Now that the worst of COVID-19 is over, we must focus on the economy

Scott Morrison

Several weeks ago I said that Australians were a strong people, but with the pandemic upon us, we were about to find out just how strong we were.

Facing the most serious threat to our way of life in generations, Australians have stepped up.  We’ve adapted, made sacrifices, and made sure we have supported each other.

We’ve worked together – employers and employees to save jobs; banks working to save businesses and homes; and even in politics, we’ve found common ground on many fronts through the National Cabinet of states and territories with the federal government.

For many of us, the changes have brought home what is most important – the bonds of family, community and country.

Millions of Australians have been hit by devastating job losses, reduced hours, and business uncertainty. A hard reminder about just how much we depend on a strong economy for the essentials we rely on.

At the same time we have experienced the vulnerability and frustration of isolation, especially tough on those who are older and were more vulnerable to begin with.

These sacrifices have enabled us to do what most countries haven’t. We have been winning our fight against the virus, flattening the curve at the same time as boosting our health system.

While we are no more immune than we were three months ago, we now have much stronger protections in place in our health system.

Like a physical recovery, economic recoveries take time and effort.

Having taken up the fight to the virus and having bought time with emergency lifelines such as JobKeeper and JobSeeker programs, we are now reopening our economy.

The National Cabinet, made up of the state, territory, and federal leaders, has agreed on a three-step plan to achieve a COVID-safe economy and society and is implementing that plan. Step one is almost done.

A key part of step one is finally getting kids back into school. This is also well underway, especially here in NSW.

Treasury estimates that the benefits of step one being lifted will result in 250,000 people going back to work, including 83,000 people in NSW. Step one will put $1 billion back into the NSW economy every month.

By the end of step three, 850,000 people will be able to get back in work including 280,000 in NSW. With NSW representing one-third of our national economy, reopening NSW safely is a critical part of our national recovery.

In the coming months, we need to keep building confidence and momentum in our economy. This will enable us to shift our reliance from emergency assistance programs like JobKeeper, to real and sustainable incomes that can only come by restoring jobs in the workplace.

JobKeeper is an emergency $130 billion lifeline provided by the federal government to more than 6 million Australians in their time of greatest need. It’s the most expensive program in Australia’s history. And then there is the doubling of JobSeeker payments to help all those who are unable to access JobKeeper through their workplace.

These are important emergency supports, but at more than $20 billion per month they cannot go on forever. There is no money tree. All of this money has to be borrowed and paid back.

The JobKeeper and the expanded JobSeeker programs are buying us valuable time to chart our way back, but they are not the plan.

Getting people back into real jobs in growing businesses is the only sustainable way we will get Australians and our economy back on their feet.

But looking to the future, I would rather be in Australia than anywhere else in the world.

The foundation of our recovery will be continued success on the health front.

That means having a COVID safe Australia. Relying on the capability we are building to track and trace the virus. More Australians downloading the COVIDSafe app will strengthen this capacity – it is vital to our national efforts.

As well, businesses, unions and governments are working on efforts to ensure our workplaces are COVID safe. For many businesses, that will mean adjustments to existing layouts, practices and policies.

Beyond the here and now, we need to look at policy settings across all areas and ask a simple question: Are they fit-for-purpose to create jobs and fire economic growth?

On tax, on getting state and federal governments to work better together, in enabling workers and their employers to do better deals where they can both benefit, on getting rid of job destroying government regulation, on making energy more affordable and reliable, and making sure we are training Australians with the skills they need to be successful in their jobs.

This pandemic has shown we can never be complacent about the things we need to do to grow our economy and generate jobs.

While we face the greatest economic shock in 90 years, I am an optimist about what is ahead.

Throughout this pandemic, Australians have shown each other what we can achieve when we work together.

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Coronavirus Australia: We can’t spend the rest of our lives avoiding risks

How good are Australians in a ­crisis? The number of active cases of COVID-19 has fallen steadily for more than six weeks. At the start of last month, there were almos­t 5000 known carriers. Today there is a tenth as many.

If you want to know what a health crisis really looks like, turn to Britain, where 2642 fatalities have been announced in the past week, pushing deaths per million to 521. In Australia there have been just four per million.

That suggests it is safe to let the experts stand down and put the politicians back in charge. The extraordinary powers given to medical officers and police chiefs should be withdrawn to allow the hard work to begin.

Last week’s unemployment figures are just a taste of the post-pandemic misery. JobKeeper payments have kept Australians employed for now, but not every job is salvageable. Hundreds of thousands more people are likely to be out of work when the payments are wound back.

By any reasonable measure, the health crisis has been averted. Yet the experts who were so swift to alert us to the danger in the first place are slow to admit it.

A second wave, however unwelcome, would almost certainly be smaller than the first. We are far better prepared for its arrival thanks to the investment in ­testing, tracing and additional hospital facilities.

Credit also belongs to the Aust­ralian people, who have sacrificed­ much to beat this virus. Those who still have jobs should be allowed to return to them.

As Scott Morrison was at pains to point out on May 1, opening up the economy involves risk. There will be further outbreaks. More people will be infected and some could die.

Yet we are beyond the point where the pain averted by keeping people at home is greater than the pain it causes. And we are well beyond­ the point when the damage­ to the economy ($4bn a week) can be seen as a necessary or proportionate response.

Let us recall the reason for taking these drastic measures. In late March the virus appeared to be spreading exponentially, such that demand for acute hospital beds might outstrip supply.

The lockdown, together with the work of federal Health Minister Greg Hunt, ensured that didn’t happen. The number of intensive care unit beds tripled to more than 7000. Fewer than 100 were occupied by COVID-19 patients at the height of the pandemic. Yesterday 11 were in use.

With our borders closed, the risk that another wave could be large enough to swamp our health services is extremely slight.

The risk is even lower in South Australia. A swift response from Premier Steven Marshall — the closing of state borders, enforced quarantine for South Australians returning home and the appointment of a state co-ordinator under the Emergency Management Act — allowed SA to contain the virus better than most.

Only one new case has been detected in the state over the past three weeks. Of the 439 cases identified, 435 have recovered. Sadly, the other four died.

Yet bars and pubs remain closed. Cafes and restaurants are limited to 10 patrons at a time, making reopening a loss-making option for most.

Police can issue a $5000 on-the-spot fine to anyone reckless enough to invite more than seven guests to a wedding or 20 mourners to an indoor funeral.

Under whose authority is this extraordinary power given to the police? The authority of the SA Police Commissioner himself, Grant Stevens, who was appointed state co-ordinator of emergency manageme­nt on March 22.

Now that SA is, as near as ­dammit, virus free, Stevens is ­entitled to pat himself on the back, drop in at Government House and relinquish his emergency power, which will otherwise not expire until the end of the month.

Don’t hold your breath. Like the health experts appointed to save us from becoming the Italy of the south, Stevens is in no hurry to return to his day job.

SA Chief Public Health Officer Nicola Spurrier put on a “Fri-yay” top to celebrate the “fantastic” news of the state’s clean bill of health, but seems less than eager to step out of the limelight. There was no room for complacency, she warned. There was always the threat of a second wave.

Expert as Spurrier and Stevens might be in their respective fields, health and public order is not the expertise we need at this moment.

Our challenge now is avoiding deep, damaging recession. We need experts in assessing the nationa­l interest, weighing risks and evaluating competing public policy goals. We need experts who can balance the need for a healthy population against the imperative of a healthy economy, particularly in SA, where unemployment is at 7.2 per cent, the highest in the country.

In other words, we need the expertis­e of parliamentarians whose jobs depend on recognising the public interest. The power to make decisions should be remove­d from unelected officials and returned to those with a popular mandate.

The hard road is still ahead. Extraordinary public health measures that impinge on indiv­idual liberty were popular six weeks ago, when the shops were out of toilet paper. Today, they are a burden.

Having controlled this virus better than almost anyone expec­ted, by normalising social ­distancing, reducing international arrivals to a trickle and restricting interstate travel to essential business, governments must act quickly to lift restrictions.

The speed of economic recovery will depend on the willingness of businesses to take risks by investin­g and hiring, despite the uncertainties that will bedevil us.

Governments must lead by exampl­e before the culture of risk-avoidance that takes hold in a pandemic becomes entrenched in public and commercial life.

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Public holiday date is moved to create another long weekend for Australians in a bid to boost domestic tourism

A public holiday has been moved forward to create a new long weekend in Queensland as the premier pushes to boost domestic tourism.

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk announced on Thursday the usual mid-week public holiday for Ekka - the Royal Queensland Show - is being moved back to Friday August 12.

'The Ekka public holiday will move from Wednesday, 12 August to Friday, 14 August to support our tourism industry,' Ms Palaszczuk tweeted.

'For one year only, People’s Day will become the People’s Long Weekend and I’m calling on Queenslanders to use it to boost local tourism.'

The show has been scrapped this year because of COVID-19, but it is hoped the creation of a long weekend will encourage families to further explore their local region.

Ms Palaszczuk on Thursday has also urged the state to plan winter holidays within their regions during the upcoming school break.

She said there had been confusion over the school holiday restrictions, but that Queenslanders would be permitted to travel up to 250km.

'They can holiday in Queensland in their regional areas so I really want to encourage people as much as possible to start planning those holidays and support our tourism industry,' she said.

The announcements come as she faces pressure from the tourism industry and other stakeholders to open the borders.

NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian has repeatedly pushed for Queensland to relax the rules to allow interstate travellers to visit the Sunshine State for a holiday.

But Queensland is holding firm, saying the borders will remain closed until the southern states can bring their COVID-19 cases under control.

Transport Minister Mark Bailey said on Thursday the government won't take health advice from NSW, which has recorded 49 deaths from the virus and is still regularly recording new cases.

