mainstream context where Aboriginal violence is more effectively suppressed and less tolerated by Aborigines themselves.
It is in the traditional context, on lands of dreams and ideals hard-won after years of political battles with their white conquerors, where violence is legitimised as a proper tool to uphold male dominance over women.
People generally want to conform to their culture. They tend to be as violent and as tolerant of violence as their culture expects and allows. Strategies to ensure that Aborigines no longer endure cultural contexts where violence is normal just have to be implemented. But the nation's thinkers and policy-makers have been baulking at the task.
In her book A Fatal Conjunction, Kimm laments in her concluding chapter that "the continuing public denial that violence is part of traditional culture remains a large part of the 'root of the problem"'.
Kimm also urges the need to place women's rights above cultural rights in law and sentencing.
However, the powerful implications of Kimm's book - that addressing Aboriginal violence requires strategies that tackle its traditional, cultural roots - are circumvented in her last chapter by her insistence that policy stay within the tenets of self-determination and community control of programs.
Kimm emphasises the need to ensure that Aboriginal women themselves determine their own responses, and points to the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council of Central Australia, in a positive light.
Australian Crime Commission figures compiled by Jane Lloyd, an expert in remote indigenous domestic violence, show that 28 years after the establishment of the NPYWC, the violence on the NPY lands remains catastrophic, clearly indicating that women's initiatives and other responses are not working.
Women from the NPY regions are "67 times more likely to be a domestic violence related homicide victim".
Despite the power of the rest of Kimm's book, one is left with the sense that community violence at higher than the mainstream rate is inevitable, and Aboriginal women's empowerment is about community women themselves running the sadly necessary community women's shelters and night patrols and legal centres to secure some safety. There is no breakthrough here and it sounds little better than surrender. Is this the best we can do as a nation for the Aborigines of remote Australia?
Adjustment to the mainstream is not about taking anything from Aborigines. It is about implementing policies and programs that reverse Aboriginal exclusion from mainstream culture, because this is the only effective broad-scale strategy for the acquisition of strong norms against violence. It is critical that governments encourage integration, otherwise Aborigines are condemned to dangerous traditional norms of violence. Those norms not only cause misery and suffering, they also limit the life chances that many Aborigines could enjoy within contemporary Australia.
SOURCE
In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG sees the latest gangland killing in Melbourne as a sign of decline in the quality of Australian life
Health nazis losing obesity war
THE Aussie pie, pizzas and sausage rolls are back in school canteens as the war against child obesity falters and threatens to collapse. Lollies, ice creams, chips and even banned sports drinks have also re-emerged on school menus because thousands of families are snubbing healthier foods.
Nutritionists and dietitians are desperately trying to rescue the $750,000 school health campaign launched five years ago by former Premier Bob Carr. They are offering "low fat" Aussie beef pies, pizzas made with wholemeal pita bread and vegetables and chicken burgers to children who turn their noses up at salads and wraps.
The anti-health push is greatest at secondary level where students leave school grounds to eat at local fast food outlets or order in takeaway pizza on their mobile phones.
Dietitians have told The Daily Telegraph some schools are offering pies to children three times a day - at breakfast, recess and lunch. In a bid to reverse the trend the Healthy Kids School Canteen Association is taking over some school food operations. Low fat pies, pizzas and sausage rolls, with ingredients that meet health guidelines and home-made lasagne are now the front line items aimed at winning customers back.
Friday is pie and pizza day at Holy Cross Primary School at Glenwood in Sydney's west - portion sizes limited to healthy amounts - and the kids are lining up to get their orders. Canteen Association dietitian Jennifer Madz said Holy Cross would become a template across the state. "The problem is parents see the canteen as a treat and expect treat food there. We are trying to change the behaviour," Ms Madz said. "High schools are a special problem where students with money in their pockets go off campus to lunch in local fast food outlets. We are working on a plan to combat that."
Canteens hit by the global recession claim profits have been eroded as students resist low-fat menus.
