Australian Politics
Amazing lost art of letter-writing
The article below mentions writing with steel pens. I wrote that way for most of my primary schooling. The trick was to use bought ink instead of school ink. School ink was a dull blue but "Quink" ink was a bright blue and flowed better. Rich kids had "Quink" ink. I never did
When relatives die, the possessions they leave behind are often a source of intrigue and mystery. So it proved for Michael Dorahy and his younger sister Colleen.
Buried among a collection of vintage schoolbooks, he recently discovered a neatly folded criss-crossed letter dated 1879.
A criss-crossed letter, also known as cross-hatching or cross-writing, contains two or more streams of writing, one written over the other at right angles.
"It was in Mum's stuff, some of which was sent to me by a sister and during COVID I finally had time to go through it all and research what criss-crossed letters were," Michael, who lives in Melbourne, said.
The manuscript is hard to read as lines of correspondence cross each other on the page.
He believes the manuscript predates fountain pens and a source from the National Library of Australia agrees, identifying features unique to the genre, including writing tools.
"Steel nib pens with handles" were advertised in Australia as early as 1831, the source said, so it is likely that in 1879 the author would be using a metal nib pen.
An example of this can be viewed at Museums Victoria, along with a history of the pens.
"According to a 2016 article from the Rosenbach Museum and Library, the reason for cross-writing was to save paper or postage, but it also may have become a habit, even when not strictly necessary," the NLA reported.
"It was a system used worldwide, and definitely used in Australia in 1839, see Criss-Cross History Hidden in a Letter, which notes that paper was scarce."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-01-22/criss-crossed-letter-mystery/103362666
***************************************************Forget the flags, it’s the cynicism we’re not buying
“Woolworths loves Australia, and love being Australian.” So say the websites of several Woolworths locations. And yet Woolworths, along with Big W, Kmart and Aldi, is refusing to stock Australia Day paraphernalia. Mixed messaging much?
One spokesman for Woolworths explained it was partly because “there’s been broader discussion about January 26 and what it means to different parts of the community”.
Sure, so why not just stock the merchandise and let the customer decide? Coles will stock Australiana merchandise, but it assured Australians it was not specifically for Australia Day. Phew!
Ironically, I can buy all my Australia Day gear at The Reject Shop.
Of course, it’s the right of any private business to stock whatever it likes, and Woolworths and other retailers are exercising this right. But this whole business is strange because the retailers are taking a moral stance on an issue that really has nothing to do with them, as though they are churches offering moral guidance.
It would seem many major corporations are increasingly (over)run by agonised souls who on the one hand are climbing the ladder of ruthless, lucrative careerism, while atoning for it by trying to turn profit-driven corporations into beacons of righteousness.
If there was one lesson from the voice referendum, it was that Australians don’t like major corporations preaching about national issues, and especially trying to use their bottomless pit of resources to try to influence the outcome of a national debate.
These retailers have the right to sell what they like, and Australians have the right to avoid them in favour of small businesses to buy everything they need for Australia Day, meat and all.
But the oikophobia – or fear of one’s own nation – on display every Australia Day is not trivial. We are raising a generation in a way that can only be detrimental to the nation in the long run. We are clearly not inculcating a sufficient gratitude for Australia or Western civilisation in our education system, certainly not a sufficient love for democracy over tyranny and terror.
The protests against Israel immediately after October 7 show the dire state of our education system. Amazingly, a “week of action” in schools in support of Palestine was endorsed by several regions of the Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union. Many teachers planned to turn up to class wearing pro-Palestinian paraphernalia.
An open letter to the Victorian government signed by hundreds of Victorian teachers and school staff denouncing Israeli human rights abuses continues to gather signatures. Nowhere does the letter condemn the actions of Hamas or demand that Hamas return any Israeli hostages. Nowhere. It’s as though evil Israel just launched a campaign into Gaza for no reason whatsoever. School students began rallying in support of Palestine against Israel soon after the attacks. This is their right, but one must ask whether they are being told both sides of the story.