'We won't be lectured to by the worst performing state,' he said. 'It's time for Gladys and the NSW government to get their act together and start performing as well as Queensland has on the health front.'

Ms Palaszczuk agreed. 'I hope they get their community transmission under control because that means we will be able to open up sooner,' she said.

The premier is also facing pressure from One Nation leader Pauline Hanson who has engaged a pro bono constitutional lawyer to represent businesses affected by the border closure in a High Court challenge.

'It is unconstitutional for Premier Palaszczuk to close Queensland's border and her actions are causing me a great deal of concern for the economic viability of our state,' Senator Hanson wrote on Facebook.

Ms Palaszczuk said a court challenge was a matter for Ms Hanson. 'But, by the time any action gets to the High Court, I'm quite sure the borders would be open.'

Queensland recorded no new cases of COVID-19 overnight. There as 12 active cases remaining

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Reading wars hit home during lockdown lessons

“Dogs say ‘woof’, cats say ‘meow’, what does the letter ‘a’ say?”

And so it began. Perched at the dining table, armed with a 257-page guide on teaching a child to read, I was about to try to do just that. My daughter, Margot, had been at school for two months when the niggling concerns about her reading progress began.

Aged 5½, she could read and write her name independently, but not much else. Despite years of reading to her, singing songs and learning rhymes — many of which were learned by heart — she had difficulty identifying all the letters of the alphabet consistently, while her ability to link the letters with their various sounds was hit-and-miss.

Her teacher reassured me that she was where she was meant to be for a foundation-level student. Still, I was haunted by a conversation I’d once had with a prominent education academic who suggested all the journalists she knew had their children reading by the time they started school.

One evening, I sat down with my daughter to read one of the readers sent home from school and noticed how her eyes were automatically drawn to the pictures. It was hardly surprising; the images were obnoxiously large, overshadowing the much smaller text. As I suggested she point at each word and try to sound out each of the letters, she ignored me and started blurting out what she guessed they might be based on the image.

Frustrated by my gentle attempts at bringing her attention back to the words, she told me crossly that Eagle Eye was helping her to read.

As an education journalist, I know all about this Eagle Eye character who encourages children to guess an unfamiliar word by looking at the picture. Along with pals Lips the Fish (“get your lips ready to try the first sound”) and Skippy the Frog (“let’s skip that word altogether”), these child-friendly characters are a common feature of classrooms that adhere to the balanced literacy approach to reading instruction.

Balanced literacy emerged from whole-language reading instruction, spawned in the late 1960s, whereby children were expected to learn to read whole words naturally, merely as a result of plentiful exposure to books and writing. While balanced literacy concedes that children may need some guidance, it is based on a problematic theory called multi-cueing, also known as three-­cueing, which surmises that a reader looks for meaning, structure and visual cues to help make sense of what is on the page.

Countless researchers from across the globe have dismissed multi-cueing as an ineffective system on which to base reading ­instruction lacking in any evidentiary basis. Yet cueing strategies are popular in many primary classrooms because children often experience some early success using picture cues and context to identify words, especially when aided by repetitive and predictable texts.

However, as Sir Jim Rose, whose landmark 2006 review of reading in the UK was key to the development of Britain’s Primary National Strategy for Reading, has pointed out, “children who routinely adopt alternative cues for reading unknown words, instead of learning to decode them, later find themselves stranded when texts become more demanding and meanings less predictable”.

Through my work I had written about many schools that had transformed their reading results and they typically shared one common feature: they had implemented a phonics program.

While the mere mention of the word phonics risks sparking an outbreak in the long-running reading wars, the debate has at least moved on from whether to teach phonics — the research says we should — to how it is best taught.

In Victoria, where I live, the­ ­Department of Education and Training promotes a balanced literacy approach to teaching reading, in which phonics is taught in ways deemed “meaningful to children”, such as reading books, having fun with rhymes and writing their own stories.

“Phonics instruction should take place within a meaningful, communicative, rich pedagogy, and within genuine literacy events,” the department’s Literacy Teaching Toolkit states.

With phonics in context, a typical lesson might involve the teacher reading with students and periodically stopping at a word to discuss the relationships between letters and sounds (known as phonemes). Occasionally there may be a lesson on a letter or sound, but they are not typically presented in a systematic, cumulative way.

In many other states, such as NSW and South Australia, public education authorities have endorsed a different approach called systematic synthetic phonics. Also known as “blended” phonics, it involves teaching a child about the individual letter-sound relationships first, then having the child combine or synthesise these sounds to form words. While learning to read successfully entails more than simply learning phonics skills — it also depends on the development of phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension skills — major reviews of the teaching of reading in Australia, Britain and the US during the past 18 years have consistently identified ­phonics as a key component of an effective program.

The research also comes down on the side of synthetic phonics.

According to the NSW Education Department’s guide for schools on effective reading ­instruction: “There are a number of different approaches to teaching phonics, with varying levels of effectiveness. The most effective method is called synthetic phonics.” The document highlights results from a longitudinal study undertaken in Scotland that compared synthetic phonics with two analytic phonics programs.

At the end of these programs, children in the synthetic phonics group were reading around seven months ahead of children in the other two groups and were spelling eight to nine months ahead of the other groups.

Seven years on, those in the synthetic phonics group had extended their advantage further.

I was attracted to the simplicity at the core of the synthetic phonics approach; the way children were taught sequentially, starting out learning some simple letter-sound relationships, working towards the more complex end of the spectrum. For a parent with no teaching expertise, it seemed somewhat achievable. And with schools effectively set to close indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic, I finally had the time to help my daughter learn to read.

Having asked several literacy specialists and teachers what programs they rated, I settled on one devised by US author Stephen Parker called Teaching a Preschooler to Read (also suitable for primary schoolers). Parker, a retired teacher, has a knack for using plain language to explain a pretty technical topic. The guide, aimed specifically at parents, maps out clearly what to teach, when to teach it and how.

My first task was to refamiliarise myself with what is known in literacy circles as the alphabetic code. As Parker explains, the alphabet itself is only part of the code, with the 26 letters symbolising 44 different sounds. There are 20 vowel sounds (such as the short A in apple or axe but also the longer A in acorn) and 24 consonant sounds (B in bat and D in dad but also “th” and “sh” and the “ng” in king).

A list of those 44 phonemes was my constant companion during the coming weeks, and I swear I started to have nightmares about mixing up those short and long vowel sounds.

Stage one of the program kicked off with teaching my daughter the five short vowel sounds as well as M, N and S .

With a new Sharpie I wrote each letter on an index card and we practised saying the letters and their corresponding sounds every day. We also started to pay more attention to letters in our environment. Walking down the street, I’d point to the number plates on cars and ask Margot whether she could spot any of “her letters”, as we’d call them, and sound them out.

With her confidence growing, we moved on to decoding simple two and three-letter words. As with the letters, I wrote them on the index cards. To make a game, I had her flip them over and attempt to sound them out.

“A-n … An!” She got it on the first attempt.

I asked when she would use such a word.

“I would like an apple,” she replied. I was quietly impressed.

She moved on to the next word.

“M-a-n … Man.” Again no problem.

“N-a-n … Nan.” Ditto.

And that brought us to the word “sun”. She looked at it, then looked at me with a strained ­expression.

“Snake,” Margot said. I asked her to try again, this time concentrating on each letter. “Sam! S-s-s-sit!” She was becoming frantic, reeling off any word she could think of that started with S.

We were done for the day.

The next time we sat down to practise phonics I introduced her to the Decoding Dragon. The invention of Melbourne linguist and author Lyn Stone, the dragon’s job was to chase away those Guessing Monsters, including the hit-and-miss Eagle Eye.

While I was no fan of Eagle Eye, I decided to redeploy him. I told Margot that Eagle Eye had a new job and would help her focus on each of the letters as the Decoding Dragon would help her to sound them out.

Our little sessions continued. Some days were great. Others — quite a few actually — were a grind. Small children have very short attention spans and I learned my daughter has quite a stubborn streak. Overall, I could see a trend of improvement and a growing confidence. Each time she successfully sounded out a new word, I’d place the index card into her “special word box”.

“Look how many words are in your word box!” I said one morning. “I know,” she said, “I’m killing it.”

I made a decision early on to be upfront with the school about tackling phonics at home and my intention to replace the predictable readers for decodable books.

The teacher was receptive and supportive, going so far as to recommend several online apps for decodable readers, many of which were free as a result of the pandemic. However, concerned about the amount of screentime we were already having, I decided to purchase a hard-copy set. At $420 for 60 readers, they weren’t cheap but I felt it was a necessary investment.

One morning I took to Twitter and mentioned how excited I was that the readers had arrived in the post, only to see first hand how divisive their use is in literacy circles.

With titles such as Pat the Rat, The Pan and The Map, decodables are designed so a novice reader can practice reading the words they have already been explicitly taught.

“A pan sits!” mocked one teacher. “Fit rats. No thankyou.”

“Read to your daughter with ‘real-world’ words,” demanded another.

I won’t lie; I don’t particularly love the books. The language is basic and sometimes seems stilted. They won’t win any literary prizes. But they are not aimed at me — a proficient reader — but at a child, for whom deciphering the strange squiggles on the page is a hugely laborious task.

Further, they are merely a stepping stone along the path to becoming a reader

We’ve been at this caper for two months now and have just moved on to stage two of the program, which involves introducing the letters D, P, G and T. In the meantime Margot’s teachers, who have been doing an exceptional job teaching the children remotely, have introduced the digraph “th” as well as a bank of common ­English words such as the, is, was and my.

With school set to resume next week, I find myself reflecting on her progress. Can she read independently? Not even close; we are still very much at the start of this process. But I no longer feel that underlying sense of guilt about whether I could be doing more to help her out.

The word box is getting quite full and my daughter can now read many of them automatically. At night, when I read her a bedtime story, she will stop me to point out words she knows.

