Australian Politics
Education Department pushing for number of schools teaching First Nations languages to exceed 100
What a waste of effort! What does it achieve? Very undesirable if it derails students from learning a European language such as German, French and Italian. That would cut them off from vast cultural heritage. I have gained hugely from my studies of German and Italian
The Department of Education is pushing to increase the number of Queensland state schools teaching Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages and more than a hundred state schools are primed to jump on-board in the coming years.
According to the most recent department data, current as of February 2022, only five state schools teach First Nations languages – Mabel Park State High School in Logan, Mossman State School in the Far North, and Tagai State College’s three campuses in the Torres Strait.
However, in early 2022, the Department of Education launched a dedicated program to help schools with extra resourcing in co-designing and delivering First Nations languages.
“In 2022, 44 state schools have reported that they are working collaboratively with Language Owners to teach 26 different Aboriginal language or Torres Strait Islander language in their schools,” a Department of Education spokesman said.
“Demand for teaching an Aboriginal language or Torres Strait Islander language is increasing. Currently, a further 113 state schools are in the early stages of developing a program to teach an Aboriginal language or Torres Strait Islander language.”
University of Queensland Associate Professor Marnee Shay has done extensive research on Indigenous education in her role as an academic. She is an Aboriginal woman with connections to Wagiman Country in the Northern Territory and Indigenous communities in South East Queensland.
“Many Indigenous leaders and education advocates have been championing the inclusion of Indigenous language and culture in the curriculum for many years now. It has been slow, but we finally see change and commitment at a policy level,” she said.
“As an Aboriginal person who was denied the opportunity to speak my language, I think it is excellent that the Department has made a policy commitment to increasing the number of schools teaching First Nations languages.
“Having Indigenous language as part of the curriculum at their school is identity-affirming for Indigenous students. “For non-indigenous students, it is an opportunity to learn not only the language, but the history and culture of the people who have been here for tens of thousands of years.”
However, Professor Shay said there are not enough First Nations language teachers. “We have Elders and community people that might have the knowledge and skills to teach language, but this is not always recognised by the system, which often requires people to hold university degrees,” she said.
“Indigenous people must be involved in the teaching of our own languages. You can’t teach language without culture – Indigenous people are the best people to be teaching this.
“Expanding the number [of schools teaching First Nations languages] is important, but not at the expense of process and cultural protocol – which can take time.”
All state schools are required to teach a language from at least Years 5 to 8. The four dominant languages in state schools are Japanese, French, Chinese and German.
The Department of Education spokesman said schools looking to teach Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages are advised to gain permission from local community elders first, and work closely with them in designing the program.
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My last phone call with George Pell
Andrew Bolt
I sure won’t forget the last time Cardinal George Pell rang me. Not now that I’ll never speak again to this holy man. He called me one night from Rome with an anxious question: Had I finally answered Christ’s call?
He’d even sent me an unimpressive book by Antony Flew to hasten the conversion he felt was imminent, so I was embarrassed to disappoint him and admit I was still agnostic.
Here’s why his call will stay with me now that he’s died in hospital of a heart attack, just as he was chatting to an anaesthetist about his hip operation.
It underlined something Pell’s critics never understood about him. To them, Pell was a schemer. A cold politician who rose to be the Vatican’s treasurer, third in line from the Pope, by putting his church above people. And, they wickedly added near the end of his life, he was a paedophile.
For decades, the media pumped out this hatred of Australia’s most senior Catholic, a conservative who opposed their global warming religion.
Just last Friday, browsing in a second-hand bookshop I found a copy of The Prince, a purported portrait of Pell by one of his nastiest critics, former ABC presenter David Marr.
The publisher’s blurb sums up the ABC gospel on Pell that did so much to destroy his reputation. Marr’s book was “a portrait of hypocrisy and ambition” of “a cleric at ease with power”.
But the Pell I knew was a man of God, who couldn’t even in his last days shake his concern for my soul. That real Pell is also there in his inspiring Prison Journal, written while in jail for 404 days for a crime he couldn’t possibly have committed.
