Christian schools join to train teachers

This is a very positive development, as secular teacher traiing has very low standards in every respect.

It is however regrettable that they have followed the secular example and mandated four years for teacher training.  That was always a highpoint of out-of-control credentialism.  Teachers in times past did perfectly well with a one-year diploma and "Teach for America" sends graduates into difficult schools with only months of preparation.

A saving grace may be that the new arrangement will see trainees spending much more time in the schools than they do in the secular system

The Pentecostals have provided the lead for the new setup but the participating schools are mostly Anglican, so the  new setup is non-denominational, in the best Protestant tradition.


Five Sydney schools have joined together to pilot a training program to ensure the future supply of high-quality teachers for their schools.

Trainee teachers will enter into a four-year undergraduate or two-year postgraduate degree program with a big difference: the trainee teachers will be working in the schools with students for their entire tertiary education.

The Teaching Schools Alliance Sydney has been established by Blue Mountains Grammar School, St Andrew’s Cathedral School, The Scots College, Inaburra School and William Clarke College. The Alliance will partner with Australia’s largest Protestant-affiliated tertiary provider, Alphacrucis College, to deliver the degree program.

The Alliance hopes to address wider social concerns about student teacher quality, high attrition rates in the profession and classroom readiness of graduates. The pilot program will lead the way in directly addressing these issues and becoming a model that can be replicated across Australia, particularly in regional areas.

The initiative reconnects schools with the training of the next generation of teachers and utilises the tertiary partnership to form a ‘Teaching School Hub’. The model is already operating successfully in the Hunter Valley NSW with a cluster of schools from St Philip’s Christian College group of schools.

Each Hub will assess applicants on the basis of proven volunteerism, ethos alignment, EQ, IQ and appropriate academic standards before commencing training.

Alphacrucis liaison for the Alliance, Dr David Hastie, said that the ‘Hub model’ of teacher training provides significant benefits to the schools as well as the trainee teachers. “The clinical training approach embedded in the model has proven to be effective across the globe, but this Hub model adapts it for our unique Australia education context. The model provides professional and contextual preparation with a wealth of experience in curriculum development, assessment, small group teaching, parent interaction, problem-solving and conflict resolution.”

“The trainees are also well supported, their tuition fees are subsidised, they are paid part-time as a teaching assistant and they graduate with significant work experience.”

A typical Alliance trainee will spend 1-2 days per week paid to work in the classroom with a Mentor Teacher, which means that by the completion of their degree the trainee will already have hundreds of days of school-based experience.

The academic program includes a mixture of local face-to-face intensives, mentor training, and online coursework. A significant point of difference from existing models is that the training follows the rhythms of the school calendar rather than the traditional university calendar. This means that trainee teachers are receiving 40 weeks of training each year rather than the common university calendar of two 13-week semesters.

The degrees awarded are the same degrees awarded at traditional universities with the same standards, rigour and accountability to the governing bodies that set and monitor academic standards in Australia. In addition, the pilot is to be evaluated by an independent research team.

Full and partial scholarships are available to prospective trainees.

Background:

Blue Mountains Grammar School is a co-educational Pre-Kindergarten to Year 12 Christian school in the Anglican tradition. The school has two campuses located at Wentworth Falls and Valley Heights.

St Andrew’s Cathedral School is a co-educational Kindergarten to Year 12 Anglican school located in Sydney’s CBD.

The Scots College is a Pre-Kindergarten to Year 12 non-selective Presbyterian boys' school for day and boarding students. The College has campuses in Bellevue Hill, Rose Bay, Dolls Point and Kangaroo Valley.

Inaburra School is a co-educational Kindergarten to Year 12 Baptist school located in Sydney’s South.

William Clarke College is a Pre-school to Year 12 co-educational Anglican College located in Kellyville in Sydney’s north west.

Alphacrucis College is Australia’s largest Protestant-affiliated tertiary provider, and is aligned to the Pentecostal denomination. Founded in 1948, the College’s main campus is located in Parramatta with additional campuses in Brisbane, Melbourne, Hobart, Adelaide, Perth and Auckland.

Media release. Contact: Dr David Hastie – 0405 153 048. Alphacrucis College, Associate Dean, Education Development. david.hastie@ac.edu.au






Lure of big cities too strong for regional Australia to keep migrants, despite government efforts

Over four decades, country towns have mostly failed to retain migrants, according to the most comprehensive snapshot of Australian migration ever collated.