The other day I told her she was starting to read like a grown up. “I know,” she replied, “The Decod­ing Dragon has been helping me.”

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 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

‘It is unconstitutional’: Pauline Hanson threatens to take ‘scaremongering, lawless’ Queensland premier to the High Court for refusing to open up the borders

Pauline is referring to Section 92 of the constitition, which reads "On the imposition of uniform duties of customs, trade, commerce, and intercourse among the States, whether by means of internal carriage or ocean navigation, shall be absolutely free." That "absolutely free" is hard to get around so Annastacia Palaszczuk is clearly breaking the law with her restrictions

Pauline Hanson is threatening to take the Queensland premier to court over the state's controversial decision to keep the borders shut, despite the coronavirus curve flattening nationwide.

With businesses crippled across the state, Annastacia Palaszczuk has insisted keeping the state borders closed is for the good of people's health.

There have been just 1,058 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Queensland, and only 12 known active cases.

It comes as restrictions were eased or lifted entirely across the country, with NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian even encouraging families to book holidays.

With Queensland refusing to do the same, Ms Hanson has vowed to 'take the premier on' over the 'unconstitutional' and 'political' border closures.

'I raised last week that I think it's unconstitutional what the premier of Queensland is doing keeping borders closed for trade and commerce under section 92 of the Australian constitution', Ms Hanson told Sky News.

'Speaking to other people, they totally agree with me.

'I'm calling on Queenslanders who've been affected by either their families being destroyed, or inconvenience or trade.

'Those tourist operators who rely on tourists coming there have had their businesses affected.

'It's unconstitutional to do what they're doing, it's important to hold her to account and I think it's a political move what she's doing.

'When I see my state in dire straights, you've got communities that are dying, we need the tourists from down south coming up through Queensland.

Labor's Ms Palaszczuk, who says she is putting the health of the people she leads first, is also facing pressure from other states to remove the border block.

'The very, very earliest, and only if everything went absolutely perfectly, we might be able to think about opening up our border in July,' Chief Health Officer Jeanette Young said on Wednesday.

'If the tourism industry wants a more realistic scenario they should be preparing for September.'

Dr Young says she herself would like certainty over when the border will open, but cannot commit to any timeframe.

She said a September re-opening may not even be feasible if interstate cases are not brought under control.

Senator Hanson said she had engaged a pro bono constitutional lawyer to represent businesses affected by the border closure in a High Court challenge.

'It is unconstitutional for premier Palaszczuk to close Queensland's border and her actions are causing me a great deal of concern for the economic viability of our state,' Senator Hanson wrote on Facebook.

'There is no cure or vaccine for the coronavirus, and until there is, all states and territories must learn to live with the virus. 

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Australians should say 'ya'll' instead of 'ladies and gentlemen' - according to politically correct new push for 'gender-neutral language'

Australians should be saying 'y'all' instead of 'ladies and gentlemen' or 'boys and girls', according to the United Nations, which has intensified its push for 'gender-neutral language'.

UN Women Australia, a national branch of the global organisation, tweeted part of a its new 'gender-neutral dictionary' on Monday.

The list urged people to replace common words such as 'landlord', 'husband/wife' and 'manpower' with 'owner', 'spouse' and 'workforce'.

A more comprehensive list on the website directed Australians to use Americanisms such as 'y'all' or 'folks' instead of 'ladies and gentlemen' or 'boys and girls'.

According to the guidelines on the website, the list was made to promote gender equality by abandoning gender-based pronouns, such as 'he' and 'she', and replace them with generic terms, such as 'they'.

New South Wales One Nation leader Mark Latham described the guidelines as 'ludicrous'. 'I'd tell them - y'all crazy,' he told The Daily Telegraph.

'My advice to them is that if they want to use "y'all" I'd strongly advice them to go and live in the United States, go to Alabama.'

Mr Latham said UN Women Australia - which strives to achieve gender equality around the world - should be closed down.

The Institute of Public Affairs' Dr Bella D'Abrera said the recommendations curtail free speech.

'The UN's ridiculous attempt to curtail free speech by dictating which words we can and cannot use is a fundamental attack on the very human rights it purports to defend,' she said.

She claimed the UN is more interested in 'social engineering' than maintaining international peace.

The tweet garnered thousands of responses slamming the organisation for the 'tone deaf' post.  'Stop trying to control people's language. It's creepy and unnecessary,' one woman wrote.

Another pointed out many languages other than English largely comprise gendered words.

'Are you going to rewrite all languages that incorporate grammatical gender? Or is that suppressing a culture,' they asked.

'The coronavirus is ripping through countries killing hundreds of thousands of people and this is what this tone deaf incompetent organization is focused on,' a third said.

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Retirees facing financial as well as health risks in coronavirus pandemic

Spare a thought for self-funded retirees in these difficult times. Not only are they in the age bracket most at risk from the virus, but their financial wellbeing in retirement is being put at substantial risk.

The collapse in the stock market, including among most blue chip stocks, is just the start of their financial pain. These big businesses, even if they survive, aren’t likely to pay out the dividends they once did for years to come, if ever.

The financial plans of self-funded retirees are built around dividend projections which therefore no longer apply, and with interest rates so low its not as though they can simply transfer their saving into cash accounts and do any better.

The RBA cash rate is at a record low.

The difficulties self-funded retirees face in low interest rate environments is the flip side to the benefits those of us with homes loans get from lower rates for borrowing.

Lower interest rates has become a way of life, but the prospects of rates surging north again anytime soon seems unlikely. Even if it does happen, it will only be in conjunction with inflation, which erodes spending power at the same time.

On the policy front, there isn’t much there for self-funded retirees to cushion the blow. While Jobseeker and JobKeeper are doling out tens of billions of taxpayers dollars to keep working age Australians in jobs or at least above the poverty line, self-funded retirees are getting no such support.

Even pensioners have received a boost to their pensions to help them get through these tough times. But the self-funded retirees who voted en-masse against Bill Shorten and his franking credits policy have become the forgotten people among Coalition supporters.

Their loyalty hasn’t translated into being looked after now. And because Labor is still licking its wounds from last year’s May election defeat, it hasn’t exactly been inclined to highlight their plight and put pressure on the government to do something to help this large voting cohort.

Rather, Labor has focused its attention on the plight of many casuals who are missing out on JobKeeper, and the university sector which isn’t eligible for the payments. Or childcare users who would benefit from free childcare continuing for longer. Or workers for foreign companies ineligible for JobKeeper. Or indeed anyone who might benefit from Newstart not returning to the low levels it was pegged at previously.

What about self-funded retirees? They truly are the forgotten people in this crisis. Taken for granted by a government that would not have won the last election had it not been for their support. Forgotten by an opposition that has written them off politically.

While I have long been critical of the unsustainable tax breaks for many older Australians, especially those with very large savings, the self-funded retirees who only just miss out on a part pension and concession card benefits are the ones caught in the middle right now.

As Ian Henschke from National Seniors has pointed out, some self-funded retirees — because of this crisis — are now drawing on an annual payout from their investments lower than the annual pension. To survive they would need to draw down their savings right at a time when their value has been halved. He wants to see discussion about legislating a universal pension in the wake of this crisis to ensure that can’t happen.

Whether that is a long-term solution or not is debatable — indeed whether it is fiscally viable is highly debatable. But there is little doubt this cohort of senior Australians deserves more than the cold shoulder.

Especially from a Coalition government.

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Whitehaven Coal's $700m Vickery coal mine expansion plan clears another hurdle

WHITEHAVEN Coal has cleared another hurdle in its push for a $700 million coal mine expansion near Gunnedah, in north-eastern NSW.

The Department of Planning, Industry and Environment has recommended the project is "approvable" and pushed the application to the Independent Planning Commission (IPC).

The application seeks to extend the Vickery coal mine, about 25km out of Gunnedah, and develop a new coal handling and preparation plant, as well as a rail spur line to connect to the main railway that leads to the Port of Newcastle. This would mean the end of coal trucks transporting the goods on the road to Gunnedah.

The project - which went on public exhibition in the latter half of 2018 - attracted 560 submissions with 345 in support of the project, and 201 who opposed the plan.

In September last year, Vickery Coal submitted an amended application. It's expected to generate 450 jobs as well as 500 during construction, as well as a net benefit of $1.16 billion to the state.

The Department released its report on Tuesday and highlighted key issues for the IPC to consider which included impacts on water resources, amenity and biodiversity.

The report from the department will now be considered by the IPC who will hold a further public hearing in coming weeks. The IPC must make a final determination on the project within 12 weeks.

Whitehaven Coal issued a statement on Wednesday welcoming the release of the report.

"We know there is strong support for Vickery from the comprehensive community consultation process that has already been undertaken - 60% of public submissions to the Department of Planning and 75% to the IPC called for the Project to be approved," Whitehaven Coal Managing Director and CEO Paul Flynn said

But in April, the mining giant put all expansion decisions on hold due to "volatile financial market conditions", including the Vickery mine expansion.

"While coal markets in the March quarter have demonstrated their resilience, volatile financial market conditions caused Whitehaven to continue to be cautious in allocating capital to expansion," the company said at the time.

Lock the Gate - a vocal opponent of the expansion plan - has long maintained the coal mine "will damage local groundwater, put an iconic heritage property at risk, and worsen the social damage large-scale mining has already inflicted on the local community".

SOURCE
 
 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

How scrapping ‘free’ childcare will hurt providers, parents and children

In recent days both the Prime Minister Scott Morrison and the Education Minister Dan Tehan have indicated that the “free” childcare arrangement they initially promised for six months may be shelved as early as June 28.

To understand why this will be catastrophic for parents and centres you only have to look to the comments the PM himself made when announcing the rescue package.

“Child care and early childhood education is critical,” Prime Minister Morrison explained.

