Australian Politics

"In an attempt to go green, we are losing our green"

Catriona Rowntree has slammed the Victorian government over “secretive” plans to build a massive renewable energy battery project next to her farm southwest of Melbourne.

The Getaway presenter, 53, is furious about the proposal to build batteries and solar panels on 770 hectares of land in Little River at the base of the You Yangs Regional Park, just outside Geelong, saying locals were blindsided by the plans and fear it poses a fire risk.

“You are about to learn what many of us across the state of Victoria are being blindsided with — that is in an attempt to go green, we are losing our green,” she told followers on Instagram ahead of an appearance on the ABC.

Rowntree later told the broadcaster the state government was trying to “sneak through” the proposal “and the council did not know”.

“I’m feeling like the canary in the coal mine,” she told ABC Melbourne radio host Raf Epstein. “If you don’t know something’s happening, how can you object? That’s what happened to us.”

ACEnergy acquired the land in 2023 to build the Little River Battery Energy Storage System (BESS), with the development application currently being considered by Victorian Department of Transport and Planning.

The 350MW/700MWh lithium battery farm would be one of the state’s largest if it goes ahead and “support Victoria’s clean energy transition”.

“By providing a reliable and flexible storage solution, it will help balance supply and demand, integrating more renewable energy into the grid and reducing reliance on fossil fuels,” ACEnergy states on its website.

Rowntree, a long-time presenter on the Channel 9 travel program, spoke at Tuesday night’s Geelong Council meeting to voice her concerns about the Sandy Creek Road project, saying she had only found out through press reports days earlier.

“It is currently on prime agricultural land and historically, this property in a fire corridor,” she said, the Geelong Advertiser reported.

She noted fatal bushfires had ripped through the area in 1969 and suggested other sites in the area may be more suitable. “As you know, this is a high wind area, and opposite the You Yangs Park 500m away,” she said.

At the meeting, Geelong Mayor Trent Sullivan agreed that the community had been caught “unaware”.

“Whether it’s a battery [or a] a waste-to-energy incinerator, things that have been tried to, I dare say, be snuck through by the state government, the community must be made aware of it,” he said.

A decision on the project is expected by the end of the year and construction would begin in 2025.

Cr Sullivan said on Thursday the council had written to the state government to request and extension of the community consultation period, which ends on September 7, by three weeks.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/sustainability/dodgiest-deal-getaway-star-catriona-rowntree-fumes-over-renewables-project-next-door/news-story/0ef24f039ea724147c17503bbf6fcdec

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If Peter Dutton is racist for urging caution on Gaza migrant checks, then so am I

Steve Waterson

It’s a painful thing to learn so late in life, and more painful still to confess in public, but I’ve recently discovered I’m a racist. Not a white-hooded, Ku Klux Klan, cross-burning racist, you understand, nor a genocidal Nazi, but just one of your odious, everyday bigots.

For decades I’ve deluded myself, believing a lifelong refusal to hate anyone or judge them inferior on grounds of their race, colour, religion or culture was sufficient to escape the charge.

As part of the social contract that guides our lives and interactions, I understand and endorse our duty to protect and assist the marginalised and underprivileged in our society, but here’s where my mask of tolerance falls away: if we try to extend that compassion to embrace everyone in trouble, anywhere in the world, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to erect one or two safeguards. I am convinced that some caution needs to be exercised when inviting people to join our happy club, with particular attention paid to their background and professed beliefs.

Hypersensitive and racist fearmongering, no doubt, but in my view migrants from societies that feature suicide bombing and random murder in their repertoire of political self-expression merit close scrutiny; indeed, the people fleeing those places have more tangible fears of the vicious lunatics they are escaping and don’t want them arriving unvetted on the next plane.

If our leaders invite trouble into this country through inattention, laziness, recklessness or negligence, they have failed in their most fundamental responsibility. Immigration ministers and anyone who commands them should abide by the doctor’s golden principle: first, do no harm.

On Monday another assault was launched on the Opposition Leader, this time by federal Treasurer Jim Chalmers, himself a doctor of philosophy (an amusing turn of phrase, given what passes for that discipline in our modern polity, where basic notions of logic and semantics have gone astray).

