Major Australia Day event is cancelled over sensitivities around celebrating the national day

Anthony Albanese's high commissioner to the UK has scrapped the annual Australia Day fundraiser, citing 'sensitivities' over the controversial public holiday.

Stephen Smith, Australia's highest-ranking diplomat to the UK who previously served as defence minister and foreign affairs minister under the Rudd and Gillard governments before retiring from frontline politics in 2013, has put an end to the popular Australia Day Gala dinner.

It was held annually for the past 20 years in the marble-clad Exhibition Hall of the Australian High Commission on the Strand on the Saturday closest to January 26.

The black-tie evet, which is run by the not-for-profit Australia Day Foundation, has previously attracted some of Australia's biggest exports, including singers Kylie Minogue, Natalie Imbruglia, Tim Minchin and entertainer Barry Humphries and broadcaster Clive James.

A spokesman for the High Commission of Australia told The Sydney Morning Herald it was 'well known that Australia Day touches on sensitivities for some Australians'.

'The high commissioner is happy to acknowledge that was part of the decision-making process with respect to the various alternative dates suggested by the foundation,' the spokesman added.

Leader of the opposition Peter Dutton called on Mr Albanese to 'reverse this bad decision'. 'Australia Day is our national day and it shouldn’t be cancelled like this,' he said.

Mr Smith told the organisers that it would not be appropriate to hold the 2024 event around January 26, which marks the First Fleet's landing in Sydney in 1788.

The High Commission of Australia reportedly wanted to charge the charity £29,000 ($55,000), impose a curfew of 11pm and proposed the event be held in March instead.

Phil Aitken, founding member of the foundation told the paper, the lack of support for the event after 20 years was 'very sad'.

'I was very disappointed to be told that it was not appropriate to have a function around Australia Day that might be interpreted as insensitive back in Australia,' he said.

Advertising titan Bill Muirhead, who was also a founding member of the foundation, slammed the decision as 'un-Australian' .

'The last time I checked, January 26 was still Australia Day,' Mr Muirhead told the paper.

The event has turned a profit in recent years which has been used to fund scholarships for Australians to study in the UK.

Opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham called on the federal government to overturn Mr Smith's decision.

'It's not a high commissioner's place to unilaterally change the date of Australia Day,' Mr Birmingham told the paper.

'Stephen Smith doesn't just look like a killjoy who's ashamed of Australian history but is also trashing a prime event that promotes investment, travel and trade with Australia.

'Penny Wong and Don Farrell should overrule this ridiculous decision that burns the goodwill and reputation of an event built up over many years by proud expats happy to give their time to promote our nation.'

Mr Smith was believed to be the Prime Minister's third choice for the ambassadorial role as the government struggled to fill the post for nearly a year.

Earlier this year, he stoked controversy when he said it was 'inevitable' that Australia will become a republic and remove King Charles as head of state.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12847861/Major-Australia-Day-event-cancelled.html

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Education destroyed by self-serving educrats

Such is the parlous and substandard state of Australia’s education system, if those in charge managed a major corporation like Qantas, Optus, or Woolworths they would either be investigated by the ACCC, be removed from the board, or have their salaries and bonuses docked.

Not so for those career educational bureaucrats, academics, subject experts, and carpetbaggers who have played a central role in the nation’s dismal collapse in educational standards over the last 30 to 40 years.

Whether we look at international tests like PISA – where today’s 15-year-old students are a year behind their year 2000 counterparts – university courses being dumbed down due to first year students being unable to cope, or employers complaining about illiteracy and innumeracy, Australian education is going down the gurgler.

Despite the additional billions of dollars invested as a result of the Gonski funding review, multiple national reform agreements over the last 30 years, and countless government-sponsored curriculum and assessment inquiries and reviews, generations of students have been, and still are, destined to failure.

There’s nothing new in the latest 2022 PISA results highlighting Australia’s descent into mediocrity. In 2004 I wrote about why our schools are failing and cited evidence from tests and surveys carried out in 1975, 1995, and 1996 concluding that nearly 30 per cent of primary students failed basic literacy tests.

When detailing why Australia under-performs and why standards have declined so dramatically, the usual suspects include ineffective classroom practice, a superficial, substandard curriculum, lack of discipline, failure to set high expectations, and parents abrogating their responsibilities.

Rarely identified is the major systemic problem infecting Australia’s education system. A problem centred on the fact those responsible over the last 30 to 40 years have failed dismally in their responsibility to provide students with a challenging, enriching, and worthwhile education.

Beginning in the early 1970s, those tasked with training teachers jettisoned the more traditional approach based on teacher authority and teacher-directed lessons, rote learning, and memorisation in favour of a range of progressive, new-age innovations and fads.

Open classrooms, community schools, student-centred learning, the whole word ‘look and guess’ approach to reading, as well as diagnostic, descriptive reporting, and assessment based on the belief ranking and failing students was bad for their self-esteem dominated.