“Particularly for those Australians who rely on it so they can go to work every day, particularly those who are working in such critical areas. I don’t want a parent to have to choose between feeding their kids and having their kids looked after, or having their education being provided.”

He continued: “This virus is going to take enough from Australians without putting Australian parents in that position of having to choose between the economic wellbeing of their family or the care and support and education of their children. I won’t cop a situation where a parent is put in that place with their kids.”

If the government proceeds with its reported plan to pull the rug out on free childcare and “snap back” to the old system on June 28 that is precisely the situation many parents will face.

And other children will no longer have access to the education and support their early learning currently provides – not necessarily because of their parent’s positions – but because up to 86 per cent of childcare centres will be at risk of closing if the old system is suddenly switched back on.

The government’s own review of its rescue package was reported yesterday and it indicates that 86 per cent of centres said the package had stopped them from closing its doors. All of those centres will be in jeopardy without the current relief in place.

According to the government review, attendance rates at centres across the board are currently just 63 per cent of ordinary times, which is well below break-even point, and not viable. Without the lure of free care, operators are expecting those numbers to drop further still.

Given more than 600,000 Australians lost work last month alone it’s highly unlikely parents will be able to afford the same level of care now that they could three months ago.

The government intervened in April because parents were fleeing from centres in droves, driven by either health concerns related to the pandemic, or drastically changed financial positions, or both.

The health risk of COVID-19 is certainly less now than it was in April, but the devastating economic damage this pandemic has unleashed remains alive and well – and is unlikely to be repaired any time soon.

Charging full fees again will place unsustainable economic pressure on parents who are already squeezed; many will no longer be able to afford access to the education and care their children deserve.

Without children enrolled close to pre-COVID-19 numbers this vital sector’s ability to survive will be compromised.

The Prime Minister has said free childcare is not sustainable. But withdrawing this relief early and attempting to snap back while we are still in the midst of the economic fall out of this health crisis is not sustainable either.

Providing “free childcare” is costly and not perfect. But it won’t cost Australia nearly as much as it will if the early childhood education sector falls over altogether. We cannot afford that collapse – not for our economy, our communities and least of all our children.

Instead of unwinding this reform we need to strive for better and spend the next few weeks and months ensuring the early childhood education and care sector is strong enough to emerge from COVID-19 not just intact, but better than ever. For children, educators and families.

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Turnbull left us a dud school curriculum

In his recent memoir, A Bigger Picture, Malcolm Turnbull presents an ego-centred, delusional account of the way he single-handedly solved the school funding issue and ensured Australian students’ dismal performance in international tests would improve.

Wrong on both accounts. Not only was the Gonski 2.0 funding model flawed, inequitable and guilty of penalising low-fee schools, especially Catholic, but the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools also proved to be a dud calculated to dumb down the curriculum further, ensuring even lower standards.

Chapter 40 of the former prime minister’s book centres on the May 2, 2017, press conference announcing a new school funding agreement titled Gonski 2.0, named after the report’s chairman, David Gonski, and the intention to appoint Gonski as chairman of the education review.

Turnbull lauds the event as a political masterstroke as Gonski had been chosen by the ALP’s Julia Gillard when education minister to review school funding and the “I give a Gonski” slogan was a key plank in the left-leaning Australian Education Union’s campaign to attack conservative governments.

By securing Gonski’s involvement, Turnbull boasts: “I’d ensured that all those ‘I give a Gonski’ posters, banners, corflutes, T-shirts and hats were heading to the recycling bin. Because we didn’t just ‘give a Gonski’, we had his support: he was standing right next to me as we announced our new school funding policy.”

While Turnbull writes he had settled the funding wars as schools now had a model that was “genuinely national, consistent and needs-based”, nothing could be further from the truth.

Stephen Farish, the expert responsible for developing the methodology employed by Gonski 2.0 to quantify how much funding non-government schools received, admitted it “clearly isn’t working”. Under Turnbull as prime minister wealthy independent schools were treated the same as low-fee, less privileged Catholic schools.

Even worse, Simon Birmingham, the federal education minister at the time, and Turnbull knew the Gonski 2.0 funding model was inequitable as months earlier the Catholic Education Commission of Victoria had published a paper — Capacity to Contribute and SES Scores — proving the model reinforced disadvantage.

Significant is that the analysis and conclusions reached by the CECV paper subsequently were endorsed by a commonwealth review of school funding chaired by Michael Chaney that concluded the Gonski 2.0 model was so corrupted it had to be replaced by a more equitable way of deciding funding to non-government schools.

By ignoring the CECV’s paper, in addition to endorsing a flawed funding model, Turnbull also demonstrated how politically inept he was by igniting a nationwide campaign led by Stephen Elder, then executive director of Catholic Education Melbourne, arguing for a more equitable funding model.

In addition to launching Gonski 2.0, Turnbull announced the curriculum review to try to achieve excellence in Australian schools by identifying the most effective way to raise standards.

Describing Gonski’s experience and qualifications to determine how to overcome Australia’s academic underperformance as measured by international tests, Turnbull called Gonski “my old school friend, debating partner and neighbour” and “one of Australia’s leading capitalists and a director of banks”.

Not mentioned in Turnbull’s book is that the eventual report published in March 2018 was flawed, substandard and guaranteed to lower standards further.

Instead of explicit and rigorous year-level standards where students would be graded and evaluated in terms of performance, the review embraced costly and unproven educational fads such as progression points and developmental learning. Students would no longer pass or fail as the focus turned to formative assessment and personal growth.

The report also undervalued what American academic Jerome Bruner described as teaching “the structure of the discipline” in favour of content-free, vacuous so-called 21st-century generic competencies.

The review ignored findings by the National Research Council in the US in the acclaimed publication, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School, that a “fundamental understanding of subjects” was essential if students were to become “self-sustaining, lifelong learners”.

Jennifer Buckingham, then a senior research fellow at the Centre for Independent Studies, wrote at the time that “the solutions posed in this report will take us further in the wrong direction. If implemented, the Gonski 2.0 report will just be another chapter in the story of Australia’s sad educational decline”.

It’s understandable why failed politicians such as Malcolm Turnbull want to ensure their version of events dominates the historical record. But A Bigger Picture shows how he failed Australian schoolchildren.

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No longer a joke: Why Australia's COVID-19 inquiry campaign won the day

Australia's role in landing an independent investigation into coronavirus was dismissed by Beijing as a joke. Our transgression was not in the substance of the argument but in speaking out of turn.

This uppity island nation of 25 million marshalling support for an independent inquiry infuriated Beijing.

The long standing trade relationship between Australia and China is under strain after the coronavirus halted imports and exports, forcing Australia to look inwards to develop manufacturing.

Good fortune, effective government policy and the public's embrace of social distancing measures had put Australia on course to suppress the virus before any other middle power. Seeing a diplomatic opening, Australia stuck its neck out and pushed for the inquiry.

More significantly, it acted on the rhetoric and began building a coalition with Europe. The prospect of an alliance with the Trump administration had been poisoned diplomatically by White House claims of a "Wuhan lab virus".

This was a historic move by Australia.

Overnight, almost a month to the day since Foreign Affairs Minister Marise Payne first lobbied for an independent inquiry into the origins of the coronavirus, the motion to establish one passed the World Health Assembly unanimously.

There were no objections. The resolution had the largest number of co-sponsors in history -137 countries in total for a motion that will examine both the origins of the coronavirus and the role of the World Health Organisation.

The last time Australia had played such a prominent international role was in 2015, when then foreign affairs minister Julie Bishop led calls to establish an MH17 inquiry after 298 people were shot out of the sky by a Russian-Ukrainian missile. The coronavirus has killed more than 300,000 and decimated the global economy.

China accused Australia of running a politically motivated campaign in April. Two trade strikes would follow in early May. They were of course, unrelated, we were told. About $1 billion in the barley and beef trade is now affected.

By Sunday, more than 60 countries had signed on as co-sponsors of the resolution. Its fate was sealed. For Beijing, it was much more preferable for the European Union to be seen as leaders of the resolution than those upstarts Down Under.

Europe has gravitas that Australia does not. Our negotiators recognised this early when they latched the first terms for an independent inquiry onto the draft of a European Union motion on April 29. It was happy to concede the lead, allowing countries to back the call without choosing "sides" in the rancorous three-way dispute between China, the US and Australia. China became one of the last dozen co-sponsors on Tuesday night, just before the vote.

China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian emphasised the European Union’s role this week after being asked about Australia’s push. "The EU submitted a draft resolution on COVID-19 to this year’s WHA, and the parties reached consensus on the content of the draft resolution after thorough discussion," he said.

"This is a slap to the face to countries like Australia - the most active player in pushing forward a so-called independent probe into China over the coronavirus outbreak, which was then rejected by the international community," China's international state media arm The Global Times said on Tuesday.

Behind the bluster, the reality is found in the actual motion.

The final text of two key clauses in the motion, OP9.6 and OP9.10 are identical to the draft motion agreed to by the European Union and Australia over the weekend. The same document was signed by China on Tuesday.

They establish a mechanism to identify the source of the virus and the route of introduction to the human population and "an independent and comprehensive evaluation of the WHO's response to COVID-19" at the "earliest appropriate moment".

Compromise and negotiation saw any direct reference to China removed and terms such as "investigation" transformed into "review", but the substance of Australia's argument largely remains intact.

In fact it is far stronger now that the one initially agreed to by the European Union member states in April. That motion would have focused much more broadly on the "lessons learnt from the international health response to COVID-19".

No doubt questions still remain. China will use its weight, funding of the WHO and influence over developing countries to interpret the "earliest appropriate moment" as only once the pandemic has passed. That could be years away.

The footnotes of the motion reveal the Independent Oversight and Advisory Committee for the WHO Health Emergencies Programme will be engaged "as appropriate" to oversee inquiry into the WHO response.