The last paragraph says it all, with Pell, the son of a Ballarat publican, writing of the “man-God, whom I love and serve, whom I have followed for all my life”.
Oops. Sorry about all this God talk. It puts a lot of people off these days, and that was the problem with George Pell. No churchman here was firmer in defending his faith, and for that he was crucified.
Where did it all go so wrong? Many critics will point to May 1993, when Pell accompanied Australia’s worst paedophile priest, Father Gerald Ridsdale, to a court hearing. The media went berserk. Myths grew that Pell defended Ridsdale in court and tried to hide his crimes (both false). Even Pell was badgered years later into admitting he’d made a “mistake”.
It was a mistake only because few people now understand Christianity. Pell was trying again to follow Christ, who preached to prostitutes, tax collectors and the despised, telling them even the worst sinner need only repent to be forgiven.
But who understands that message today, when the woke forgive no one? Look at the jeering on Twitter at Pell’s death – “rot in hell”, “mongrel”, and “need to know if George Pell felt any pain before he died like a cockroach”.
Pell, a Christian, would never have been so pitiless. This is the great moral chasm – Christians vs barbarians – into which he fell.
But you’ll want me to say something bad about Pell, even if just to show he wasn’t perfect and I haven’t guzzled the altar wine. Well, Pell didn’t help himself by seeming aloof, cool and a little arrogant.
I once castigated him for using the birth of the beloved daughter of a friend of mine to preach against the IVF techniques which conceived her. Pell sometimes lacked a sensitivity that could have spared him.
Yet what was done to him was more damning than anything he did. For instance, Pell was accused by the witch-hunting Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse of helping the Bishop of Ballarat move Ridsdale from parish to parish, knowing he was raping boys.
Pell denied it, and the commission had no evidence he was lying. In fact, it bizarrely claimed Pell was at a meeting of consulters where the bishop said Ridsdale was a paedophile, yet it accepted another consulter there didn’t know this until a decade later.
No, Pell had to be the fall guy for his guilty church, and Victoria’s police made sure of it.
Pell had long been hated by the Left, even since he became Archbishop of Melbourne and insisted priests and Catholic schools follow the church’s teachings and not their Left-wing own.
He also set up the first compensation scheme anywhere for victims of child-sex abuse, and put in reforms – almost entirely successful – to guard against paedophile priests, but that didn’t save him.
In 2015, Victoria Police advertised for complaints against Pell, asking “victims” to come forward. They then charged him with 26 complaints of child sex abuse against nine “victims”.
The charges were so far-fetched that all collapsed, but not before Pell spent more than a year in jail after being convicted of somehow raping two teenage boys at once in the open sacristy of his Cathedral, in the bustle just after Mass.
In fact, the evidence was clear: Pell was at the front of the Cathedral, talking to worshippers, at the only time the sacristy was free, and his accuser must have been outside, walking back with the choir. Neither the raped nor the alleged rapist could have been at the scene of the crime.
One of the two “victims” even told his parents there was no rape, and the High Court decided, seven judges to nil, Pell was innocent.
Pell always suspected senior Vatican clerics planted or supported these bizarre allegation to stop him investigating them for corruption. One of his enemies is now on trial.
Yet to this day, thousands of Australians still prefer this lie of Pell the paedophile, and the ABC has never apologised for pushing it. Like Nero, they’d rather crucify an innocent Christian than hear the truth.
In that respect, Pell follows the Christ he adored. Let Catholics remember him as a man, flawed but holy, martyred by pagans to pay for their sins.
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Solar project gobbling up cash at a fatal rate
Another Greenie fantasy
A fall out between two of the nation’s richest men has led to the abrupt implosion of the $30bn Sun Cable project, one of the world’s biggest solar and battery projects which had aimed to turbocharge Australia into a major international clean energy exporter.
Sun Cable was placed into administration on Wednesday after a dramatic scrap between its two high-profile backers – Mike Cannon-Brookes and Andrew Forrest.
It sets the scene for the businessmen to compete for control of the development, known as the Australia-Asia PowerLink.