Let’s skate over the cost-of-living crisis, housing unaffordability and stagnant building activity, industrial relations anarchy, a million new migrants a year, homelessness, unemployment and underemployment, a vanishing defence capability, anti-Semitism, preposterous domestic energy prices while we ship our coal overseas, crumbling health and education systems (that’ll do for starters), and focus on what’s really behind our nation’s decline: that horrible man over there.

To describe Dutton, with shrill outrage, as “divisive” seems a bit rich, the accusation levelled by the team that manufactured the voice referendum that cleaved the nation in two. And to label him dangerous, apparently for disagreeing with the government, betrays a misunderstanding of his role. Hint: there’s a clue in the man’s job title.

Even more hypocritical is the notion that Dutton’s supposed failings should disqualify him from being prime minister, when a lack of ability has been no hindrance to the elevation of a clown car of incompetents to ministerial office.

Back to philosophy school with you, Doctor, for a refresher course in ethics and the logical fallacy of argumentum ad hominem.

Sadly, this is where the runaway train of modern politics is headed. It’s naive and foolish to be disappointed, but this season’s rhetoric seems particularly lacklustre, led by the US, where the train has already left the tracks, and where “weird” has somehow become incisive, critical analysis and “joy” a legitimate aim of government, both to be considered with chin-stroking gravity.

In the end, of course, the self-righteous beauty of calling someone a racist (especially if you don’t really believe it) is that it means you don’t have to listen to another word the evil bastard says: as with all the currently popular terms of disparagement, the tactic is designed to silence dissent. We’ve seen it consume our universities, and it’s spreading like a noxious weed into the wider public arena.

This will sound like a fairy story to younger readers, but once upon a time we listened to what other people had to say, however disagreeable. We argued with them, changed their minds or were persuaded by them, but it never occurred to us to gag them.

We trusted good ideas to drive out the bad; our language was purged of cruel descriptors of different races, the disadvantaged and disabled, those of alternative sexual orientation, not by prohibition but because in listening to the ugly voices we became aware of how repellent we might sound ourselves.

Unlikely, I know, but it might be nice to restore that educated, civil discourse and leave the name-calling and juvenile abuse back in the gutter. An apology across the board for the more unpleasant and intemperate remarks our politicians have spewed at each other would be a handsome start, but I won’t, as they say, be holding my racist breath.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/if-peter-dutton-is-racist-for-suggesting-caution-in-migrant-checks-then-so-am-i/news-story/58f9b64697e70245119d3e8ca28b9e54

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Education gone wrong

Alarm bells should be ringing in Australia today. As they are to some unfocused degree in newspaper headlines expressing disquiet over the deteriorating mental health of teenagers, soaring rates of school truancy and fear about declining aggregate NAPLAN scores in basic numeracy and literacy. The problem is broad and deep. It has resulted, at the core, from the declining authority of the teacher in the classroom. In turn, this reflects gradual changes in the wider culture since Arendt was writing.

Formality used to be more institutionalised. When teachers were always addressed as Mr Smith or Sir, or Mrs Jones or Miss, they stood more at a distance, the classroom atmosphere cooler, the teacher as instructor rather than friend or equal. The principal was a remote figure who could be referred to as an authority of last resort, with the threat of stern rebuke or punishment.

The physical punishment of strapping or caning has become unthinkably barbaric today. There was a time when it was the ultimate coercive tool in maintaining discipline. While no one would argue for its return, it must be acknowledged that it made it generally easier, even in the much larger classrooms of the 1960s, to instil obedience and respect.

There is progress and regress at work here, making any overriding judgment difficult. Friendlier, warmer relations in the best classrooms today are to the good. Just as the closer relations within families between parents and their children, breaking down old generation gaps of misunderstanding, are to the good.

But such progress has come at the price of making it more difficult to control places such as large classrooms of unruly students, where order depends on the teacher’s ability to keep control, backed by a wider school culture of formality and discipline.

To put this in context, the central question about the rise of modern society is what transformed the typical person of the European Middle Ages – violent, immoderate, perceiving the world in childlike extremes – into the self-controlled, disciplined and inward individual who has come to occupy a central position in societies such as our own. Schooling played a central role in this long historical process. Generation after generation followed the simple and punitive adage of spare the rod and spoil the child.