Israel is a multiracial, multiethnic democracy established as a safe haven for millions of Jews to flee genocide after World War II. It has an Arab minority of roughly 20 per cent that has the same legal rights as Jewish Israelis. It sits in the midst of a region where it is no exaggeration to say millions of its enemies would like to see it destroyed.
Indeed, it would seem many young Australians would like to see it destroyed as well, or at least unwittingly call for its destruction. “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” is chanted at the protests. It literally calls for the erasure of the state of Israel. How could such a chant be fulfilled except through violence; that is, genocide?
In 2022 the Sydney University Students’ Representative Council passed a motion condemning Israel as an apartheid state. It was titled “From the River to the Sea”.
Many of those same chanters accuse Israel of genocide against the Gazans as Israel does nothing more than seek to remove those in Gaza who would seek a repeat of October 7.
Indeed, innocent people in Gaza are being killed, but perhaps Israel’s critics might consider the people to blame are those who deliberately use Gazans as human shields by launching attacks from built-up urban areas. For Israel to desist from retaliatory action that would take innocent lives would be to sit back and allow Hamas terrorists, and sympathisers, to launch attacks until, as the chant goes, Israel has been obliterated “from the river to the sea”.
If Gaza is to have any future then Hamas must be destroyed, and, atrociously, it fully intends to bring many innocent Gazans down with it. As the Hamas Covenant of 1988 had it, “death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its (the movement’s) wishes.”
How can so many Australians, particularly young Australians, be so blind as to see Israel as the oppressor here? Sadly, it’s pretty clear too many teachers, themselves products of a very one-sided university education, are reluctant to teach both sides of the story.
Many young Australians seem to feel the West and its satellite allies, such as Israel, are at best hopelessly flawed, and at worst positively wicked. This uninformed cynicism has the pernicious effect of muting our national solidarity with Israel, a democracy amid authoritarian regimes, and established in defiance of actual genocide.
The seriousness of a lack of enthusiasm for celebrating Australia Day is not really about flags and bucket hats, it is linked with the ever-growing cynicism towards Western civilisation in general.
We must do more than merely publicly disapprove of retailers who seem to have jumped on the cynical bandwagon. We must demand that some in our national legislature have the courage to stand up and fight for an education system premised on gratitude for Western civilisation and the historically unprecedented free and prosperous lives it has afforded all of us in this great land. Not to mention the promise it holds for millions of outsiders who aspire for something better. This is what we celebrate on January 26.
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‘Golden visas’ axed in crackdown on billion dollar passports-for-sale scheme
A business visa program which makes up a quarter of all the nation’s migration allocations has been quietly axed by Labor over claims it has had a profoundly negative impact on the economy, including a “golden visa” scheme allowing wealthy foreigners to live in Australia if they make investments of at least $5m.
The entire Business Innovation and Investment Program has been closed to new applications, with a shift to more skilled workers expected to boost Australia’s dividend from migrants by $3bn over the next decade.
The Significant Investor visa strand of the program has always – and without subtlety – targeted Chinese citizens, who make up 90 per cent of successful applicants The visa subclass was given the number 888 – which signifies triple good luck in Chinese numerology.
The visa required a minimum investment in Australia of $5m and conferred an automatic right of permanent residence. Investors could gain citizenship even if they spent only 40 days a year in Australia and, unlike other visa holders, they were not required to learn or speak English. There was also no upper age limit.
The crackdown follows revelations by The Australian that foreign criminals and corrupt regime officials have used the red-carpet schemes to acquire Australian citizenship.
While more than 7000 Chinese citizens have been granted Significant Investor visas, not a single applicant in the past 10 years has been rejected under the character test designed to help exclude criminals or those with suspiciously obtained wealth.
The move to replace the Significant Investor and other BIIP visas with more skilled worker visas will boost Australia’s dividend from migrants by nearly $120bn over the next 30 years, according to the Grattan Institute, because business investment visa holders retire about 20 years earlier than the younger skilled workers who will replace them.
