Female doctors asked about family plans during job interviews

This is an old chestnut.  Female doctors have a much shorter working life on average than male doctors do.  But training doctors is very costly.  So to get the most out of what is spent on medical education, it makes sense to train male doctors only.  But that has produced such a shriek of anger from feminists that all medical education is now open to women.

When considering applicants for advanced medical training, however, it makes sense for the sex of the applicant to be one factor in deciding on who gets the training.  And that appears to be current practice in Australia.  But that is DISCRIMINATION so must be forbidden


Female doctors are being asked about their plans to have children during job interviews at public hospitals, in a practice the Australian Medical Association says should have "stopped yesterday".

NSW president of the AMA Professor Brad Frankum has called for tougher penalties against hospitals and training institutions in order to wipe out the practice, after he received reports of it taking place during interviews and informal talks with candidates beforehand.

He said most of the reports related to positions at public hospitals and tended to come from candidates going for specialist or advanced trainee positions across most fields of medicine

"There need to be sanctions against hospitals that do the wrong thing. "If hospitals are allowing this to happen, then those hospitals should not be allowed to employ trainees until they sort it out," he said.

"This is not information an employer needs to be privy to ahead of employing someone and nor should they be seeking it on a formal or informal basis."

SOURCE






How Earth's growing tropical zone may lead to more droughts and hotter heatwaves on Australia's east coast

This is simply a grab at publicity.  The tropics are defined by the limits of the sun being overhead so the tropics cannot change. The underlying finding is that there is drying on both sides of the tropics. But drying is an effect of cooling.  Warming would produce MORE rain, not less.  So the phenomenon does not indicate global warming.  It in fact contradicts it


A leading academic [An adjunct profesor is "leading"?] says the Earth's growing tropical zone may lead to more droughts and hotter heatwaves in Australia.

CQ University's Adjunct Professor of Environmental Geography Steve Turton said temperatures could reach more than 40C in Sydney and Melbourne during heatwaves and last for two weeks, The Daily Telegraph reported.  

With the area between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn currently 'bulging' and heading poleward, Adjunct Prof Turton said this will have an impact on the nation.

The planet's waistline has been growing since 1979 and it is likely to continue thanks to human activity, Adjunct Prof wrote in a piece for The Conversation.

'If the current rate continues, by 2100 the edge of the new dry subtropical zone would extend from roughly Sydney to Perth,' he said.

'As these dry subtropical zones shift, droughts will worsen and overall less rain will fall in most warm temperate regions.'

Adjunct Prof Turton said the geographical location of Australia placed the nation at high risk of an expanded tropical zone. 

He added: 'Future climate change projections for Australia include increasing air and ocean temperatures, rising sea levels, more hot days (over 35C), declining rainfall in the southern continental areas, and more extreme fire weather events'.

Adjunct Prof Turton said biodiversity hotspots in Australia could also feel the effects of the tropical zone expansion as there were 'no suitable land areas (only oceans) for ecosystems and species to move into'.

SOURCE




Trotskyite entryist roiling Australia's Green party

It is common for members of political minorities to infiltrate larger parties to get their agenda on the map. Old Trot Rhiannon is an example of that.  But she is too hostile even for the Greens and they are trying to get rid of her.  She became a senator on the Green ticket, however, so ousting her is complicated.  And she is unlikely to compromise from her unwavering hate

Sarah Hanson-Young says she’s “sick” of internal divisions affecting her party but they are set to continue as Greens officials struggle to broker a peace deal after the federal party room voted to exclude Lee Rhiannon from key debates.

The Greens national council, the party’s executive body, met on Sunday and was expected to formalise its response to Senator Rhiannon’s suspension from key meetings and decisions until the NSW branch, of which she is a member, was reformed.

A Greens source said no decision had been made but there was agreement that members should stop making public comments as the civil war unfolded.

Bitter infighting erupted more than a week ago amid accusations Senator Rhiannon had undermined party processes — a claim she disputes — while the Greens negotiated with the government on the Gonski 2.0 package.

The battle turned into a broader tussle between those, such as leader Richard Di Natale, who want to prevent Greens NSW from binding its MPs to vote a particular way on policies, versus those who believe NSW members should maintain their input and influence.

Senator Hanson-Young, a South Australian Greens MP, said the party had to resolve that “internal structural issue” and denied Senator Rhiannon had been “bullied and harassed”, as she has claimed.

The Greens NSW state delegates council will meet this weekend to nut out a formal position on the partyroom’s ban of their only federal senator.

“The public wants to know what we stand for and what we’re going to do and so much time in the last week-and-a-half has been spent … talking about the Greens and ourselves and I’m sick of it, I want to get on with the issues,” Senator Hanson-Young told Sky News.