The two billionaires clashed over different views on the optimal funding package and strategic vision for the project based in the Northern Territory, which would have sent power from Darwin to Singapore with a 4200km cable.
FTI Consulting were formally appointed as voluntary administrators on Wednesday.
“The appointment followed the absence of alignment with the objectives of all shareholders. Whilst funding proposals were provided, consensus on the future direction and funding structure of the company could not be achieved,” a statement from Sun Cable said.
The fallout threatens to sink one of Australia’s biggest energy projects, pitched as a vision for how the nation could move away from fossil fuels and become a major renewable energy exporter.
Sun Cable in March 2022 raised $210m of new funding to push ahead with its signature clean energy scheme – the $30bn Australia-Asia PowerLink development – with fresh funds ploughed in by the Atlassian co-founder, also the chairman of Sun Cable, and the Fortescue Metals chairman.
However, Dr Forrest’s Squadron Energy recently raised concern that Sun Cable failed to meet its Series B funding milestones and was spending cash at unsustainable rates. The project is running up to 12 months behind schedule, partly due to delays with Indonesian environmental approvals.
Squadron also raised issues with Sun Cable’s management team and may have ultimately wanted to install its own executives in place to run the huge renewable project, sources said.
Documents filed with the corporate regulator show that John Hartman, the chief executive of Dr Forrest’s private Tattarang investment group, quit the Sun Cable board in late November.
As part of ongoing funding needs for the development, Mr Cannon-Brookes’ Grok Ventures was planning to invest an extra $60m into Sun Cable, but that proposal was not agreed to by Squadron, sources said. Squadron, for its part, held concerns over a clause within Grok’s funding proposal that would have seen the company sold or put on the market if there were further failures to meet its funding milestones.
Squadron put forward a funding proposal for a similar amount prior to Christmas but it was not accepted by the rest of the board. Both Grok and Squadron held veto rights which effectively cancelled each other’s funding deals.
It had widespread backing from the federal government and received support from Scott Morrison with Indonesia approving the route of the power project through its territorial waters.
Grok said there was little other choice for the company than the move into administration, while underlining its ongoing interest in the scheme. “In the circumstances, including where all but one shareholder agreed with the company’s funding strategy – the Board was left with no other option, but to enter into voluntary administration,” it said in a statement. “Grok remains a strong supporter of Sun Cable delivering the world’s largest solar energy infrastructure network and the Australia-Asia Power Link. We are confident Sun Cable will be an attractive investment proposition and remain at the forefront of Australia’s energy transition.”
“Voluntary administration provides the best opportunity for the company to access appropriate funding sources.”
Documents filed with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission on Monday show that Sun Cable received a $28m cash injection on December 24. Both Squadron and Mr Cannon-Brookes’ private investment company CBC Co were involved, along with Xero founder Craig Winkler, Craig Scroggie – the chief executive of NextDC – and Eytan Lenko, the chief executive of Beyond Zero Emissions.
The same group kicked in another $26m in mid-September, the documents show, with Squadron and CBC also paying $6.2m for new shares in late October.
All of the share issues are believed to be cash calls from the $210m capital raising announced by Sun Cable in March 2022.
The solar project in the NT, which is estimated to deliver carbon emissions abatement of 8.6 million tonnes per year, will help power Darwin and Singapore.
It includes the world’s largest battery and a 4200km high-voltage cable from Darwin to Singapore, the longest in the world.
Sun Cable still needs to raise more than $30bn in debt and equity by the end of 2023 to back its plans, with the company last year appointing Macquarie, Moelis & Company and MA Financial Group as its financial advisers for the massive task.
The Australia-Asia PowerLink project will create more than 1500 jobs during construction, 350 operational jobs and 12,000 indirect jobs. It will start supplying energy to Darwin in 2026. The venture aims to send 20 gigawatts of power from the world’s largest solar farm near Tennant Creek to Darwin and would also feature a giant battery as part of the project.