While most sugary drinks are banned from school canteens, the food industry has manipulated some products to get around the rules. To get a non-milk-based gelato accepted the manufacturer added calcium and reduced the portion size. Banned Powerade became "Powerade Light" and juice was carbonated and sold in a can so children would think it was a softdrink. Under the nutrition rules foods are divided into red (no more than twice a term), amber (to be selected carefully and in smaller servings) and green (fill the menu) categories.
But enforcement has been almost non-existent and the Catholic and independent school sectors are not bound by them.
SOURCE
Black drunk driver negligently burnt to death in a prison van
This is a truly horrible story. Prosecutions must follow
THE Director of Public Prosecutions will be asked to consider criminal charges in the case of an Aboriginal elder who was effectively cooked in the back of a prison van on a scorching day in the West Australian outback. WA Coroner Alastair Hope said yesterday he would ask the DDP to consider whether charges should be laid after finding the death of Mr Ward, 46, whose first name cannot be released for cultural reasons, was “unnecessary and wholly avoidable”.
Mr Hope found “inhumane treatment” led to Mr Ward's death from heat stroke in the pod of the commercially owned prison van, which had no air conditioning and little or no air flow. He criticised the transport company, Global Solutions Ltd (GSL), for arranging Mr Ward's horror 360km journey between the Goldfields towns of Laverton and Kalgoorlie, and accused its custodial guards of colluding in their evidence.
He found the company, the two guards, Nina Stokoe and Graham Powell, and the Department of Corrective Services had all contributed to Mr Ward's “terrible death” on January 27 last year. The coroner found the father of four, from the Goldfields town of Warburton, died of heat stroke when he succumbed to temperatures of 50C inside the van on a searing day, after being picked up for drink-driving the previous day.
Mr Hope said Ms Stokoe and Mr Powell, who provided Mr Ward with only a 600ml bottle of water and did not check on him throughout the journey, had breached their duty of care. He said Mr Ward had no proper method of communicating with the guards, who had colluded before giving unreliable evidence to police about the death. The hearing was told that when Mr Ward eventually arrived unconscious at Kalgoorlie hospital, his body was so hot that staff had been unable to cool him down. Even after an ice bath he had a body temperature of 41.7C. He had a laceration to his head from falling in the vehicle and a 9cm third degree burn to his stomach from lying on its hot metal floor.
Mr Hope said the department had failed to provide GSL with proper means of transport and that the vehicle was “not fit for humans”. The prison van did not have a spare tyre, indicating GSL's “reckless approach” towards the transport of prisoners, he said. “In my view, it is a disgrace that a prisoner in the 21st Century, particularly a prisoner who has not been convicted of any crime, was transported for a long distance in high temperatures in this pod,” Mr Hope said. Among his 14 recommendations, he said the state government must improve its handling of prisoners and review its justice system.
In response, WA Attorney-General Christian Porter said action had already been taken to prevent another “tragic incident” and pledged $3 million and a rollout of 40 new custodial vehicles by December 2010. “Things have improved substantially and I intend to see they improve further,” Mr Porter said. “But it now falls to this government to repair the system that allowed this quite shocking event to occur.”
About 40 protesters demonstrated outside Perth's Central Law Courts, where the coroner delivered his findings. The Deaths in Custody Watch Committee called for improved human rights for Aboriginal people, while Amnesty International called it “a disgrace that a prisoner should be transported in this way in the 21st century”. Aboriginal Legal Services of WA CEO Dennis Eggington said Mr Ward's family was happy with the recommendations but wanted criminal charges laid against the Government.
SOURCE
Victorian government hospital gives woman fatal overdose
Mogadon is well known as a powerful sleeping pill. Why would anybody be given three of them? This sounds deliberate, not accidental. It's not even indicated for depression
A family say they could only watch their mother slowly die after staff at Casey Hospital allegedly gave her an accidental overdose of a sleeping pill. The coroner is investigating the March 30 death of Elsinor Mitchell, 74, who was allegedly given three Mogadon tablets on March 27 when she was not supposed to receive any medication. Ms Mitchell's family say that within 15 minutes of the medication she fell into a coma while being transferred in an ambulance, and they could only watch as her organs shut down over the next three days because doctors were powerless to reverse the damage.