Further, it was the capacity for systematic and sustained work and for rational, calculated organisation that was to constitute the human prerequisite for the development of the industrial democratic society that was to emerge. Medieval forebears were, by disposition, incompatible with the workings of modern society, being far too emotionally unstable to work regular hours in a modern office, factory or shop.

And schooling today retains a good deal of its civilising function, the slow and laborious work of instilling in children the capacity for self-control and concentration. The common put-down that the main job of schools is childminding, while holding some truth, vastly underestimates the role in the character development of the young.

Then came the 1960s, and a new injection of the Rousseau fallacy that humans in the state of nature were happy and free before being ruined by the artifices of civilisation. They were “noble savages”. This fed through into an educational philosophy centred on belief in the innate creativity of the child, with the task of schooling just to stand back to encourage self-realisation. Rote learning of the times tables was out; playful fun was in.

Australian director Peter Weir drew on his Sydney school experience, in his brilliant 1989 film Dead Poets Society, to explore this territory, showing how an inspired poetry teacher could be just as destructive to teenage mental equilibrium as the old order he replaced, one of stiflingly routine discipline. At risk, as Rousseau might have celebrated, was the reversing of centuries of the civilising process.

It’s worth recalling that even in Elizabethan London the typical church or theatre audience would have been unrecognisable to us – a constant chattering hubbub of restless shuffling, squabbling, nudging, spitting and swearing. But is it much better today in an average Australian high school, with inexperienced female teachers in their 20s trying to control restless 16-year-old boys, unsettled by bubbling levels of testosterone, boys who don’t want to be there?

It has become extremely difficult to be a secondary school teacher. Those who are privileged to work in the private school system, or in a few elite government schools, provide the exception. In both those atypical categories, behaviour management in the classroom tends not to be a morale-crushing problem.

Behaviour management, requiring teachers to be prison officers, but without the bars or the solitary confinement, is not a stand-alone challenge.

Teachers in a recent ongoing South Australian study spoke of an alarming increase in misogynistic, homophobic, racist and sexist language and behaviours, mostly by boys and young men targeting girls and young female teachers.

This includes intimidating physical confrontation of female teachers as well as shameless sexual innuendo, teachers who were on their own in classroom, corridor or carpark without any other adult support, and sometimes with no serious backing from a principal, plus hostility from parents who couldn’t credit that their darling son could be such an insensitive brute. Such parents, in their turn, reflect the decline of the authority of the teacher and a general disrespect for their position.

If discipline is one side of the education coin, engagement is the other. Changes to the curriculum, such as introducing phonics in teaching primary school children to read, will mean little without capable, talented teachers to arouse the interest of their students, stimulate them, making them want to learn. A bored classroom is a dead classroom.

If income is a lead indicator of social status, then tradies rank far higher in today’s Australia than teachers. Plumbers and electricians may be indispensable in day-to-day life, but are they more important to the long-term wellbeing of the society?

Plato, in his last work, signalled his judgment after a long life of reflection: the most important institution in any society is the one that teaches the teachers. By implication, he regarded teaching as the highest of all vocations. Australia today seems to invert Plato, with teacher training degrees of low status, generally of mediocre intellectual calibre, and including little practical hands-on training in classrooms. To be fair, federal Education Minister Jason Clare and his state counterparts are trying to reform teacher training, to focus it more on practical experience and the capacity to teach basic literacy and numeracy. Their success, if gained, would be of greater long-term benefit to the country than almost anything else their governments achieve.

The ability to engage students is the first principle of teaching. It requires some charisma in the classroom. Gifted teachers will almost inevitably communicate an enthusiasm for their subjects. This is no more than a by-product of the true mission of education, at its highest. Teachers are servants of the truth, dedicated to passing it on. Their role illustrates the centrality to the good life of coming into harmony with the deep truths of human existence; and believing in the possibility of so doing.

This even holds in scientific and vocational disciplines, where an ethos is transmitted, including timeless methods of thinking, and ways to attack problems, as well as factual knowledge.