The existing WHO committee consists of seven members drawn from national governments, non-governmental organisations, and the UN system, outside of the WHO itself.

Can they be truly independent inside an organisation that has shown itself to be caught and occasionally paralysed by the rising rhetoric and volatile funding of its two largest members?

But the significance of clause OP9.6 of the resolution should not be understated. The clause allows for scientific and collaborative field missions to enter China to determine the origin of the disease and prevent the establishment of new zoonotic reservoirs, those sites where the virus makes the fateful leap from bat or bird or pangolin to human.

China, which is not named, will argue that the same inspectors should be allowed to enter the US, having pushed the unfounded theory that the disease might have originated there.

The US will likewise argue that inspectors should be allowed into the Wuhan lab, a theory that is also unproven.

So they should. Both superpowers have signed the motion.

SOURCE  






Angus Taylor says it is not Australia’s policy to achieve net zero emissions by 2050, despite signing up to the Paris agreement, because the Morrison government will not adopt a mid-century target in advance of a plan to achieve it.

The energy minister said on Tuesday that signatories to the Paris agreement, including Australia, had agreed to hit net zero “in the second half of the century”. But scientists say in order to meet the central Paris goal of keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5C – a commitment Australia adopted in 2015 – signatories need to hit net zero by 2050.

A new review of the government’s climate policies headed by former Business Council of Australia president Grant King notes that “like other signatories to the Paris agreement, Australia has agreed to adopt progressively more ambitious targets beyond 2030 and has endorsed the agreement’s overarching long-term goals, namely to limit the global temperature rise to well below 2C – and if possible below 1.5C – by achieving net zero emissions as soon as possible in the second half of the century”.

Major business groups, including the Business Council of Australia and the Ai Group, say Australia should adopt the net zero by 2050 target. Earlier this month the Ai Group called for the two biggest economic challenges in memory – recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and cutting greenhouse gas emissions – to be addressed together, saying it would boost growth and put the country on a firm long-term footing.

Every Australian state has signed up to net zero emissions by 2050, and these commitments are expressed either as targets or aspirational goals.

But asked on Tuesday whether net zero by 2050 was the federal government’s policy, Taylor said: “No.”

“Our approach is not to have a target without a plan,” Taylor told the ABC. He said technology improvements would drive significant reductions in emissions “and we’d love to be able to achieve net zero by 2050, but ultimately that will depend on the pathways of technology to deliver that without damaging the economy”.

The King review has recommended new approaches to reducing pollution including paying big emitters to keep their emissions below an agreed limit, and allowing businesses to bid for funding from the government’s climate policy – the $2.55bn emissions reduction fund – for projects that capture emissions and either use them or store them underground.

The King review proposal to pay emitters to remain below their baseline looks like a voluntary carbon trading mechanism. The review says the idea “could be achieved by crediting emissions reductions below baselines and providing for the sale and purchase of … safeguard mechanism credits by the federal, state or territory governments or through voluntary transactions in carbon markets”.

Despite that clear description in the review, Taylor contended initially on Tuesday the proposal was not a form of voluntary carbon trading. He said the review proposed a “carrot” to give companies an incentive to overachieve on their pollution reduction commitments.

The Coalition has spent a decade opposing carbon pricing, and it abolished the emissions trading scheme legislated during the Gillard government. Rightwingers in the Liberal party also moved against Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership in part because he pursued a policy to reduce emissions in the electricity sector.

But after first saying the King proposal was not a form of carbon trading, the energy minister then argued that principle was “nothing new”. “You can trade Australian carbon credit units now. There is nothing new with that, that’s a pre-existing system we have through the emissions reduction fund.”

It is unclear whether some of the proposals in the review would garner majority parliamentary support, but Taylor said some of the proposals might be able to be achieved without changing legislation.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

Controversial character called the 'Genderbread Person' which teaches children that gender is decided in the brain and is not related to anatomy is dropped after a parent complained

Learning material teaching high school students about different gender identities has been pulled from one school.

An unnamed mother in regional NSW complained about the use of the 'Genderbread person' in her 15-year-old son's classroom.

The education tool is used to teach students that anatomy doesn't always determine gender.

The mother advocated against this after her son came home 'angry' over the material being taught in class.

She said she has written to state and federal health ministers but her school's principal. who called on Monday to apologise and reveal it had been removed from the school, was 'the first person in authority' to understand her.

'In over a year of feeling like I have been beating my head into a brick wall, at last a sensible response,' the mother told The Australian.

She said before this members of parliament had 'bounced her around like a hot potato'.

The woman believes the education material targets 'vulnerable children' like her eldest child.

Her child revealed he identified as a transgender boy rather than a girl.

The child's mother contributes the 19-year-old's gender identity to underlying depression.

She is furious the hospital gave her child the testosterone needed to transition.

'Gender and sex are being confused [in school] - it starts to introduce this confusion, especially with vulnerable young people like our daughter,' the mother told The Australian.

'Some parents I've spoken to have said their children who are on the autism spectrum have been sucked into this [trans identity] - these are kids who are looking for somewhere to fit in. Other parents, their kids have had sexual abuse.'

She said children like hers need support and therapy but not drugs.

Jack Whitney, Co-Convenor of the NSW Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby, argues it is important to have a 'supportive learning environment that values diversity of all students'.

'We understand that education advocates and experts have long called for the inclusion of transgender and gender-diverse educational resources. As such the Lobby encourages the ongoing inclusion of these programs to ensure that the education children receive works towards a future where they are all able to thrive,' Mr Whitney told Daily Mail Australia.

'From our experience, the case reported in The Australian is often because a parent is apprehensive of what they don't know or understand, and their immediate response is to remove their children. However, we argue children have the right to an education that informs them of a world that is diverse and best prepares them to navigate the future.'

He said there is going to be unique needs for every child and it is important staff consult with students, their carers and family on these matters.

A spokeswoman from the NSW Department of education said their personal development syllabus covers a range of topics such as human anatomy, personal identity, gender roles and expectations and sex-based harrasment and diversity.

'Gender fluidity is not part of the NSW Curriculum. The department does not endorse the use of associated materials and schools have been made aware of this,' the spokeswoman said.

'The Genderbread resource was not developed by the NSW Department of Education. The school immediately withdrew this resource from future teaching and learning programs, following a request by the department to review its use.

'The Safe Schools program is not and never has been, part of the NSW curriculum. The NSW Department of Education does not promote this program or its resources.'

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Abbott backs Hastie

Tony Abbott has redrawn the battlelines and entered the conversation about China. The former prime minister’s long-forgotten website Battlelines — named after Abbott’s 2009 memoir outlining his political philosophy — has come out of hibernation to get behind Liberal MP Andrew Hastie.

In an email entitled “Looking to the future”, Abbott asks his loyal army of supporters to back Hastie, “a great defender of the values you and I hold so dear”.

Abbott describes the former SAS captain and member for the outer Perth seat of Canning as a “leading voice in the Coalition calling for a stronger Australia”. Hastie is chairman of the powerful parliamentary joint committee on intelligence and security.

He also is the public face of The Wolverines, a secret bipartisan group formed in Parliament House to speak out against the Communist Party’s expanding power and which last week added US ambassador Arthur B. Culvahouse Jr to its ranks as an honorary member.

“(Hastie) is a favourite target of the radical left and has been in some tough campaigns,” Abbott wrote. “For years Andrew has been a champion of Australia’s sovereignty and our need to be self-sufficient in times of crisis. I encourage you all to support Andrew and I have asked him to email you.”

The website was set up early last year and raised more than $1m for Abbott’s failed final run at Warringah. We’re told it’s being used to campaign for key conservatives around the country, hand-picked by the former prime minister. It’s a centre-right counterforce to progressive groups such as GetUp that hopefully has more thought than the much mocked satirical superhero Captain GetUp.

The NSW Moderates are suitably unimpressed, saying it’s a pointed snub. “Why hadn’t he gone out in support of a local Liberal,” one whinged, as the behind-the-scenes fight heats up in Warringah. For his part, Hastie is modest about being anointed by Abbott, telling Strewth: “I’m humbled by Tony’s support but I will never be able to match his raw physicality in a pair of Speedos.”

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Remove these roadblocks and our economy will take off

During the lockdown I have been tidying up, throwing out the ­orange jumpsuit I used to wear during that incarceration known as the budget lockup. I don’t see that contrived marketing exercise being resurrected, given the ongoing need for social distancing.

Sorting books into “keep” and “give away” piles, I came across Procuring Successful Mega-Projects. It’s in the keep pile because rebuilding the Australian economy in the post-coronavirus period is likely to involve very large projects, public and private.

You can’t attach “successful” to many recent mega-projects. Most have been public sector ones; the liquefied natural gas projects in Queensland and Western Australia are exceptions.

Consider the over-budget and much delayed Sydney light rail project or Melbourne’s calamitous West Gate tunnel project, now bogged down in a dispute about where to put contaminated soil. The Victorian government bestowed an egregiously generous concession to the toll road operator to construct the tunnel but the project is long delayed.

In the post-pandemic era, there will be an urgent need for Australia to achieve greater self-reliance and build more stable supply chains. The cheap and easy route of offshoring activities should come to an end. In turn, this will involve the construction and operation of large-scale projects.

It’s important here to identify the reasons for our deindustrialisation across several decades. This way we work on fixing the drivers that forced many manufacturers to leave, and to determine the means of achieving a more diversified economy, rather than one dominated by the services sector.

While some might assume cuts to import tariffs were the principal reason manufacturing industry shrank, it had been contracting well before tariffs were reduced. Tariffs were a tax on the poor and an impediment to our exporters.