Victoria police have prepared a brief for the coroner, who is reviewing medical records and referring the information to the clinical liaison service for a medical opinion. Southern Health, which runs Casey Hospital, yesterday declined to comment on the incident, saying it was standard procedure not to discuss matters before the coroner. Other medical sources have told the Herald Sun it would typically require a greater dose of Mogadon to overdose.
Ms Mitchell's brother, Alf Hulland, his sister's power of attorney while in hospital, said Ms Mitchell was diagnosed as suffering depression by Casey Hospital doctors and given medication just before being placed in an ambulance to travel to a Heatherton clinic. He claims the hospital's doctors later admitted they realised the mistake only while Ms Mitchell was in transit, but she had already slipped into a coma before they could alert paramedics to the problem.
The Narre Warren mother of five adult children was later rushed to Monash Medical Centre but could not be saved. "A doctor took her youngest son into a room and told us somebody had made a terrible error at Casey Hospital," Mr Hulland said. "She said there would be a big inquiry and it would not be covered up, but apart from that there was nothing more she could do and her organs would shut down so she had 24 to 48 hours at the most to live.
"It is the most distressing thing I have ever had to endure in my entire life - to sit there and watch her die. I think it is absolutely disgraceful. "They had told me that within a fortnight she would be home and back to her normal self again. There was no reason for her to die. "A doctor came over from Casey Hospital the next day and apologised. It is the first time I have seen a doctor cry." Mr Hulland said he could barely recognise his sister in her final hours because her transformation was so severe. "She was a bubbly, happy-go-lucky person who always helped anybody," he said. "She absolutely had a heart of gold."
SOURCE
Pervasive violence is part of traditional Aboriginal life
And only integration and assimilation into mainstream culture offers any prospect of reducing it
In his address to the National Press Club in 2003, Mick Dodson claimed that "violence is not and never was part of Aboriginal tradition ... We have no cultural traditions based on humiliation, degradation, and violation. Let me make this point abundantly clear. Most of the violence, if not all, that Aboriginal communities are experiencing today [is] not part of Aboriginal tradition or culture."
That denies the reality. Pre-contact Aboriginal society was very violent, and that violence and the cultural norms that sustained it continue to generate the extreme levels of violence in today's remote communities.
There is little point in criticising traditional Aboriginal Australia, unless traditions pose dangers for today's Aborigines, and unless we incorporate this reality into policy responses.
Despite considerable evidence that pre-contact Aboriginal Australia had high levels of violence, and that traditional norms concerning violence still operate, policy distortion continues because of a resistance to consider traditional norms of violence.
Even among intellectuals such as Joan Kimm and Louis Nowra, who have bravely pointed to pre-contact origins of today's high rate of Aboriginal violence, evoking the policy implications is resisted.
To secure a less violent, more positive future for Aborigines, today's restrictive conditions on inquiry and policy need to end.
The particularly high level of violence against women in pre-contact Aboriginal Australia can no longer be denied. First-contact explorers and colonists noted with distress the terrible scars and bruises that marked the women due to the frequent brutality of their menfolk.
Stephen Webb's palaeopathology studies of cranial and post-cranial remains verify that before European arrival, violence against Aboriginal women was prevalent across the mainland continent, with women suffering significantly more cranial injuries than men.
The level of Aboriginal violence particularly against women remains shocking. In 2004-05 across four states where records were kept, "indigenous females were 44.1 times more likely to be hospitalised for assault than non-Indigenous females".
To open up this restrictive research climate, we need to de-couple some falsely linked concepts.
In his book Race and Culture, African-American economist and social commentator Thomas Sowell writes that the horror of racial oppression and hatred cannot be denied: "It is difficult to survey the history of racial or ethnic relations without being appalled by the inhumanity, brutality, and viciousness of it all.
