Queensland’s most in-demand public schools continue to be flooded with thousands of out-of-catchment students despite strict enrolment requirements

State High is selective. Out-of-area students have to pass a type of IQ test. That raises the standards of the school generally, which makes it popular: A virtuous circle

Queensland’s most in-demand public schools continue to be flooded with thousands of out-of-catchment students despite strict enrolment requirements and even threats of police action.

An exclusive Courier-Mail analysis can reveal more than 50 schools across the state have at least 500 out-of-catchment students enrolled this year.

Despite using private investigators and even threatening police involvement over catchment fraud, top public school Brisbane State High School still saw more than 1564 out of catchment students enrol in 2022, comprising about 46 per cent of its total student population.

According to the school’s enrolment management plan, BSHS – the country’s largest high school – still accepts more than 1000 kids into its selective entry program.

This is despite the state government building a brand new high school, the $153m Brisbane South State Secondary College, just three kilometres away.

Brisbane State High School has seen its percentage out-of-catchment students barely shift over the past three years with 48 per cent of students’ out-of-catchment in 2020.

Other major and in-demand public high schools also saw large numbers of students enrolled from outside the catchment zone.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/education-queensland/queendlands-most-indemand-public-schools-revealed/news-story/7a036892b54772a1097d1395fc48277d

*************************************************

The many pro-Aboriginal bodies do little if any good

The numerous government-funded bodies tasked with closing the inequality gap between the 3.2 per cent of Australians who are Aboriginal and the rest of us have thus far had very limited success. Given the massive disparity in lifestyles, employment levels, income, and any other measure you can name it is understandable that Australia’s various governments keep looking for new ideas. Unfortunately, the latest scheme is yet another stinker doomed to go the same way as every other plan based on the prevailing ideologies.

There are at present more than 70 organisations actively involved in managing a variety of schemes to ‘close the gap’. They generally have four things in common. First, they usually have flash websites. Second, they are funded by you. Third, they are almost completely ineffective and, finally, they are free from any form of independent cost-benefit analysis.

Take Closing the Gap, an organisation mainly funded by various government bodies. According to its website, their objective is to ‘enable Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and governments to work together to overcome the inequality experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and achieve life outcomes equal to all Australians’.

The organisation was ‘developed in genuine partnership between Australian governments and the Coalition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peak Organisations’ (the Coalition of Peaks), to ensure that ‘the views and expertise of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including Elders, Traditional Owners and Native Title holders, communities and organisations will continue to provide central guidance to…national governments’.

The Coalition of the Peaks is, according to its website, ‘a representative body of over seventy Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled peak organisations and members (who are) to be formal partners with Australian governments on Closing the Gap’. The website also claims that ‘We have worked for our communities for a long time and are working to ensure the full involvement of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in shared decision-making with Australian governments across the country to improve the life outcomes of our people’.

This is a very worthy aim, and one might reasonably ask why we need yet another organisation to replicate this function. The Voice to Parliament we are told ‘would advise parliament on matters relating to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’. This is, as far as I can see, exactly what the Closing the Gap mob was supposed to do. The Voice to Parliament mob argues that ‘Constitutional entrenchment is important because it would give the Voice special legitimacy and provide it with stability and certainty. The details of its design would be determined by Parliament’, according to a recent article on The Conversation.

Recently, in the Australian, Troy Bramston also expressed enthusiasm for the Voice to Parliament which, he assures us, ‘is not a third chamber. It would only advise the Parliament’. But neither Bramston nor any of the other numerous supporters of this half-baked scheme are seriously addressing the issue of what form of advice the new entity would provide that is not within the purview of the 70 organisations already tasked with that objective. What we are witnessing is the establishment of another layer of bureaucrats on top of all the other ineffective bodies already funded by or competing for your taxes. Even Pat Turner, co-chair of the Joint Council on Closing the Gap, who is supportive of a Voice to Parliament, is ‘struggling to see the way forward’ and wants to ‘start to see some detail’.

On the other hand, the Green’s Aboriginal intellectual giant, Lidia Thorpe, is opposed to the Voice to Parliament at this stage and instead argues that ‘We (Aboriginal people) need to protect and preserve our sovereignty. We demand a sovereign treaty with an independent sovereign treaty commission, and appropriate funds allocated…We don’t need a referendum.’