And this trend of migrants moving to the cities appears to be increasing, despite repeated government efforts to make life in the regions more appealing.

Professor James Raymer, who led a team of Australian National University (ANU) researchers to collect and refine almost 40 years of data, said migrants in a regional or remote area have a "very low chance" of staying in that area, and this pattern has been "very consistent over time".

"Most will leave within a five-year period, over half, if not 70 per cent, will leave, and if they're going to stay in Australia they're going to go to one of the big cities, probably Sydney or Melbourne," he said.

"What we actually see in the data, the chances of them leaving remote and regional areas has been increasing for a lot of the newer migrant groups."

Same access to services

Immigration Minister David Coleman is confident the new visas will attract migrants to regional communities and keep them there.

"We want skilled migrants to settle in regional areas long-term and want to ensure they are not disadvantaged compared to permanent migrants in our major cities," he said.

The visas require migrants to work in regions on temporary visas for three years before they are eligible for permanent residency.

Proposed laws will give these temporary visa holders the same access to welfare and government services as permanent visa holders.

"This Government will continue to back those migrants who commit to living and working in regional areas, to support local economies and contribute to regional communities," Mr Coleman said.

Details of the visas are still emerging, as the Department of Home Affairs holds briefings with migration agents and lawyers around the country.

However, the Migration Institute of Australia has criticised the decision to require regional-based migrants to earn $53,900 a year in order to qualify for permanent residency.

"While the Government is telling regional Australia it is listening to concerns about skills shortages, they are going to make it as hard as possible to fill them," institute president John Hourigan said.

"The requirement to earn this level of income for three years is not reasonable given the already suppressed nature of rural economies struggling with drought and diminishing investment."

New glimpse of internal migration

The ANU data is the most comprehensive picture of regional migration ever collected in Australia.

Across 47 regions and 19 nationality groups, the project tracks who has moved where every year back to 1981.

It finds that regions in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory have the lowest rates of retention of migrants.

Professor Raymer said his study also found that, for the most part, people were becoming increasingly settled. "The likelihood of us moving in Australia has been decreasing, so we're less likely to make moves across Australia these days as we were in the 1980s."

SOURCE  






Medicine prices in Australia among the cheapest in the world, research shows

If you take medication for several health issues, you may be surprised to find out Australia has some of the cheapest prescription drugs in the world.

A recent drug price index compared the cost of 13 common medications across 50 countries and found on average the prices were 25 per cent below the median global cost.

These medications were used to treat common health conditions including heart disease, asthma, depression, anxiety disorders and erectile dysfunction.

Australia ranked as the 11th most affordable place to buy common prescription drugs, including antidepressant fluoxetine (better known as Prozac) and erectile dysfunction drug sildenafil (marketed as Viagra).

"I wasn't surprised to see us the top of the list for affordability," said Anna Kemp-Casey, research fellow at the University of South Australia who was not involved in the study.

"Our Commonwealth does a really good job of negotiating prices for things that go on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme."

In Australia, the vast majority of prescription drugs are subsidised by the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS) which aims to ensure people have access to affordable medication.

The price index, conducted by healthcare company Medbelle, found drugs were cheapest in Thailand, Kenya and Malaysia, while the US topped the list for having the most expensive pharmaceuticals.

"Mostly that's to do with lack of regulation around pricing," Dr Kemp-Casey said.

"It's a free market in terms manufacturers being able to charge what they like, which is not the case in Australia."

Australia fared best (in terms of affordability) with cholesterol-lowering drug atorvastatin (brand name Lipitor), our second-most commonly prescribed medications, and sildenafil.

The cost of life saving lung cancer and leukaemia drugs will soon be slashed after the Government listed new medications on the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme.

There are, however, a handful of medicines the index found to be significantly more expensive in Australia than in other parts of the world, such as the sedative alprazolam (marketed as Xanax) and insulin glargine (branded Lantus), used to treat diabetes.

But Dr Kemp-Casey said the drugs found to be less affordable in Australia weren't a cause for great concern, since they are either new (and so don't have a cheaper generic version) or aren't doctors first choice of treatment.

"Our ability to negotiate a low price with the manufacturers is much less than another country who is using [a drug] first line ... because their market is much bigger," she said.