Sun Cable chief executive David Griffin said the project remains “well placed” for completion. “As we have progressed our work, the demand for delivering reliable, dispatchable 24/7 renewable energy in the Northern Territory and the region has risen materially,” Mr Griffin said in a statement issued on Wednesday.
“Sun Cable looks forward to developing and operating the projects to meet this demand.”
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Climate lockdowns: a never-ending story of misery and control
Here is a harsh truth we must be cognisant of: the same power-hungry control freaks who wanted to lock down the whole world to keep us ‘safe’ from Covid are also wanting to lock down the whole world to keep us safe from ‘climate change’.
And they have told us this. A conspiracy theory is an unsubstantiated and unlikely claim. A conspiracy truth is when the folks involved tell us openly and plainly what they want to do. The Great Reset mob have made it perfectly clear what they have in mind in relation to climate lockdowns after Covid lockdowns were so easily and quickly implemented with the approval of the masses.
The World Economic Forum has published plenty of articles and run a variety of talkfests promoting Covid as a means to enshrine globalisation as a form of centralised government. This would mean the end of a free West. They have switched to promoting climate change fear as an extension to this program. A simple look at their website is all you need to confirm which way Klaus Schwab wishes to drag the world.
Consider one recent article titled, From Davos 2022 to Davos 2023: The six themes then that have set the agenda now. Here is a short part of it:
Theme #2: Three interconnected crises – climate, food, energy.
The climate crisis has long been a key component of the Davos agenda. But with rising emissions, rising energy prices and rising food prices – inextricably linked and exacerbated by the geopolitical crisis in Ukraine – climate conversations took a graver tone at Davos 2022 as world leaders discussed the need for immediate action…
Countries must drastically scale up efforts: ‘It isn’t just about words anymore – it is about action,’ said Xie Zhenhua, China’s Special Envoy for Climate Change. ‘Climate action, now, is critical.’
Hmm, ‘climate, food, energy’. Don’t we already see that being ‘dealt with’ by our elites? Whether it is Bill Gates buying up huge amounts of arable farmland in America, Holland confiscating 3,000 farms to meet the climate dictates of the EU, or energy crises throughout Europe caused by alarmist climate action policies, we know where this story is headed.
Also note how China is called upon as a sort of spiritual leader! For a large amount of critical data and detail on why we do not want to follow China, please get a hold of Michael Senger’s vital 2021 volume, Snake Oil: How Xi Jinping Shut Down the World.
It seems that there is never a shortage of fools and/or power-hungry tyrants waiting to get in on the action. For example, UK activists are moving full steam ahead with this:
Oxford, England will be enforcing six ‘traffic filter’ locations restricting car travel in 2024 as part of an effort to ‘help tackle climate change’. During a trial run of at least six months, only buses, taxis, cyclists, pedestrians, and workers with special exemptions will be able to pass through the ‘filter’ access points at all times without being fined, the Oxfordshire County Council and Oxford City Council explained.
Residents of Oxford and ‘some surrounding villages’ can apply for a permit to drive through the filters for up to 100 days a year, and residents of Oxfordshire County may apply for a permit to pass through the filters up to 25 days a year.
As another site puts it:
Apparently, not enough people are catching buses or riding bikes. But instead of making that more appealing, the totalitarians will force it through tracking and fines. Oxfordshire has just approved on November 29, the ‘traffic filters’ trial which will turn the city into a ‘fifteen-minute city’. The Trial will start in Jan 2024.
It’s a crowded area, Oxfordshire, and no one likes traffic congestion, but in a free world the problem is self-limiting as drivers get fed up with delays and exorbitant parking costs, and they car-pool or choose to catch the bus or ride a bike. But in Big Nanny State the local rulers start making rules about who can and can’t visit and how often, and they want your car registered on their own special list with cameras to track you and fines to punish you. They offer exemptions of course, but then you have to apply for them and get permission.
The WEF have printed plenty of articles telling us what a great idea this is. A brief quote from one of them reads: ‘As climate change and global conflict cause shocks and stresses at faster intervals and increasing severity, the 15-minute city will become even more critical.’