Despite the vagueness of the proposal, The Voice to Parliament appears to be gaining traction. Just before the federal election, the ABC’s Vote Compass showed the number of voters supporting a Constitutional amendment to provide a Voice to Parliament had increased from 64 per cent in 2019 to 73 per cent today.

The idea that yet another taxpayer-funded body will offer better ‘guidance’ to politicians and bureaucrats than the existing plethora of bodies is a fantasy that can exist only in the minds of those whose opinions are based on ideology rather than evidence. And yet this mad scheme continues to gain ground even though no one can even give a clear explanation of how it will work that is acceptable to all relevant parties.

Recently, on the ABC radio show for eggheads, The Minefield, the ubiquitous Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discussed the need for recognition of ‘the moral primacy for First Nations people’. They argued that what is required is an acceptance that indigenous people never ceded their sovereignty, that a shared sovereignty is the reality of the modern world and that an acceptance of an indigenous spiritual sovereignty is an essential precursor for a Voice to Parliament.

To put it bluntly, the entire wokerati is adamant that a Voice to Parliament, or some form of treaty, is required but no two advocates can agree on the exact role of the Voice and how it will differ from dozens of organisations already advising our parliaments on Aboriginal policy. Nor do the advocates explain why the federal and state minister, all tasked with liaising with Aboriginal groups, are not already advising parliament.

Some insight into the challenges the Voice will face can be gauged by the achievements of the current indigenous leaders. After the seventh meeting of the Joint Council on Closing the Gap in December last year, a communiqué was produced to tell the world what they had done. The members of the Joint Council, which included Ken Wyatt, then federal minister for Indigenous Australians, seven other members of various parliaments, and 13 members of the Coalition of Peaks, after much deliberation and debate, proudly announced that they had approved a new logo for the group.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/coalition-of-the-perks/

************************************************

Academics discrediting Australia’s carbon credit system are ‘serious people’, says former chief scientist

The former Australian chief scientist charged with investigating the country’s divisive carbon credit system says academics who have described it as a fraud and a sham are “serious people”.

In an interview with Guardian Australia, Prof Ian Chubb said there were also credible voices defending the scheme and he would need to carefully weigh the evidence.

Chubb, a neuroscientist who was an inaugural board member of the Climate Change Authority and vice-chancellor of the Australian National University, has been given six months to unpick a growing controversy over the integrity of the scheme, which is central to government and business plans to cut emissions and reach net zero by 2050.

The climate change and energy minister, Chris Bowen, will announce on Monday three panellists who will work with Chubb on the review. They are Ariadne Gorring, the co-chief executive of the climate investment and advisory firm Pollination Foundation, retired federal court judge Dr Annabelle Bennett and economist Dr Steve Hatfield-Dodds.

Carbon credits are bought by governments and businesses as an alternative to making emissions cuts. Each carbon credit represents one tonne of carbon dioxide that has either been stopped from going in the atmosphere, or sucked out of it.

Concern about the validity of the scheme has been heightened since March, when Australian National University’s Prof Andrew Macintosh – who, as chair of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, used to be responsible for the integrity of the scheme – released several academic papers with colleagues arguing that most credits do not actually represent real or new emissions cuts.

Macintosh, an environmental law and policy scholar, said the system run by the government and Clean Energy Regulator was “largely a sham” and a fraud on taxpayers and the environment.

The Clean Energy Regulator and Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee have rejected this, saying they had asked independent experts to test Macintosh’s assertions and found no evidence to support them. They have been supported by industry body the Carbon Market Institute and some companies that run carbon credit projects.

On Friday, Macintosh and colleagues released two new papers that argue the “vast majority” of carbon credits awarded for what are known as “human-induced regeneration” projects – which involve regenerating native forests by preventing grazing by livestock and feral animals (and not be tree-planting) – had not drawn more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere than would have happened anyway.

Human-induced regeneration is the most popular method to create carbon credits. The academics said the method had “numerous flaws”, including that landholders were issued carbon credits for growing trees in arid and semi-arid rangeland country though the vegetation was already there before the work started.