"It makes sense to pay more for something we don't want to use as much of. "In terms of things we'd be expect people to be using a lot of in Australia … they are the very low-priced ones, and that makes sense."

Generic drug prices in Australia were more than 36 per cent lower than the global median, while brand drug prices were 7 per cent cheaper, the index found.

While Australia fared well in the ranking, Dr Kemp-Casey said this index should be interpreted with some caution, as it only looks at 13 types of medicine.

"When you look at a larger range of generic medicines, things might come out a little differently," she said.

Medicines still too expensive for chronically ill

In 2017 a Grattan Institute Report found Australians were still paying too much for prescription drugs because of "loopholes" in PBS pricing policies.

Dr Kemp-Casey said the Australian system was largely affordable for people in good health, but those with chronic illness or multiple diseases found the cost of medicines prohibitive.

Under the PBS, the government subsidises the cost of medicine, so that general patients pay no more than $40.30 (for most PBS medicines), and concession card-holders pay a maximum of $6.50.

"It's not unusual for me to hear about someone who has 15 or 20 different medicines they take in a month," she said. "You multiply each one of those by $6.50, and you can start to see how things get very expensive for people, especially on low income."

The PBS Safety Net is designed to protect patients (and their families) who require a large number of medicines in one calendar year by discounting or eliminating the cost of drugs once they reach a certain threshold.

But Dr Kemp-Casey said, unlike the Medicare Safety Net, in which medical expenses are automatically recorded, patients using the PBS are required to keep track of their own spending.

"Unless you go to the same chemist every time … those records aren't all kept in one place," Dr Kemp-Casey said. "So, a lot of people are probably eligible for the safety net who don't actually get there … that causes extra hardship too."

SOURCE  






Thriving in drought: How investing big in water saved the Brown family

The Barkly Tableland is a large inland area about half way between Darwin and Alice Springs, a most unpropitious location for any economic activity.  But grass does grow there most years

When Adrian and Emma Brown bought Amungee Mungee Station in 2014 to build intensive cattle production in the Northern Territory, they were warned it could be an expensive project that may not succeed.

But five years on, their business has been thriving. They haven't had major destocking, like most nearby properties on the Barkly Tablelands

Their bold cattle management strategy allows them to run more cattle without degrading the land

The Browns have built some of the most significant water infrastructure in the northern pastoral industry and it's holding them in good stead amidst the lowest rainfall on record in the Barkly Tablelands.

As a result of the drought, hundreds of thousands of cattle have been trucked from properties in the region, and the Browns say if it wasn't for the water infrastructure development, they would have de-stocked too.

"We're really starting to push forward at a rapid rate and this drought probably won't hold us back," Mr Brown said.

But Ms Brown said investing in this water infrastructure wasn't just about drought-proofing but also getting better use of the entire property during all types of conditions.

"There was never a question of let's put a massive development in for the one in seven years where we don't get a wet season," she said. "It was … we've got an investment here, we've spent the money buying the land but we're not using it, so it's like having a hotel and only using the bottom floor when there's another 20 floors above it.

"So, we basically said let's be able to utilise as much of the country as we can and do it in a way that it's sustainable long term.

"We don't want to put 1,000 cattle on a watering point and run them there for the rest of time, we want to be able to have 200 cattle in a paddock, do a slow rotation system so the country is getting spelled and there is no land degradation happening."

Within three years at Amungee Mungee, carrying capacity increased from 2,600 cattle in a normal season to over 40,000.

"Our feed quality has improved so we're now in a position where we can actually sell at this time of the year which is great," Ms Brown said.

The family also doesn't have the stress of needing to scramble to buy cattle once the drought does break, where prices will probably go up and quality breeding cattle will be in demand.

"This de-stocking program hurts for three to four years ahead," Mr Brown said.

So how does it work?

The Browns say it's a simple strategy that includes restricting the cattle numbers in a paddock by fencing off paddocks extensively, installing more water tanks and troughs so cattle walk no more than four kilometres for a drink.

This means they don't lose condition and allows them to graze across more areas. It also means less land degradation.

At Amungee Mungee there are also 200 sites where pasture is monitored and water quality is tested, and this helps them with long-term budgeting for grass.

The Browns have now expanded their project to other stations.

Along with their long-term investor, billionaire Brett Blundy, the Browns have now purchased two more stations, Walhallow and Creswell Downs on the Barkly Tableland.