Life, under this star, becomes a long voyage of learning, with the teacher as captain, bestowing legitimacy and authority on the voyage. A minority of teachers may be in this gifted category, influencing their students irrespective of the wider environment within which they work.

Yet the wider environment can make a crucial difference. When morale is high in a school, with a camaraderie among the teachers encouraging belief in the fine mission of what they do, then many will perform much better than their lesser selves would otherwise allow. In a good school, the average teacher can become a great teacher. Further, high conviction and enthusiasm among teachers are infectious and will usually transmit to students.

Education is broader than schooling. The most effective learning is often indirect, working unconsciously, with slow impact on the motivational complexes churning deep within an individual. Parents play the critical role here, as unwitting exemplars more than guides – and obviously, for bad as for good. There are also key educational influences on the bigger social stage. Take the recent Olympics. It displayed young men and women, many hardly more than boys and girls, who have dedicated years of their lives to their sport and then produce world record-breaking performances on the global stage, winning the adulation of their nation as they ascend the dais, the gold medal placed around their neck, and shedding tears of joy as the flag rises to the playing of the national anthem.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/we-entrust-our-kids-to-the-care-of-teachers-yet-take-little-care-of-them/news-story/3472507b6bfdb043f279409ed60491ac

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A requiem for "Voice"

Its advocates can't admit that they got it wrong in wanting special representation for blacks

There was a time when the Yes side infuriated me with the shallow quality of their “debate”. Now the Yes side bores me. It has been 10 months since the proposal to change our Constitution failed, and its proponents still have not moved past the second stage of grief. They are now wallowing in anger. Why did this happen, who is to blame? Someone, please wake me up when the bloodletting stops. Even better, let’s hope they get to the final stage – acceptance – soon. Please.

In recent weeks, some losers on the Yes side have displayed tedious self-indulgence, blaming everyone except themselves for the loss. The recent contributions of Shireen Morris and Greg Craven tell you something about the lack of insight and the shoddy analysis that have marked much post-referendum contributions by voice supporters. What we’ve learned most clearly is how deluded they remain.

Mr Albanese holds a press conference for The V once referendum at the Sydney Opera House. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Sam Ruttyn
Mr Albanese holds a press conference for The V once referendum at the Sydney Opera House. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Sam Ruttyn
It might have helped the nation better understand the voice if the violent disagreements among people on the Yes side had been aired in public in full and before the referendum rather than behind closed doors after the referendum. Only towards the end of the campaign did we see even the hint of cracks emerge in their facade.

Instead, with completely ineffectual exceptions, the Yes side presented itself publicly as a solid phalanx of moralising custodians of the path to righteousness. Now they are more like Moaning Myrtles, shouting over metaphorical toilet cubicles past each other.

Craven made his last-gasp concerns particularly irrelevant by saying the defects of the voice proposal could be ignored. He would still vote Yes because it was the moral thing to do. The radicals picked their marks superbly. They didn’t need to compromise because all those who might have had sufficient influence to speak up and seek a workable compromise were already locked into whatever the radicals served up.

Morris writes in her extract from Broken Heart: A True History of the Voice Referendum that “Indigenous leaders repeatedly compromised to try to win Coalition support”. This is barmy stuff. As someone who followed this debate very closely, I know numerous compromises were offered – and categorically rejected by the Yes side. Both Father Frank Brennan and barrister Louise Clegg bravely put forward proposals with more moderate constitutional wording aimed at narrowing the voice’s operations. Both were ignored.

Indeed, according to another Yes supporter, Damien Freeman, Morris stopped working with the group Uphold & Recognise, the moderate voice supporters, after they held a forum in February last year that included Brennan and Clegg. “She objected to the fact that we allowed Clegg and Brennan to raise their concerns about the constitutional draft amendment that the Prime Minister announced … at Garma. Morris believed we should have put up only speakers who made the case for the Garma amendment,” Freeman wrote last weekend.

No signs of compromise there.

Others, including me, suggested that any constitutional provision include a “non-justiciability” clause to ensure that a future High Court could not soak itself in social and political activism with the new voice provisions. In fact, for many years Morris assured us “a First Nations voice was specifically designed to be non-justiciable”.