More here:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/18/academics-discrediting-australias-carbon-credit-system-serious-people-says-former-chief-scientist#:~:text=Greenhouse%20gas%20emissions-,Academics%20discrediting%20Australia's%20carbon%20credit%20system,people'%2C%20says%20former%20chief%20scientist&text=The%20former%20Australian%20chief%20scientist,sham%20are%20%E2%80%9Cserious%20people%E2%80%9D .

**************************************************

A mysterious referendum

The good news that has just come to hand is that the federal government has decided to keep as a closely guarded secret everything that the voter needs to know before voting on the proposed Voice for aboriginals. This is a great relief and has enhanced the prospect of this long overdue reform being implemented. After all, too much detail would have confused the voters, put the whole project at risk and diverted them from the real issue in the referendum, namely that if every elite in the country thinks the Voice is a wonderful idea, which is obvious, how could you not vote for it? So, too much information would have been dangerous. The more they knew about it, the more the voter might have been needlessly alarmed about what was proposed.

For a while, I thought we would have to come clean on giving answers to at least the bare minimum of questions that are raised about the Voice. Nothing fancy, but questions like what will the Voice actually do? Who will be able to stand as a candidate or vote in its elections? Will there be any elections? Will it be just advisory, or will it have executive and legislative powers? If so, what will they be? Will it pay its own way? Will it be subject to the courts and the ordinary law like the anti-racism and anti-discrimination laws? Will it exist forever or just for a fixed term?

With questions like that floating around, and unanswered, it looked perilously like we would have to give some detail or people would think the worst of the Voice. After all, if the idea ever took hold that our whole system of government was about to be turned upside down by a new black parliament, with an electoral roll based on race, where only one race can vote or stand for election (if there are any elections) and a special set of laws for one class of the community, no one would vote for it. And that would of course be a major catastrophe, especially when everyone in the political parties, the media and virtually every self-respecting celebrity and multi-millionaire that I know, wants the Voice and wants it now.

But in the sober light of day, I realise that burdening the people with anything remotely like the detail of what they are voting on would be even more dangerous and probably fatal to this laudable objective. Giving voters any details on issues like those listed above would simply confuse them, create a demand for more information and might even put the very existence of the Voice at risk. So, I am absolutely thrilled that the government has hit on the solution to this looming problem: just don’t provide any information at all. It is obviously better and much safer, and more in the public interest, to keep the details of the Voice a secret, so that the people will not be diverted by minutiae of that sort before they come to vote. And as the minister, Linda Burney, said last week, it is much better to get it into the constitution and provide the details later, after people have voted in favour. And as she added, the detail can then be changed as well. It reminded me of that great electoral reform in the Central African Republic of counting the votes before they are cast.

Take the question of whether the Voice will only be advisory or whether it will have real power and actually do things. Up to now, the argument has been that the Voice will only be advisory and that no one should be scared of it because it will not do anything. I never thought that argument would fly. People would say, ‘Oh, yes; it’s only advisory, but if its advice is rejected, they will never shut up and sooner or later they will get their own way. And the unelected backboneless courts will give them what they want, even if the elected government will not.’ But now, that obstacle has disappeared with one stroke and what a relief! The government has hit on the perfect solution: don’t say if the Voice will only be advisory; don’t say what issues it might give advice on, don’t say if it will have power to do anything else and, above all that, do not under any circumstances give any details. That way, no one can say its powers are excessive because no one will know what they are. And by the time we get the referendum passed, it will be too late and the Voice that we all want will be on the statute books. So, we can all breathe a lot easier, now that the voters will not know anything at all about the Voice when they come to vote on it; sorry, when they come to vote for it.

But there is more good news. The ABC, our guardian on these weighty moral issues has had a stroke of genius. In a referendum, the government must publish a Yes and a No case, so both sides are presented to the voters and equal money is spent on each. I always thought that was a bit risky; equality is all very well, up to a point, but if people read too much of the wrong side, they might be tempted to vote for it, and we know what that can lead to. But the problem was solved last Sunday on Insiders. An ABC journo, Dan Bourchier, with nodding and agreement from the panel, revealed a ‘sense’ he had detected, in a way that only the ABC can ‘sense’ these epochal forces, that ‘if you put equal funding for a No case, you are essentially creating one where there might not be one’. Dan really put his finger on the issue. There might actually not be a No case. Probably better not to have one.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/brown-study-201/

************************************

Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)

http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

***************************************