The development was welcomed by the institute’s economic policy program director, Brendan Coates, who described the BIIP as “the single worst part of Australia’s skilled migration program”.
“Unlike all the other parts of the program, it has tended to attract older, less-skilled migrants that end up costing Australian taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run in pension and other health costs that far exceed any tax they pay over their lives in Australia,” Mr Coates told The Australian.
“So closing that down and reallocating those visa places to other parts of the Skilled Migration Program will pay an enormous fiscal and economic dividend to Australia.”
The Migration Review, spearheaded by public service chief Martin Parkinson, found that skilled migrants contribute $300,000 more in benefits over their lifetime than those who buy their way into the country.
More than 80 per cent of company directors within the Business Innovation and Stream were in retail or hospitality, which were “sectors not typically associated with major advancements in productivity and innovation”.
A much more tightly controlled Talent and Innovation Visa would create a single, streamlined pathway “to attract relatively small numbers of highly talented migrants to Australia, such as high-performing entrepreneurs, major investors and global researchers”, the federal government said, adding: “permanent residency is an important drawcard to attract these migrants as we compete with other nations in the global race for talent.”
Industry sources suggest an investment of at least $10m into more targeted venture capital projects will be required.
The abolition of the BIIP schemes will cause serious ructions in the multibillion-dollar business investment visa industry, where financial advisers, migration agents, banks and specialist investment firms have reaped huge rewards for more than a decade.
The scheme has brought nearly $12bn in investment to Australia over the past 10 years, but the Productivity Commission has long maintained that the benefits were small, uncertain and accrued mainly to fund managers.
The visas also could be a pathway for “dirty money” into Australia and were prone to fraud, the commission said.
Chinese billionaire Huang Xiangmo, who was granted permanent residency, was one of the few investors under the program whose visa was cancelled on character grounds.
Security agencies – but not immigration officials – had serious concerns about his links to the Chinese Communist Party, and the prolific political donor was later alleged to have personally delivered $100,000 cash in an Aldi plastic bag to Labor Party officials.
The Australian has also previously revealed concern that wealthy members of Cambodia’s Hun Sen regime have bought their way into Australia through the scheme, with at least 80 significant investor visas granted to Cambodian nationals in the past decade.
Many nations that offered golden visa schemes have shut them down to stop corrupt foreign officials parking their wealth in “safe” countries, leaving Australia as one of the last Western countries where it was possible to buy a right of residency and, ultimately, a passport.
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“No, you’re not going to school’: Why more Qld parents are keeping their kids at home
While once seen as alternative, homeschooling is becoming increasingly popular for families from all walks of life.
In Queensland, Education Department data shows 10,048 children were registered for homeschooling in 2023, a huge surge from the 1108 kids enrolled a decade ago. In South Australia, there are 2443 registered homeschoolers and 11,912 in Victoria. NSW has the highest number of registered homeschooled students in the country with almost 12,500.
The Low family in Bargo, NSW, is part of that group. Pediatric occupational therapist Jessica Low, 35, and her husband, researcher Dr Mitchell Low, 35, have five children and have never sent them to school.
“The biggest factor for me is child development,” Jessica Low says, drawing on her experience gained over the past nine years she has spent working as an OT. “Just physically they don’t even have the proper core strength to sit at desks for long periods in early childhood. “That’s why you see kids flopped over with their head in their hands.
“And they’re not even allowed to sensory regulate themselves because if they start wriggling and fidgeting, they’re told to stop.”
Low says her oldest children – Penelope, 9, Josie, 7 and John, 6 – are thriving at home, and so too is their family.
“If my kids were in school we would have such little connection,” Low says, noting that learning begins from the moment they wake up.
“A big part of our day is breakfast. They all have jobs, one clears the table, one does the dishwasher. It’s learning to work as a team, learning to communicate with one another.
“There are sibling fights which they may need guidance to resolve. These are important skills for them to learn.”
Home education looks different for every family, shaped by each state’s regulations.