Professional bodies, including the Australian Council for Educational Research, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association, and the Deans of Education all imbibed the educational Kool-aid committing generations of students to failure.

The Australian Education Union, not surprising given its cultural-left leaning, argues the competitive, academic curriculum must be overthrown as it reinforced capitalist hierarchies. Ignored is that forsaking meritocracy especially punishes disadvantaged but bright working class students.

In 2005 the Head of the AEU boasted such had been the success of the union’s long march through the education system ‘the conservatives have a lot of work to do to undo the progressive curriculum’.

The Australian Association for the Teaching of English is also responsible for falling standards as measured by international tests. Drawing on the neo-Marxist-inspired concept of critical literacy, the AATE has long argued teachers should forsake teaching standard English and grammatically correct language in favour of empowering and liberating students by emphasising student agency and creativity.

Proven by the publication in 1998 of Going Public: Education policy and Public Education in Australia, the Australian Curriculum Studies Association is also responsible for Australia’s dumbed down, ineffective curriculum.

The book argues in favour of ‘social democratic values that lie at the heart of progressive aspirations about public education’ and argues fears about falling standards are ‘alarmist and negative’, spread by conservative politicians and a subservient media to undermine public education.

Against what is condemned as ‘reactionary policy development’ ACSA calls for schools and teachers to redouble their efforts to teach an emancipatory and liberating view of education calculated to indoctrinate students with its Woke ideology.

Commonwealth, state, and territory education departments and bodies like the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority cannot escape blame for turning Australia’s education system into an intellectual wasteland.

In addition to multiple national education reform agreements proving ineffective and costly, government and bureaucratic intervention has drowned school leaders and teachers in needless red-tape and mindless busy work contributing to burnout and high attrition rates.

Even more disturbing, based on the principle of promoting people to their least level of ability, those educrats responsible for destroying what was once a successful and rewarding education system are either promoted or recycled as members of yet another inquiry or review.

Like the old industrial relations club, those responsible for Australia’s educational decline are a self-serving, inward-looking coterie more concerned with power and prestige than raising educational standards.

The alternative is a market-driven system of education based on subsidiarity and parental choice represented by autonomous community schools and school vouchers.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/12/education-destroyed-by-self-serving-educrats/

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COP28 fantasy shows emission targets can’t be reduced to zero sum game

The COP28 summit in Dubai has provided marvellous entertainment. It has illustrated the complete fantasy of so much Australian climate policy and debate for the past 20 years.

Holding it in one of the main oil-producing regions meant a couple of disagreeable collisions with reality. For the big energy producers just laughed out loud at the idea that they were going to eliminate fossil fuels.

The only people who believe that are climate activists. I don’t even think governments that say it believe it.

According to the Energy Institute Statistical Review for 2023, fossil fuels provide about 82 per cent of the world’s energy, which is about where it has been for a decade or more.

But right back to the Gillard government years, we in Australia were constantly berated for what laggards we were and how the rest of the world was switching en masse to renewable energy.

In fact, far from the Coalition years costing the nation by delaying necessary change, they gave us another decade to accumulate wealth. Being a late adopter of technology is smart when the technology in fact has not yet been invented. It’s still true that when the Coalition ran on energy policy it won elections.

The rest of the world was not decarbonising. China is responsible for 30 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Sometime next decade its historic emissions will be so great it will be responsible for the lion’s share of historic emissions as well, so the essentially nonsense argument that the West caused the problem and therefore should pay disproportionately for its solution will not apply in any way.

But China has also dominated the market in manufacturing the hard objects of renewable energy – wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles. One reason China has such a price advantage in producing such products is that it uses cheap electricity generated by coal. That’s true, by the way, of all the consumer goods we buy from China too. The West deindustrialises to reduce emissions and all the same products are made by coal-fired electricity in China. China uses more coal than all other nations combined. China and India use two-thirds of all the coal used in the world.

Once on the ABC Insiders’ program I earned a passionate interjection by the normally well-mannered Annabel Crabb for saying a hi-tech coal-fired power plant would be a good idea in Australia (a position Malcolm Turnbull once advocated). No, she protested, coal was on the way out. The ABC audience was outraged at my pro-coal remark, as if I’d brought eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog to a Salem witch trial.

What of reality? In 2022, increased demand for thermal coal in China, India and Indonesia more than offset the decline in demand in the US, the EU and Japan. So consumption of coal in 2022 hit an all-time high. So, too, did greenhouse gas emissions.

The US Energy Information Administration reports that on all its realistic scenarios, it expects greenhouse gas emissions to rise until 2050 at least.

I’m not arguing that this is a good thing. But every so often it’s worth trying to think of policy in the framework of reality. If you accept more or less the anthropomorphic warming idea, then you want to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

But if it’s absolutely clear that the rest of the world is going to massively increase emissions, and that anything Australia does one way or the other will have no discernible effect on global warming, then it’s only reasonable that you temper the urgency of your efforts a bit. Still reduce emissions by all means, but not at any cost.