The same infrastructure and cattle management plans will be rolled out at those stations over the next few years.

But building the infrastructure in conditions where temperatures push over 40C can test workers. Gary Cutting, who's in charge of fencing more than 1,000 kilometres on Creswell Station, says it's hard work, but they've found ways to cope. "We get to rotate and sit in the aircon for 400 metres so it's not too bad," Mr Cutting said.

Innovation is part of the solution; Mr Brown and his team invented a fencing machine that can cover more than six kilometres in a day using a GPS and a barbed wire machine that strains the fence as they go.

Unlike building in the city, popping down to the local hardware store isn't an option — so thousands of pieces of this infrastructure puzzle all have had to be brought in from hundreds of kilometres away.

Dealing with those long distances led the Browns to another idea.

Innovation in the outback

They were unhappy with the quality of polythene pipe and concrete troughs being brought up from southern states, so they decided to build their own.

They'd also seen the limited options for products to build up infrastructure on Ms Brown's family property Beetaloo Station on the edge of the Barkly Tableland.

"We just saw a market, there was no-one specialising in that, so we basically moved to Katherine and started the trough business," Ms Brown said.

Since then the products have been in such demand from pastoralists and the mining sector that the Browns recently opened a new factory and large extrusion shed in Darwin to bring all of their manufacturing into one location.

They can produce tanks, troughs, barbed wire and polythene pipe of different sizes.

The Browns say they're motivated by a desire to show the rest of the country what can be done in northern Australia if the right investment is made.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

Marine heatwaves threatening Australia's oyster industry and affecting Great Barrier Reef, scientists warn

Note the dog that didn't bark below.  The people involved are NOT barking about global warming.  They cannot logically do so.  If waters are warming much more rapidly than the global rate, it is not global warming!  Sometimes a tautology is needed

Waters off parts of Australia are warming at some of the most rapid rates in the world, threatening the future of some of the country's most important marine industries, scientists say.

Scientists say the heatwaves are having a severe impact on oysters — and threaten the future of the industry — as well plants and creatures that rely on the ocean for life, pushing some into new areas, while killing others.

"The oceans are really ringing the alarm bells," said CSIRO biological oceanographer Alistair Hobday, a leading expert on MHWs.

"[The oceans] are telling us we've got big problems and those problems are not going to go away."

A MHW is defined as a period of warm water that lasts five days or longer, where temperatures are in the top 10 per cent of events typically experienced in that region.

They are graded in severity — similar to how cyclones are — with category five being the most intense.

The heatwaves lead to outbreaks of diseases that can be fatal to oysters and other molluscs, and reduce the reproduction rates of species such as salmon and abalone as well as killing seagrass and kelp.

"[We thought] marine heatwaves were an example of what the climate would look like in 100 years time," Dr Hobday said. "But we [are] getting it today."

SOURCE  





The federal bureaucracy has continued to shed jobs and is now at its smallest size in 13 years, after losing more than 3,000 staff over 12 months

This is good news, somewhat tempered by the increased use of contractors.  Contractors are under much more pressure to perform

The Australian Public Service (APS) has been shrinking since 2012 — a trend that has coincided with increased government spending on consultants and labour-hire firms.

The latest snapshot of the public service shows it employed 147,237 staff on June 30 — 2.1 per cent less than a year earlier.

Most of the job losses were in the Tax Office and Services Australia, which includes Medicare and Centrelink offices.

The Government explained the reductions in a report, saying "fluctuations in the overall [staff] headcount occur for many reasons, including seasonal patterns, business and government requirements, and demand".

The decline of the APS workforce divided political parties during this year's election campaign. A parliamentary committee had also been examining the growing use of businesses to do government work, but its inquiry was abandoned when the election was called.

Labor pledged to end staffing cuts and reduce spending on contractors and consultants, saying the loss of government jobs was a "false economy" because buying the skills from elsewhere cost more.

Australian National University academic Leo Dobes also warned the reliance on consultants had left the APS with too few skilled economists and "a woeful lack of ability and knowledge in that area".

However, the Coalition argues that using outside expertise makes the Government more flexible and efficient.

Finance Minister Mathias Cormann told public servants last year that contractors and consultants could "keep the overall cost of government administration low, when the business needs to access relevant skills and expertise, or a surge in demand for certain public services is temporary".