The way forward involves strong commercial incentives for those considering investing in manufacturing activities as well as minerals processing and power generation. Without affordable and reliable energy, there is no real prospect of a resurgence of manu­facturing. So it was heartening to see Energy Australia give the go-ahead to the expansion of the Tallawarra gas-fired electricity plant in NSW.

The expectation is that there will be more investment in gas-fired electricity generation as the supply of gas from new fields comes on stream and the price moderates. Gas as a direct feeder stock also will be used by new manufacturing plants. The states need to play a role in facilitating this development, but the context of the post-pandemic exigencies will provide the basis for swifter and sensible decision-making to permit exploitation of gas fields.

The capital costs of building large-scale projects in Australia are way out of line with other countries, including the US and China. It is a substantial handicap, particularly compared with the small gap in operating costs relative to comparable economies.

There are four main impediments to the achievement of lower-cost successful mega-projects: approvals processes replete with red and green tape; the lack of competition among head contractors; industrial relations; and the lack of appropriate skills.

By international standards, the approval processes for many developments here are drawn out, expensive and subject to undue legal challenge. Companies commonly must submit reports that are thousands of pages long and governmental approval can take years.

The lack of competition among the head contractors also impedes mega-projects. Some are foreign-owned companies and they generally operate on the basis of not rocking the boat locally. They deliberately refrain from becoming involved in any policy debates — about lifting construction productivity, for instance. They tend to have cosy relations with the building trade unions.

Projects that do begin — mainly in the public sector — are shuffled between the small number of head contractors. Smaller firms subcontracted to work on these must accept conditions imposed on them by head contractors, following commercially onerous, template union enterprise agreements to secure work.

Last week the chief executive of Watpac, a smaller construction company, suggested that big projects could be broken into smaller pieces to inject more competition into the bidding process.

A similar view was expressed by Brent Crockford, chief executive of 12 local companies known as Australian Owned Contractors.

“Simply by breaking up procurement packages, local competition can be strengthened with greater skills development and domestic company growth, leading also to a reduction in the cost blowouts, project delays, company losses and litigation we’ve seen in recent years,” Crockford said.

One issue involves the Fair Work Act’s greenfields provisions. Because agreements can be made for only a fixed number of years, there is scope for costly disruption before a project is completed. A high-profile example was Chevron’s Gorgon LNG project being held up by a handful of workers seeking to alter roster arrangements. The solution to this problem is simple: allow agreements that last for the project’s duration.

The final impediment is also one that should be capable of remediation and without resort to the use of migrant workers. There are significant skill gaps in relation to project management as well as a range of building skills. There should be incentives for education and training providers to fill these gaps. Attention also should be paid to the contracting skills of public servants whose naivety and incompetence have contributed to some disastrous mega-projects

There are many economic challenges ahead, including securing jobs for the many workers who find their previous employer has gone out of business or needs fewer staff.

There are some clear opportunities when it comes to resurrecting parts of manufacturing and other large-scale employment that will have the added benefit of improving our self-reliance.

But this will happen only if we get the basics right. All levels of government must commit to ensure this happens.

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Coronavirus Australia: While an elite few savour the serenity, costs mount

A couple of weeks back an old school friend called, roused by ­arguments I’d been making about the damage of national lockdowns.

“I’m in construction doing government jobs that haven’t stopped, childcare for the kids is now free, petrol is cheap and traffic is better than it’s been for years and my commute time has roughly halved to 40 minutes,” he said. “I’m not minding the lack of social interaction, to be honest,” he added.

For those who managed to maintain their incomes throughout, lockdown has had its upside.

For a start, the outright deflation the Reserve Bank has forecast — 1 per cent over the year to June — means some of us might enjoy greater purchasing power even without a pay rise.

I confess lockdown did have a certain ascetic appeal. Opportunities to waste money at restaurants and bars were drastically curtailed, boosting saving. Overpriced scrambled eggs for breakfast on the way to work were out; porridge at home, at less than a tenth the cost, was in.

As a runner, the closure of gyms didn’t bother me. Pointless face-to-face meetings evaporated, saving hours. I only saw people I actually wanted to see; small talk ended.


And for those of us who can work from home, lockdowns, somewhat ironically, have given us greater freedom to structure our work around our lives, rather than the other way around.

For young lawyers and bankers — no one ever cared about “face time” in journalism — the quality of their work will matter more than how many hours they spend at their desk.

Of course, lockdowns have caused extraordinary economic damage. These sorts of benefits have tended to flow to a fortunate minority, especially public servants and corporate elites.

James Stratton, an Australian economist at Harvard, recently estimated that about two-fifths of jobs in Australia could be performed at home, and not all of them well. “Lower-income Australians, less-educated Australians, and rural Australians are more likely to be in occupations that cannot feasibly be performed from home,” he said,

“High-wage employees are three times as likely to be able to work from home as low-wage workers,” Labor MP and former economics professor Andrew Leigh noted last month.

News last week that 7.6 million people, excluding 2 million-odd public servants, are dependent in full or part on the government for their income highlights how much damage mandatory lockdowns can do.

The costs of the lockdown, including joblessness and associated social and economic pain, both during and after, will fall mainly on the young and less educated.

New analysis by economists at New York University released last week found lockdowns were likely to induce an L rather than a ­V-shaped recession, because of “long-lasting negative effects on unemployment”.

They found the “lockdown disproportionately disrupts the employment of workers who need years to find stable jobs”.

Some argue that states and nations such as Sweden that resisted mandatory lockdowns have received little economic dividend ­because their economies have been hit hard anyway.

“Private decisions to avoid social interactions in response to the epidemic would have reduced demand for activities like retail, air travel, hotel rooms, and on-site restaurant meals,” six US economists argue in a paper that finds jobless claims started to surge before states enacted shelter-in-place orders.

It’s no surprise that Sweden, or less draconian US states, will suffer economically given they are surrounded by seriously disrupted economies.

More troublingly, these arguments seem to place zero value on freedom. Being able to sit on a park bench doesn’t show up in gross domestic product, but it’s valuable nevertheless. Being under house arrest for six weeks, as New Zealanders were, is an impost far beyond GDP.

Over the weekend the Queensland Premier, on what must be threadbare justification, said she wouldn’t open the border with NSW. Again, that will affect lives far beyond what they would have been willing to pay for plane tickets or petrol.

But we are where we are. If there’s a serious silver lining to lockdowns it’s that businesses, especially large ones, will become more efficient, freeing up resources. That spells lay-offs, which will be painful for the workers concerned, but ultimately beneficial if they end up engaged more productively than pushing up costs at a bank or utility, causing higher prices ultimately for everyone else.

The long period of having staff work at home — seemingly successfully — was an experiment that would otherwise not have been conducted.

Twitter has told its global workforce of 5000 they can work from home indefinitely. Expect banks to shrink their footprint to save on rent. Big business will slash spending on information technology too. For seven weeks almost none of it was necessary, as employees used their own.

Circumstances will force savings in any case, given big firms have in effect been excluded from JobKeeper (because of the tougher eligibility requirement of a 50 per cent revenue downturn) and their revenue is likely to fall along with economic activity.

For smaller businesses the wage subsidy is working in the opposite direction, keeping enterprises afloat that would have folded sooner, and probably still will once the payments cease.

For years, chief executives of large corporations have been banging on about the importance of being agile. Insofar as that means to operate more efficiently, the coronavirus crisis has made it an urgent priority.

SOURCE 

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

Philosophy student, 20, claims he faces expulsion from Australian university for 'exposing its ties to the Chinese Communist Party'

A fourth-year philosophy student at the University of Queensland is facing the threat of expulsion this week after speaking out against the Chinese Communist Party.

Drew Pavlou is an elected member of the university's senate and is now facing 11 accusations of 'prejudicing the reputation' of the institution.

The 20-year-old led a series of campus demonstrations last year, in support of Hong-Kong's pro-democracy movement.

He also posted messages to social media criticising China's authoritarian regime and denounced the university's close financial ties with the Communist Party.

However the University of Queensland claim the breaches are not for criticising China but for positioning the statement's as if they were on behalf of the university.

Mr Pavlou believes he is being unfairly targeted.

'I am being threatened with this unprecedented move because of UQ's particularly close relationship with the Chinese party-state; UQ enjoys perhaps the closest relationship of any university with the Chinese government in the Anglosphere,' he wrote in an article for Foreign Policy.

'In addition to funding and controlling a Confucius Institute on campus, the Chinese government funds at least four accredited UQ courses that present a party-approved version of Chinese history to students, glossing over human rights abuses in Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and mainland China.

'In addition to these state-backed courses, the Chinese consul general in Brisbane, Xu Jie, serves as an honorary professor at the university.'

Mr Pavlou recently took Mr Xu to court after being attacked at a rally by Chinese nationalists.

'In July 2019, I led a peaceful campus sit-in calling for UQ to completely cut ties with the Chinese state until Tibetans were freed, Uighur detention camps were closed, and Hong Kongers were afforded greater democracy,' he said.

'Masked pro-CCP heavies violently attacked our rally, assaulting me and choke-slamming other pro-Hong Kong students to the ground.'

Following the ugly incident, Mr Pavlou was named in a Chinese state media article by Mr Xu and accused of being 'anti-China'.

As a result, Mr Pavlou claims he then received death threats, unsettling phone calls and letters.

The University of Queensland said in a statement, it rejects the 'unsubstantiated' claims and is not attempting to prevent students from expressing their personal political views or trying to limit their right to freedom of speech.

'The University is an active defender of freedom of speech - it has adopted the principles of the French Model Code into its policy framework,' the statement said.

'Everyday life at UQ demonstrates our ongoing commitment to its protection and promotion.'

The university says any decision at the disciplinary hearing will be made on the basis of fact and evidence and that the process provides a fair and confidential course of action.

The University of Queensland has approximately 10,000 Chinese students bringing in about $150 million to the university in student fees each year.