Alas, there was no compromise. When the Prime Minister released the proposed wording at Garma, non-justiciability was tossed aside. Leading Yes activist Marcia Langton laid bare the radical demands: “Why would we restrict the voice to representations that can’t be challenged in court?” And, according to Freeman, Morris didn’t want any critics of the High Court’s major role speaking at the Uphold & Recognise forum.

Others suggested the proposed wording of the voice be limited to advising on acts of parliament so that it would not reach into every part of executive government, including every move by a bureaucrat. That was ignored, too.

Morris is wrong about another more fundamental matter. It is, in my view, almost certain that the voice, even if all the various compromises had been accepted, would have been defeated.

At its core it was a bad idea for the simple reason that Australians would never accept a two-tier Constitution, where one group of people had special rights permanently entrenched in the Constitution. Dividing groups by race made a bad proposal worse. Acceptance of this simple yet powerful truth will be the final stage of activists dealing with their loss. However, some of the compromises at least would have moved the voice closer to success than the firm rejection it finally received last October.

So, failure doesn’t rest with the political right, as Morris alleges. The failure is twofold: a bad idea that was badly prosecuted.

The voice proposal was, in large measure, a vibe thing, packaged up as this undefined goal called reconciliation, along with a reaching out, hands in friendship thing, and so on. The only clear part of the proposal was that if you opposed the voice, you could expect abuse (we were racist), ridicule (we were too stupid to understand it) and mocking labels (we were Chicken Littles). What stood out was the deep disrespect of Yes advocates towards just about everyone. Even those who agreed with the voice were not told candidly and precisely what this body would entail.

The Yes side had little idea how to win friends and influence people. They treated morality as a zero-sum game – we on the Yes side are moral; you No people are not – when disagreement should have been respected as a difference of opinion.

Craven was one of the biggest disappointments during the debate. The constitutional academic had a long history of being astute about our Constitution and our High Court. In 1999, he wrote about our highest court under the title A Study in the Abuse of Power. The professor wrote: “The Court now has a long record of consciously ‘interpreting’ the Constitution in a manner contrary to the Founders, with a view to achieving this or that supposedly desirable social result … the court simply has begun a process of inventing appropriate rights, and purporting to ‘imply’ them into the Constitution.”

In 2012, writing in The Australian Financial Review, Craven wrote that “putting a whole new section into the Constitution to deal with Indigenous people, then packing it with abstract, legally binding value statements, displays the sort of political naivety usually encountered in the Mosman branch of the Young Greens. Once again, the slogan will be ‘Don’t Know – Vote No’.”

Back then, Craven predicted correctly that “legions of depressed Australians, entirely committed to reconciliation, yet not prepared to maul the Constitution to escape the lash of Professor Langton’s tongue” would vote no.

I miss that version of Craven – the genuine constitutional conservative. In recent years, Craven succumbed to unintellectual emotion and moralising every bit as unhelpful as the more radical activists. He treated thoughtful concerns about the voice with shrill contempt, never properly addressing them as a constitutional conservative should. Quips and comedy may help Craven get through his day but it was never going to carry the day for the voice.

If Craven was having heated disagreements with the Yes side, and I don’t doubt him, he didn’t bother telling us soon enough or fully enough. Only much later, when it became clearer that the Yes vote was probably going to fail, and he would be on the losing side, was Craven candid enough that there were problems with the proposal as drafted. The killer punch to Craven’s constitutional conservatism came when he threw caution to the wind and said he’d vote for the voice anyway because it was the moral thing to do.

Unlike Craven, Freeman has offered the one piece of post-referendum insight that helps us truly understand why such a bad proposal was put and why it was prosecuted with such fervour.

Freeman, a fellow Yes advocate, has the courage to identify the proposal as driven by a particularly radical form of identity politics. This consists not only of the belief that some groups in society have been oppressed and that political action is needed to correct that oppression but that “only the oppressed group can determine what political action is necessary to overcome the oppression they have experienced”. Now we understand why at least some of those who might have been sceptical about the voice proposal felt themselves unable to object to it.

One thing Craven said 30 years ago is worth repeating. He described constitutional academics as “pretty pointless people”.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/the-yes-campaign-strident-voice-of-bitter-experience/news-story/968c8afd6ead764e988fc669133dd09a