"But there are no more futile or dangerous efforts than attempts to redress the wrongs of history."
Sowell also argues that morality and causation are confused: "What is most morally revolting, or morally inspiring, about a given situation may not be what is the most important causal factor" and that "no group was a tabula rasa to begin with".
In the case of Aboriginal Australians, the most "morally revolting factor" might well be the white colonisation of this country.
However, insistent blaming of white colonisation as a primary generator of high Aboriginal violence suppresses the uncomfortable fact that within Aboriginal culture, violence continues to have strong, traditional legitimacy.
Hence, reducing Aboriginal violence to around mainstream levels will entail further shifts away from traditional beliefs, norms, power structures and behaviours.
A key upsetting aspect about critical assessment by Westerners and their intervention in Aboriginal violence is that it seems to ring hollow. What allows westerners to take the moral high ground given their history of imperialism and violence?
People are very malleable regarding their attitude and capacity to tolerate violence. It is culture and its associated belief systems, power structures and norms that largely determine people's tolerance and attitudes concerning violence. The key difference between the West and traditional Aboriginal culture is that only very recently, Western culture developed effective philosophies and associated political and legal systems that could effectively reduce violence.
In contemporary liberal democracies, violence is forbidden. For private citizens there is no legitimised violence apart from self-defence. Within traditional Aboriginal culture, there was considerable legitimate scope for people to use violence. Dreamtime law functioned above all else to protect country against sacrilege and to uphold the social order. Enforcement of correct ceremonial procedures and obligations included harsh violent punishment, sometimes death. Moreover, violence as a means to set things right extended beyond the sacred, rendering family and kinship conflict a dangerous realm too. In this traditional zeitgeist, there was no "individual right" to counter this.
Ceremonial mistakes and violations were very frightening events for traditional Aborigines because they triggered the wrath of the powerful ancestral creation beings, threatening the country on which life depended.
In such a context, causation rather than intention was the primary consideration, and members of the tribe, particularly male elders, had the right and obligation to carry out punishment against the wrongdoers. Even accidental sacrilegious acts could be subject to the death penalty.
Furthermore, the identity of a guilty party could be determined through irrational sorcerous or magical means. In one instance described by T.G.H. Strehlow, relatives make a spindle from a murdered man's hair, and watch for when it breaks while it spins into a hair string.
The distance and the direction of the spindle's travel indicate the murderer. Disputes regarding the identity of culprits identified through sorcery could lead to deadly vendettas.
Sacred law discriminated on the basis of sex, with more prohibitions placed on women. Certainly, men faced restrictions on pain of death to many sacred places, objects and ceremonies. However, for a woman, there were more sacred objects that she could not see or touch, more sacred sites that she could not be in or near, and more sacred ceremonies that she should not participate in or witness, even accidentally, on pain of death.
Surely most nerve-racking, this could affect essential daily tasks such as water collection. As noted by the Strehlows, "even waters open to women and children, if they were at all near a sacred site, had to be approached carefully".
W. Lloyd Warner detailed several examples of east Arnhem Land's Murnjin men and women being killed for willing or accidental totemic and ceremonial transgressions, noting that "if women look at a totemic emblem they are killed by their own group".
Even husbands were expected not to save their "guilty" wife, although there were brave husbands who did.
Despite the misogyny of the 18th and 19th century western world, white colonial officials and explorers were shocked by what they saw.
In the 1840s, explorer and magistrate Edward John Eyre wrote very critically of the white occupation of Australia, which he called aggression: "To sanction this aggression, we have not, in the abstract, the slightest shadow of either right or justice; we have not even the extenuation of endeavouring to compensate those we have injured, or the merit of attempting to mitigate the sufferings our presence inflicts."
Eyre's ability to see the colonial injustice and aggression against Aboriginal Australia did not compromise his ability to decry the subjugated status of the Aboriginal women.