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Qld premier nervous about reopening border

Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk has suggested Queensland's border with NSW may not be reopened for months.

"I would say that things would look more positive towards September," she told the ABC on Monday, when asked if a change by the end of May was likely.

The premier has promised to review the border closure at the end of each month.

On Sunday she warned it would be irresponsible to allow border crossings when there's still active community transmission of coronavirus in NSW and Victoria.

Asked about Queenslanders being allowed to visit the Northern Territory, Western Australia and South Australia under a "travel bubble" arrangement, she said:

"I could see that happening before NSW and Victoria. But that's a matter for the premiers there as well."

Queensland's chief medical officer and the deputy premier will travel to Rockhampton on Monday as an aged care facility remains in coronavirus lockdown.

The premier has expressed great frustration with a nurse who kept working at the North Rockhampton Nursing Centre after developing symptoms, and while waiting for coronavirus test results.

"Everyone has a personal responsibility here to make sure that if they are sick, they are not turning up to work," she said on Monday.

A total of 235 staff and residents at the centre have been tested and cleared, with officials waiting on another 37 results.

But Deputy Premier and Heath Minister Stephen Miles says it will be another 12 days before everyone is in the clear.

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Coronavirus lockdown leaves skilled workers stuck in or out of Australia during pandemic

Hundreds of skilled migrants who have been living in Australia for years have been separated from their jobs, homes and even family members by the Australian Government's international travel bans.

Temporary visa holders who happened to be on overseas trips when the border closures came into force in March have been blocked from returning to their lives in Australia.

One Perth family has tried several times to secure a special travel exemption for their 16-year-old son, who they have been separated from for months.

The Fletcher family moved to Australia from the United Kingdom on sponsored work visas but their eldest son Taylor, 16, stayed behind to finish school exams.

Now, the Government will not let him join his parents as planned.

Despite four requests for leave to travel on compassionate grounds being lodged, the Federal Government has refused their son permission to fly to Australia to be with them.

"It's just hard because obviously I miss them, and I want to see them again, I want to see them as soon as I can," Taylor said.

Taylor's mother, Chloe Fletcher, said she had also written to Foreign Minister Marise Payne and WA Premier Mark McGowan, but still had no idea when she would see her son again.

"For any mother to be away from her child for that long — the pain's unbearable," Ms Fletcher said.

The lack of clear criteria for what counts as "compassionate" or "compelling" circumstances has frustrated torn families.

"I don't understand what the actual boundaries are, what makes a compassionate case," Ms Fletcher said. "There are no actual rules or regulations, so we don't know what category we fit into."

Under Australia's coronavirus restrictions on international travel, only citizens and permanent residents are allowed to return from overseas.

That meant many skilled work visa holders outside the country were instantly separated from long-term jobs, homes, partners and pets in Australia.

Holly Haskell rushed to England after her mother died in a car crash in March. She went through the trauma of identifying her mother's body, dealing with police investigations and organising the funeral.

As if that was not hard enough, the Australian Government's travel ban came in just days after the funeral, meaning she cannot get back to her home, job and friends in Melbourne.

She is still working for her Australian employer, doing her shifts in the middle of the night so she can operate in sync with Australian time zones.

Ms Haskell applied for and failed the Government's compassion test for return travel to Australia.

"When I got the declined result, it broke me," she said.  "Apart from work I didn't leave my bed for days. "It felt like in one night not only had my mum been taken from me but my whole life has now been taken from me."

Some temporary visa holders have been paying rent in two countries so they can hold on to their Australian residences, while others have been forced to up-end their homes from afar.

Travel industry worker Alexandra Skiba has lived in Sydney for two years but was visiting family in California when she learned she would not be allowed back in. "My friends are going into my apartment to pack it up for me," Ms Skiba said.

"My boyfriend is in Sydney and I don't know when I'll see him again. "It's heartbreaking to have a skilled visa and not even be considered as someone worthy of bringing back home. It's cruel."

Acting Immigration Minister Alan Tudge said exemptions could be made in special circumstances, but the rules were clear. "We've closed our borders to everybody other than Australians who are returning and permanent residents who are returning," Mr Tudge said.

"That, to be honest, has been one of the most important things — if not the most important thing — that we've done in terms of getting control of this pandemic."

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Greenies often assure us that we will run out of food. David Littleproud claims Australia has the best food security in the world. Is he correct?

Rice, pasta and some canned foods sold out in the weeks after state and federal governments imposed restrictions and urged Australians to stay at home, with a sudden rush to stock up severely straining supply chains.

State and federal government ministers have said repeatedly that buying huge volumes of food and groceries is unnecessary, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison labelling panic buying "ridiculous" and "not sensible".

The National Farmers' Federation also sought to quell concerns about food shortages, telling consumers not to "panic" as there was "plenty of food to go around".

The Minister for Agriculture, Drought and Emergency Management, David Littleproud, went so far as to declare that Australia "[has] the most secure food security in the world".

"We're a nation of 25 million people," Mr Littleproud told ABC Radio National's Afternoon Briefing program on May 11. "We produce enough food for 75 million."

Is that correct? Does Australia have "the most secure food security in the world"? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict: Mr Littleproud's claim is in the ballpark.

According to many studies and experts, Australia enjoys a very high level of food security. The nation produces an abundance of food, exports far more than it needs, and has ample alternative sources of certain foods should they become scarce.

While Australia is not the top-ranked or "most" food-secure nation in the world, according to some comparisons, it nevertheless has plenty of flexibility in terms of food sources and could switch production priorities to alleviate shortfalls. One international comparison places Australia 12th among 113 nations in terms of food security.

Richard Heath, of the Australian Farm Institute, typified the response of the experts.

"By the most basic definition — which is, 'Are we at risk of starving because we cannot feed ourselves?' — we are so far from that, it's ridiculous," he said.

"When you consider the availability of irrigated-water area, the amount of arable land … we are a very secure nation in terms of food."

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

Ensuring a safe workplace? None of your business

Perils of the tracing app

A person’s home is their castle, but their business is not. Your family and friends can be bossed around, but an employee or a flatmate cannot.

This is the illogical approach our federal government is taking with its confusing and draconian new rules around the COVIDSafe tracing app.

Don’t take this issue lightly; everyone must wade through the detail and avoid any breaches because the penalties are excessive.

The Privacy Amendment (Public Health Contact Information) Bill 2020 clarifies the offences that can be applied to anyone who might require a person to use the app.

The bill typifies the Morrison government’s authoritarian bent. It is confusing and contrary.

An action is either allowed or prohibited, depending on the type of premises a citizen is in when they take the action, as well as the type of relationship the citizen has with the person they take the action against.

The bill is unfair to commercial operators. The government has seen fit to place extraordinary restrictions on business, which is understandable in a pandemic. However, in the same pandemic, the government prohibits business from placing restrictions or requirements on employees and customers.

In a personal context, if a person doesn’t have the app, you may be able to deny them entry to your home. However, this depends on the nature of your relationship.

“A person will not be liable for this offence if they require a person to use COVIDSafe before entering their private residence, reflecting the normal expectation that a person is generally free to deny another person access to their home for any reason,” Attorney-General Christian Porter said this week.

So your home is your castle when it comes to family and friends. Your home is not your castle, though, if the person without the app is a flatmate or if a commercial relationship applies.

To clarify, I am told by the government that you are not allowed to insist a cleaning lady, for instance, must download the app, but you can deny her entry to your home if she doesn’t. Clear as mud?

Porter says “this exemption is limited — it would not apply to other situations covered by the offence involving a commercial relationship, such as a landlord-tenant relationship, a share house relationship or an employment relationship”.

When it comes to a business context, the government has decided that a business owner has fewer rights than a residential occupier.

If a person owns a business, the government thinks the business is not the person’s castle, because they are not free to deny another person access for any reason.

A person may own the building, may own the business, may have built it from nothing, and may have more invested in it than their home but, nevertheless, they are not allowed to insist their staff members have the app, or deny entry to someone without it.

Anyone who gets these rules wrong, in a personal or business context, can be fined $63,000 and sent to prison for five years. Imagine being sent to prison for telling someone they must download an app.

I guess this is the sort of nonsense we must expect when there are too many ex-lawyers in the political ranks.

This issue will prove to be of particular interest to our hospitality sector. As the industry attempts to emerge from an enforced shutdown, it will face extraordinary challenges.

During the period of closure, hospitality businesses incur fixed costs with zero revenue. Payment can be delayed but not denied; loans and losses won’t disappear once doors reopen, and many operators are fast approaching a debt cliff.

Your pre-pandemic favourite haunts cannot be taken for granted.

According to the Australian Hotels Association, which represents more than 5000 hotels, pubs, bars and taverns, the typical pub, before interest, wages and rent, has fixed costs of about $32,000 a month.

This includes $7000 a month on insurance, $10,000 on land tax and $3000 on electricity network charges, which apply even when all the power is turned off.

Spare a thought here for the venue owners.

They’ve been shut down and now, depending on which state they are in, they are being allowed to open with restrictions that may or may not make it viable.

On the one hand, they have their customers, who want service in a safe place; on the other, they have the layers of government, with all their demands, and somehow they need to earn enough to keep going and pay back all the debts incurred while shut down.

Finally, they must manage all this with the threat of public humiliation and closure should a staff member or patron come in while infected and cause a cluster to form.

And in all this they are not allowed, with the threat of prison, to make their premises as safe as possible by insisting that all staff and patrons have the app.

You may think this extreme, but a person who owns a business should be allowed to decide who they employ and who they serve.

Further, they should be allowed to make their premises more appealing by declaring it a safe place, to the extent that safety is possible.

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Coronavirus: Newmarch House nightmare exposes fatal flaws in care homes

During this pandemic, “We are all in this together” has been the morale-boosting slogan du jour. However, while we are patting ourselves on the back for our success in handling the pandemic, people in aged care have suffered this terrible illness and died alone.