If you think this is moon-battery from far, far away, please reconsider. Here in Melbourne the powers that be are looking into exactly the same thing:
Plan Melbourne is guided by the principle of 20-minute neighbourhoods.
The 20-minute neighbourhood is all about ‘living locally’ – giving people the ability to meet most of their daily needs within a 20-minute walk from home, with safe cycling and local transport options. The current Municipal Strategic Planning Project is a joint DELWP and local government project to create better planning for Neighbourhood Activity Centres to deliver 20-minute neighbourhoods.
Banyule, Darebin, Maroondah, Moonee Valley and Whittlesea City Councils are testing draft guidance to support activity centre network planning based on their local needs and priorities. The outcomes of the project will inform future guidance developed to ensure it is robust and fit-for-purpose.
Oh dear – Melbourne, one of the most locked down cities on the planet, just can’t get enough of this stuff. We can look forward to more lockdowns – this time to save the planet. Yeah, right… Can’t wait for that. How about first looking carefully at our Covid lockdowns and determining if they actually did any good, or if they caused far more harm instead, before signing up to more?
I have featured numerous experts on this site over the past three years documenting the massive harms of lockdown mania. Yet our elites and ‘experts’ think they were just peachy and we need to have even more of them. In addition to all the evidence we have about the harms caused by lockdowns, let me finish by noting a new article by the author I mentioned above.
In Fifty Questions to Which We Demand Answers, Michael Senger gives us plenty to think about. He looks at government responses to Covid, including the lockdowns. Let me offer his final 20 questions – all of which deserve immediate and thorough answers:
How many people were killed by the WHO’s initial guidance on mechanical ventilators based on Chinese journal articles advising ventilators as the ‘first choice’ for those hospitalised with Covid?
The initial guidance from the WHO advised using mechanical ventilators not necessarily for the patient’s benefit, but to control the spread of the virus. Why was the WHO advising doctors to violate the Hippocratic Oath?
Why were numerous, credible predictions regarding famine, human rights disasters, and economic collapse as a result of lockdowns ignored?
Why was natural immunity ignored?
Why were initial seroprevalence studies downplayed?
Why were beaches and other outdoor spaces closed?
Why was the public kept in the dark about low early estimates of Covid’s actual infection fatality rate?
What was the source of the guidance to move patients who were still sick into nursing homes?
Why has there been so little public discussion of China’s influence on the global response to Covid, despite FBI Director Christopher Wray’s disclosure that Chinese officials were ‘aggressively urging support for China’s handling of the Covid crisis?’
Why was the UK government so deferential to Neil Ferguson and Imperial College London during the response to Covid despite Imperial’s close relationship with China?
Why has the editor-in-chief of the Lancet been publicly deferential to China?
Why did Bill Gates express admiration for China’s response to Covid?
Why did the German government privately disseminate a list of authoritarian measures provided in part by China lobbyists?
How did a 40-year member of the British Communist Party with no background in epidemiology become a leading advisor to the UK government, and why was she recently promoted to lead the WHO’s nudge unit?
Why did leading economists assume that a short, sharp lockdown would ‘eliminate the resurgence risk’ when the policy had no precedent?
Why did the Federal Reserve and its international counterparts disregard inflation?
Why did the Supreme Court and its international counterparts step aside while lockdowns were being implemented?
Why did the judiciary acquiesce to an indefinite state of legal emergency?
Why did Western politicians and public health officials demonstrate so little concern for following their own Covid rules?
If the virus was deadly enough to kill millions and justify an indefinite state of emergency, why has so little effort been expended to hold China accountable for its initial coverup of that virus?
Good questions indeed. But don’t expect any answers to be forthcoming from our global leaders – they are much too busy planning our next lockdowns.
https://spectator.com.au/2023/01/climate-lockdowns-a-never-ending-story-of-misery-and-control/
************************************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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a conservative Australian political commentator
Margo Robbie -- a beautiful australian
My son Joe at ANU
One of the happiest pictures ever -- Cleo Smith, aged 4
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