"Women are often sadly ill-treated by their husbands or friends, in addition to the dreadful life of drudgery, and privation, and hardship they always have to undergo; they are frequently beaten about the head, with waddies, in the most dreadful manner, or speared in the limbs for the most trivial offences.
"No one takes the part of the weak or the injured, or ever attempts to interfere with the infliction of such severe punishments ... Few women will be found, upon examination, to be free from frightful scars upon the head, or the marks of spear wounds about the body.
"I have seen a young woman, who, from the number of these marks, appeared to have been almost riddled with spear wounds."
Sadly there are thousands of examples of legitimised injurious violence, debilitating beliefs and misogyny of traditional origin that continue to give power to some and to hurt many others in Australia's remote Aboriginal communities.
What shocks outsiders is often seen as ordinary by the communities. This other country is a dangerous country.
Joan Kimm and David McKnight, within their respective fields of legal history and anthropology, recount how the tolerance of violence or thepropensity to behave violently can increase markedly in the same people when they move out of the mainstream and into traditional community. In his book From Hunting to Drinking, McKnight relates how Mornington Island youths were able to treat their white girlfriends well in the mainstream context but became violent towards them in the traditional context.
This suggests that when and where to be violent is a matter of choice. It is a strong indicator that the violence has less to do with Aboriginal men's loss or brokenness due to white colonisation, such as separation from their spiritual lands or being directly affected by the Stolen Generation; or the need for anger management or cultural healing; or even the curse of alcohol or other violence-promoting substance abuse.
No doubt these realities can be contributing factors. Nevertheless, it has more to do with traditional expectations, mores and permissions to be violent.
No matter how unfairly they, their family or their community have been treated or continue to be treated by mainstream Australia, it is - in seeming irony - the mainstream context where Aboriginal violence is more effectively suppressed and less tolerated by Aborigines themselves.
It is in the traditional context, on lands of dreams and ideals hard-won after years of political battles with their white conquerors, where violence is legitimised as a proper tool to uphold male dominance over women.
People generally want to conform to their culture. They tend to be as violent and as tolerant of violence as their culture expects and allows. Strategies to ensure that Aborigines no longer endure cultural contexts where violence is normal just have to be implemented. But the nation's thinkers and policy-makers have been baulking at the task.
In her book A Fatal Conjunction, Kimm laments in her concluding chapter that "the continuing public denial that violence is part of traditional culture remains a large part of the 'root of the problem"'.
Kimm also urges the need to place women's rights above cultural rights in law and sentencing.
However, the powerful implications of Kimm's book - that addressing Aboriginal violence requires strategies that tackle its traditional, cultural roots - are circumvented in her last chapter by her insistence that policy stay within the tenets of self-determination and community control of programs.
Kimm emphasises the need to ensure that Aboriginal women themselves determine their own responses, and points to the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Women's Council of Central Australia, in a positive light.
Australian Crime Commission figures compiled by Jane Lloyd, an expert in remote indigenous domestic violence, show that 28 years after the establishment of the NPYWC, the violence on the NPY lands remains catastrophic, clearly indicating that women's initiatives and other responses are not working.
Women from the NPY regions are "67 times more likely to be a domestic violence related homicide victim".
Despite the power of the rest of Kimm's book, one is left with the sense that community violence at higher than the mainstream rate is inevitable, and Aboriginal women's empowerment is about community women themselves running the sadly necessary community women's shelters and night patrols and legal centres to secure some safety. There is no breakthrough here and it sounds little better than surrender. Is this the best we can do as a nation for the Aborigines of remote Australia?
Adjustment to the mainstream is not about taking anything from Aborigines. It is about implementing policies and programs that reverse Aboriginal exclusion from mainstream culture, because this is the only effective broad-scale strategy for the acquisition of strong norms against violence. It is critical that governments encourage integration, otherwise Aborigines are condemned to dangerous traditional norms of violence. Those norms not only cause misery and suffering, they also limit the life chances that many Aborigines could enjoy within contemporary Australia.
SOURCE
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