They were the collateral damage of a system that herds old people together in institutions that we call care.

The outpouring of praise for aged-care workers by federal Health Minister Greg Hunt on Wednesday is all very well, but this is no substitute for the immediate questions that must be asked about Sydney’s Newmarch House and the whole model of an institutional system that has been found wanting.

As I know from bitter experience, the relatives of these people are probably too numb with grief and misplaced guilt to ask the questions that must be asked right now. However, the public deserves to know why the residents were not vacated from this facility and placed in isolation in hospital as soon as the first case was diagnosed. We know most of the intensive care wards around NSW are empty of COVID-19 patients, and a surge workforce at Newmarch was put in place only after three residents had already died.

Nursing infected patients within a hospital is very different from within a nursing home, where barriers were apparently so lax that infected people were being moved through common areas. Why were the families of residents kept out of communication, and why were those who tested negative not allowed to be removed by relatives, even to their own homes?

When the Aged Care Quality and Safety Commission finally threatened to take away the institution’s licence, I, like many others, thought: “It’s about time.”

All these questions must be answered. However, blaming just one system failure in one institution or one set of bureaucrats is not going to be the answer here. The real underlying culprit is the aged-care system itself. We have come to rely too much on the institutional model of aged care in Australia. We have comforted ourselves with the idea that care in an institution equals real care. Blithe reassurances by politicians and the sector that “overall” they did a good job just don’t cut it.

I have had multiple experi­ences with institutional aged care. My parents were in not one but three institutions across a period of four years. All of these institutions were top quality, with all the latest facilities, kind staff, with reasonable staffing ratios. Of course, families always have to fill in the gaps, which was not a problem. Most of these places welcome the families and the best institutions regard their job as helping the family rather than the other way around. My husband and I even moved in for a week when my dad was dying, and we fed and nursed him ourselves. However, in every single one of these institutions there were problems, and none was the result of neglect or abuse but simply a result of the institutional mentality.

An aged person’s welfare is totally subsumed by the necessities of institutional life and its basic routine. In our experience, this led to my parents — married for 68 years — being separated in the first institution they were placed, simply because they had different needs. That is the way an institution is efficiently run, but needless to say they were moved to a place where they were not apart.

I came to see that long-term ­institutional care is fundamentally damaging to old people. First, their physical health is always precarious, and they are constantly exposed to some level of infection. No matter how clean the institutions are, minor infections — typically things such as eye infections — spread like wildfire and major ones are common, especially in large institutions. There are often minor epidemics. While my parents were in the last of the three places, there was a gastro outbreak. However, fundamentally, the major problem with institutional care is the subtle mental effect of isolation from a normal family and social milieu. Many experts have pointed to this.

Aside from the effects of sudden removal from their home where they have lived for decades, everyone in aged care is old. Think about it. The mostly young female staff do not interact with the residents in the same way as people would interact outside the institution. There is no real freedom.

The language we use betrays this. We speak of putting people intocare, and there they will stay. The principle of “ageing in place”, the preferred Australian institutional model, is somewhat ironic since the place is where they do indeed stay — with a few outings.

They mentally stagnate. In short, there is no chance to experience any normal life or social ­interaction — one of the most important bulwarks against progressive dementia.

So what can be done in a ­society where people are very loathe to look after their aged parents themselves? In 2018, a Flinders University-sponsored study found that smaller group housing produced much better physical and mental outcomes. This is pretty consistent with other overseas research and practice. However, the first thing is to give people who are generous enough to look after their own parents the proper support and incentives.

Countries that have the most innovative models of aged care have recognised the fundamental flaws in an institutional model. In many ­European countries, including France and Germany, which have family unit taxation systems, the elderly in a family are counted as double tax deductible. In other countries, respite care, both in the home or in a small institution, is also favoured.

Australia is behind the times in pushing a large institutional model of care for the aged. However, unfortunately, social workers and medical staff are fixated on it as the only outcome. I will never forget the bland fatalism of the doctor and social worker at the hospital where my mother was languishing long after a broken shoulder had healed, telling me that taking Mum home was not a good idea — because “after all, she is institutionalised now”.

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Tutoring industry slumps, with least-coached cohort to take next tests

Students sitting next year's selective school and opportunity class tests could be the least-tutored cohort to undertake the competitive exams, as fewer students receive academic coaching during the coronavirus pandemic.

Chief executive of the Australian Tutoring Association, Mohan Dhall, said the tutoring industry had taken a "massive hit" as centres were forced to suspend face-to-face teaching and parents paused discretionary spending during an economic downturn.

Leila Bunguric used to tutor face-to-face. She now runs her business online from her Lugarno home.
Leila Bunguric used to tutor face-to-face. She now runs her business online from her Lugarno home.CREDIT:BEN RUSHTON

The majority of centres have lost between 30 and 50 per cent of students since late March. Some have salvaged businesses by moving online and seen demand for digital services surge. A small minority have continued in-person tuition while others have closed altogether.

"Most centres have seen a massive downturn in student numbers and are struggling to get by," Mr Dhall said. This could give rise to the "least-coached" cohort sitting the next round of competitive entry tests to selective schools and opportunity classes.

"There will definitely be a difference in how students go. But I think that’s a healthy thing," he said.

Dux College, with centres in Bondi Junction and Parramatta, moved online but attendance dropped by 40 per cent.

"This is due to both students' financial situations being impacted, and their preference for face-to-face classes. There are also as much as 80 per cent fewer new inquiries than this time last term," a spokeswoman said.

Fifty per cent of Alchemy Tuition students stopped tutoring in the two weeks following lockdown restrictions in late March. New bookings were also down 30 per cent in April.

"We are an in-home service and even as far back as February we had some parents cautious of having people come in to their home," chief Nic Rothquel said. "As family budgets tighten up, they are less willing to spend the money on extra support."

Mr Dhall said he anticipated a slow recovery for the industry. "On the other side, there will be fewer good operators. Those who understand learning well will thrive, but a lot of businesses will not continue," he said.

Leila Bunguric runs separate online and face-to-face tutoring businesses. She has observed a small decline in face-to-face appointments but a surge in digital interest. "The website has had an increase in sales and schools requesting access to our resources," she said.

But Mr Dhall said while some businesses had moved online effectively, most were traditional in the way they tutor. "Some are doing three-hour online classes where the tutor is speaking at them, with notes on PDF," he said.

"Kids are experiencing very mixed results from online learning. The transition has been hotchpotch at best, or ill-considered and reactive. It then becomes a disappointing learning experience."

Some centres are optimistic. Kumon coaching college has been providing digital instruction while distributing paper worksheets through pick-up or postage services.

Its enrolments were down 10 per cent in April, but it expects to see an increase in demand when schools go back. "Parents will naturally be concerned that their children’s progress in maths and English has possibly declined throughout this disruptive period," a spokesman said.

Other operators are stepping into the vacuum left by the closure of many tuition centres, offering free content, online resources or scholarships to new students.

Tony Hanlon, national director of teaching at North Shore Coaching Colleges Australia, said there had been a drop in attendance but it had been "really great to trial new delivery modes".

Majeda Awawdeh, founder of Global Education Academy, said while some parents had been hesitant about online delivery, they were getting new enrolments from interstate.

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Full-time school to put extra pressure on transport, roads

Principals are bracing for public schools to return to full-time teaching on Monday week, but there are concerns about how a transport system already nearing its safe social distancing capacity will cope with an influx of thousands more students.

The government will reveal the next stage of its back-to-classroom plan in the next few days, but has already flagged it wants all students back by month's end. "That is still our goal, and our hope," said Education Minister Sarah Mitchell on Friday.

A public transport plan is also expected this week, to explain how the system will cope with thousands of students who travel long distances by public transport or car every day. At some popular schools, students travel from 150 different postcodes.

Last Wednesday, Premier Gladys Berejiklian said the staged return to school was progressing well. "We anticipate that after next week there is a chance the vast majority of students will be back to face to face learning."

Principals are hoping for details soon, so they can prepare. They have not been formally informed of changes to the original plan, which was to move from one to two days per week, but "we're expecting to skip that [two-day] phase, and go directly to full time [on May 25]," one principal said.

Even when students began returning back for one day of face-to-face teaching last Monday, many stayed for more, said Primary Principals Association President Phil Seymour. "As the week went on, [primary schools] got more and more kids," he said. "The parents were saying they loved it so much, they wanted to keep going.

"Principals are saying, 'if it's going to happen, let's get into it' - just give us some notice so we can get ready. I think it will go back into full production." Across the whole public system last week, numbers were steady at about a third of students on campus daily.

Late last week, Ms Berejiklian asked workers who were not already using public transport to avoid it during peak hour (which runs from 7am to 11am), amid concerns that mass transit systems drove the spread of COVID-19 overseas.

There were also concerns about 'carmageddon', if those commuters drove to work instead.

But school students are heavy users of public transport. NSW Department of Education figures show that at some popular selective schools, such as Sydney Boys and Girls, students come from about 150 different postcodes across the city.

Others travel long distances to private schools, while almost half of students at public secondary schools live outside their catchment areas. School buses are exempt from social distancing guidelines, but many students use trains.

School-related travel also represents about a fifth of vehicle traffic on the roads during term time.

Geoffrey Clifton, a transport expert at the University of Sydney, said the government's transport plan needed to factor in schools, given social distancing rules might limit trains to a third of their seated capacity, or about 33 people per carriage.

"[Students] make up a fair portion of the peak hour," he said. "If parents who would have let their kids go on public transport decide to drive them to school, that's going to have an impact on the road network.

"I'd recommend that [if school resumes full time on] the 25th of May, as many adults work from home as they can, to give it some space to function. If we declare that a work from home day, at least in the first couple of days we'd work out what's working and not working."

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here