Generally, children are expected to meet outcomes that are in line with their schooled peers. For example, the Low family follows the NSW syllabus and is checked by a moderator at least once a year.
But Low says she adapts everything so they are learning through play, adding: “Kids just need to spend time playing, running, jumping, climbing trees.”
Educator and parenting specialist Maggie Dent, 68, echoes this sentiment. She’s spent much of her life’s work advocating for kids to spend less time at desks and more time playing, particularly in the formative years.
“Our children aren’t moving enough. And the lack of movement impacts the way the brain is shaped,” Dent explains.
“Children as young as five are doing a lot more sitting on mats and at desks than they used to.”
Dent says Australia’s education results “have crashed” over the past 20 years when compared with other countries.
She cites Finland as a positive example of where children are assessed not just on a curriculum but with a focus on social and emotional intelligence.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development measures the education standards of 41 participating countries through its Program for International Student Assessment. Finland ranks fourth in the PISA, while Estonia is the highest performing OECD country. In those two countries children don’t start compulsory schooling until the age of seven.
Australian children are strapping on their backpacks and heading into compulsory schooling at age five, resulting in a rank of 17.
“There is no evidence that starting earlier gets better results. In actual fact we see just the opposite. Teachers are telling me all the time that the curriculum is so crowded, and they have to so do much more assessment that it’s taken the joy and fun out of teaching,” Dent says.
“So what happens is children start to hate learning, they start to lose their curiosity and they start really struggling in social environments because there aren’t enough play opportunities.”
Dispelling the myth of social isolation, homeschooling programs such as the We Are Nature Network in Perth, Western Australia, provide a nature-based classroom for children aged four to seven. It’s run by teachers who’ve left the education system.
On the day I visit, co-founder Emily Patterson starts the morning by reading The Troll, by Julia Donaldson, on a picnic rug under a tree. There are 10 pairs of eyes watching intently.
Some of the kids are sitting on their parents’ laps, others are eating from their lunch box. Nearby three little boys who are climbing a tree turn to look and listen every now and then.
Another boy hops up from the rug and picks up a stick he’s found lying nearby. He starts tapping the stick on the dirt. No one seems to notice, they’re all too engrossed in the story, including the little boy with the stick. He’s listening to every word Patterson reads.
At one point a golden retriever being walked off its leash comes past and story time quickly turns into a collective dog patting session.
“A huge value of mine is being outdoors and playing,” Patterson, 31, says.
The mother-of-three left her job as a primary school teacher when she had her first son, Taj, seven years ago, and hasn’t looked back.
“I thought, I’ll create something that feels right for my family, but also where other kids can come and feel good about learning.”
There is limited research on the academic outcomes of homeschooling because many parents choose for their children not to sit exams. A 2014 NSW government report found homeschooled children who participated in the NAPLAN tests scored “significantly above the overall NSW average”, but noted just 10 per cent of homeschooled children took the tests.
“There is such a focus on academics at school, but you can learn to read and write at 90. You can learn anything at any age. The first seven years of life are absolutely critical to social and emotional development. You can’t get that time back,” Patterson says.
For some families homeschooling is something they never thought they’d do, but made the decision based on issues like bullying, mental health and a lack of support for neurodivergent children.
“We don’t factor neurodivergent kids and their unique needs into teaching environments at all,” Dent says.
“Many parents are asking why would I put them into a system that is ‘one size fits all’, when I can keep them home and still be doing all the things that help them learn.”
Just like school, homeschooling isn’t for everyone. It does involve sacrifices with some families having to weigh up the financial burden of having one parent give up employment, typically the mother, to stay home.
And while all the mothers I interviewed have managed to continue working flexibly around their children’s education, they do all agree on one downside: the scarcity of personal time. Nevertheless, it’s a compromise willingly embraced.
“That’s probably the only thing because I’m with them all day,” Lycett reflects. “So at night time, I need a little bit of time to myself. But other than that, they are great kids, we love being with them.”
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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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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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