“What I’m hearing here in South Australia from my members is that they are frustrated that we can’t get on and do the things we told the electorate we were going to.

“I’m not going to continue to be drawn into an internal factional brawling that is happening within the NSW branch.”

All federal Greens MPs except Senator Rhiannon have rallied behind Senator Di Natale in recent days after the NSW senator said she and others were “disappointed” with his leadership.

“There is no leadership issue in the party room. We all support Senator Di Natale as our leader, and if Senator Rhiannon has a problem with that, then she needs to make it very clear she is the odd person out in this regard,” Tasmanian senator Peter Whish-Wilson told ABC radio. “I would ask Senator Rhiannon to negotiate internally — go through the processes that we hope this will go through with the national council and the membership.”

Victorian Greens senator Janet Rice said it would be up to the party room to determine what “contentious” government legislation Senator Rhiannon should be prevented from debating, but doubted she would be excluded regularly. “I expect these occasions to be very rare indeed,” she said. “If the NSW position is fixed, there is no point in Lee being part of these discussions because her position is unable to change, regardless of new information or offers being on the table.”

SOURCE





We’re compensating bullies and it’s unfair to small business

Unfair dismissal laws are creating unfair outcomes for employers and employees who do the right thing.

Employers overwhelmingly want to do the right thing by their staff. They value their employees and want to create a working environment that helps them attract and retain good people. This includes establishing a culture of high performance and productivity, and ensuring all employees are treated fairly. But our laws are making this a real challenge for employers.

Under today’s unfair dismissal regime, employers are compensating and having to reinstate employees who have bullied or harassed and even assaulted their colleagues. This puts the safety of others in the workplace at serious risk and sends a terrible message to the victims of this behaviour.

Our laws need to strike a better balance between an employer’s ability to manage in the best interests of all the people in the workplace and the individual rights of an employee. We need the focus to go back on to fairness and away from process.

When the Productivity Commission reviewed our workplace relations framework in 2015 it found “the most problematic aspect of the current legislation is that an employee who has clearly breached the normal expectations of appropriate work behaviour may nevertheless be deemed to have been unfairly dismissed because of procedural lapses by the employer”.

The Productivity Commission cited an example where an employer dismissed two employees after they assaulted their supervisor. The commission concluded that the physical assault was a valid reason for dismissal, but that the employer’s failure to follow certain administrative procedures meant that the dismissals were therefore unfair.

Unfair to whom? To the person who was assaulted? To the employer who is expected to maintain and enforce acceptable standards of conduct? To the rest of the workforce who do the right thing and expect their colleagues to treat them with respect?

Unfortunately, this is not an isolated example. This situation should not be allowed to stand. The law needs to change. The Productivity Commission was right to find that the Fair Work Act should be amended so that “procedural errors alone are not sufficient to award compensation or restore employment in what would otherwise be regarded as a valid ­dismissal”.

There is evidence that the cost to a small business of defending a claim can reach as high as $20,000. It is no surprise, then, that “go away money” is a persistent feature of our workplace relations system. Employers are deciding it is cheaper to pay the employee who has done the wrong thing than to incur the cost, time, inconvenience and stress of legal proceedings.

For everyone else in the workplace, this sends the wrong message that justice does not prevail and that there will be no serious consequences for misconduct.

As it stands the system does not tell employers how they should deal with these issues without risking a costly claim. It does not make it clear how they should grapple with their duties under work health and safety laws, anti-discrimination laws and anti-bullying laws.

The Productivity Commission has found that unfair dismissal laws, if tipped too far in favour of protecting an individual employee, “can lead to underperformance and reduced produc­tivity”. This impacts the people in the workplace who carry the burden of team members who have let them down.

For a small business, the risk and cost of defending a claim is simply too great, and so too is the cost of a poor-performing employee. It is also unfair on their colleagues, where a small team carries the work of the person who is not performing. This has been recognised in other countries, including Germany, where small businesses are exempt from unfair dismissal laws. There is a strong case for an exemption for Australian businesses with fewer than 20 employees.

Unfair dismissal laws have a negative impact on employment decisions. Employers weigh the potential cost of a claim when making hiring decisions. They become more cautious about who they hire. Unfortunately that means people out of the labour market are less likely to get a look in. The system is failing 729,000 Australians looking for a job.

We need to rebalance our unfair dismissal laws so that employers who act fairly and in the interests of their entire workforce are not penalised. We need to remove rules that focus on the fairness of process rather than the fairness of the outcomes. We need to reset the system so that it encourages employers to hire more people. That would be fair.

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