If that’s what Australia really wanted to do, it would focus on gas in the short term and nuclear in the long term, with a chunk of renewables thrown in as well. Gas replacing coal does reduce emissions. And nuclear in the long run gives you reliable base-load power forever at more or less zero emissions, after accounting for the emissions involved in constructing the power stations.

All of our current policy is based on fantasy. For example, you can’t have net zero plus immigration, and I want immigration.

The world is not moving to net zero. Where big reductions have occurred it’s in rich nations which, until now, have been willing to pay the massive subsidies renewable energies still need, and, more important, to pay for the back-up capacity you have to have for when renewables don’t work. And yet there’s more. They also have to pay for vast work connecting renewables to electricity grids.

According to one calculation, achieving net zero through renewable energy would require 80 million kilometres of new power lines, or wrapping the Earth 2000 times.

The Economist, a great supporter of net zero and green actions, dolefully reports in its latest issue on the commercial disarray in green energy and finance. The projects are so expensive that they are falling over, in both the US and Europe.

The S&P global green energy index, it reports, has fallen by 32 per cent across the past year while global stockmarkets have risen by 11 per cent.

The Economist doesn’t say it but what those figures represent is that even in rich countries the gobsmacking cost of moving to renewables is such that they are running out of the money to spend on that type of energy.

The Wall Street Journal recently listed a swag of indicators that point to what it calls “the collapse of the net-zero agenda around the world”. Among these: the EU’s green deal has essentially collapsed, with key elements impossible to be implemented; Britain has abandoned an electric vehicle mandate and has also embarked on new licences to drill for oil and gas in the North Sea; Geert Wilders, who repudiates climate action, won a slashing victory in the Dutch elections following regional election victory for a farmers’ party opposed to emissions restrictions in agriculture.

There are countless other straws in the wind. Argentina has just elected a president who rejects costly climate action. If Donald Trump becomes president he will do the same for the US, although even under Joe Biden the US is now the biggest producer and exporter of natural gas and in September produced 13.2 million barrels of crude oil a day, a record amount.

By all means reduce Australia’s emissions, but don’t send us bankrupt going at breakneck speed. And just occasionally acknowledge the reality in the big bad world.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/cop28-fantasy-shows-emission-targets-cant-be-reduced-to-zero-sum-game/news-story/ae0d8c8fd292ee2998f737fc99e69a03

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China lifts restrictions on Australian abattoirs as trade tensions ease

China has lifted suspensions on three Australian abattoirs as it continues to ease trade restrictions on Australian goods.

Several other abattoirs remain on China's trade blacklist

Meat exports were suspended from two of the abattoirs in mid-2020, and from the third in early 2022, after COVID-19 cases were reported among workers at the plants.

But analysts said the protracted bans were part of a campaign of economic punishment conducted by China against Australia due to political tensions.

The decision means that Teys at Naracoorte, Australian Lamb Company at Colac and JBS at Brooklyn will once again be able to send their products to China.

Since May 2020, 10 Australian abattoirs have been suspended from trade with China.

Seven remain on China's trade blacklist, with Beijing alleging the exporters have wrongly labelled or contaminated meat.

Trade Minister Don Farrell told the ABC that Beijing's latest decision was "another positive step towards the stabilisation of our relationship with China".

"The Albanese government will keep pressing for the remaining trade impediments to be removed as soon as possible," he said.

China has already lifted trade barriers it placed on several Australian goods in 2020 and 2021, including crippling tariffs on barley.

Trade barriers remain on red wine, lobster and meat exporters.

Beijing agreed to "review" hefty tariffs on Australian wine, with a decision expected next year.

An economic sanction is intended to peacefully protect the world's citizens. Too often, they have the opposite effect.

Patrick Hutchinson from the Australian Meat Industry Council said hundreds of millions of dollars of trade with China had been lost due to the series of bans.

He welcomed the resumption of trade from the three meatworks.

"It's been a long haul, and we're certainly by no means over it yet, but it's a good start."

Victorian-based meat industry analyst and trader Simon Quilty said the export bans "had taken away one of the most important markets" and had had an enormous impact on the businesses.

China is Australia's biggest importer of lamb and mutton, and the second-biggest importer of Australian beef.

"Without doubt, this is welcomed by everyone," he said.

In 2019, before the suspensions Australia's red meat trade with China was about $3 billion.

Despite the trade bans, several Australian abattoirs have continued to trade throughout the diplomatic tensions.

Australian Country Choice, Kilcoy Pastoral, JBS-owned Beef City, JBS Dinmore, Northern Cooperative Meat Company, John Dee and Meramist meatworks remain suspended.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-12/china-lifts-restrictions-on-australian-abattoirs/103217502

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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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