The federal budget papers also point out that per capita spending on administration (whether on public servants or businesses) is falling, which Senator Cormann says is good — it should be "as much as necessary but also should be as little as possible".

A former deputy head of the Finance Department, Pegasus Economics director Stephen Bartos, says the private sector can be more cost-effective — if used sparingly.

"Unfortunately, what we have seen, in … some departments, is over-reliance on consultants, when there is ongoing work that would be more cheaply and effectively done by public servants," Mr Bartos said.

Lure of cities too strong?

Former Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce managed to move an agriculture regulator — the Australian Pesticides and Veterinary Medicines Authority — from Canberra to his regional New South Wales electorate, provoking an uproar and staff resignations in the process.

But the Government's policy of shifting the APS workforce out of the nation's big cities appears to have failed so far.

Since the policy was announced in 2017, the proportion of public servants who work in Australia's six largest cities (Canberra and larger) has remained exactly 82 per cent — a ratio that hasn't budged in seven years.

SOURCE  






Parents give Australian school policies poor report card

Parents are generally satisfied with how much money their child’s school has, but they don’t agree with how it is spent. If that sounds familiar it’s because it echoes what the CIS has been arguing for years.

The results of a national survey of more than 1,000 parents (relating to 1,394 children) — revealed in the CIS policy paper released this week: What Do Parents Want from Schools? — show that 88% of parents believe their child’s school has enough or more than enough funding. This includes 86% of parents with a child in a government school.

This cuts against the dominant education policy discourse — driven by the union movement and progressive educationalists — which both major parties have swallowed hook, line and sinker.

It is already clear that huge increases in public funding aren’t delivering educational improvements. This new research also shows that it is also not what parents want either.

The unions have rallied — and largely won — for money to be spent on endlessly reducing classroom sizes (presumably unsatisfied until we are practically educating one-to-one), increasing teachers’ pay (presumably until it’s in line with doctors), and amassing an army of support staff in schools.

In contrast to these priorities, parents say that they want to see better facilities and more extra-curricular activities offered at their chosen schools. This could be because funding for capital works is around one-eleventh of that of the spending on staffing. And extra-curriculars are generally paid for out of parents’ own pockets and in their own time.

The research also found that a considerable proportion of parents regret their choice of a school for their children, with around 40% saying they either would not choose the same school again or were unsure if they would.

This means that around 1.6 million students are enrolled in a school that their parents aren’t happy with. However, some appear to be more happy than others.

Unsurprisingly, those that felt limited in their choice — around two-thirds of surveyed parents — are less satisfied with the school their child is in.

Those that chose a non-government school, for instance, appear to be happier with their choice. This appears to be linked with findings of higher levels of confidence in how funding is being used in non-government schools, compared to their government school peers.

And parents who sought independent sources of information to help with their choice of school — like meeting with school staff, visiting school websites, and checking the MySchool website — are more likely to be happier with their choice. As the old adage goes, more informed shoppers are happier shoppers.

When it comes to school funding and school choice, this research is a poor report card on policymakers in state and federal government. It’s past time for government to listen to the message that parents want to see a spending shakeup and that more choice is indispensable to educational improvements.

SOURCE  





A friend of free speech bows out, integrity intact

In the final months of 2016, a jaded Cory Bernardi was cooling his heels on a 12-week parliamentary secondment to the UN in New York.

The conservative Liberal senator was fed up with the leftward drift of the party under the prime ministership of Malcolm Turnbull, who had limped across the line at an election earlier that year having wrested the leadership from Bernardi’s good friend Tony Abbott the year before.

Bernardi, a lifelong Liberal supporter, was having dark thoughts. Through circumstance, he was now living in the same city as his mentor, former Howard government minister Nick Minchin, who was then the Australian consul-general in New York.

Minchin had sponsored Bernardi’s rise through South Australian Liberal ranks in the early 2000s as a powerful and intelligent young conservative, challenging the state’s historic moderate domination. Minchin knew where Bernardi’s mind was at, and he set to work. “While Cory was in New York we spent many a while together talking it through,” Minchin tells The Weekend Australian.

“There were quite a few of us who had difficulties with Malcolm’s view of the world. But I did a lot of work to persuade him not to leave. I wanted him to grit his teeth and hang in there. I understood what he was thinking because I had also been shattered by the Turnbull coup against Abbott, but I was desperate to keep him in the party.”

Minchin’s pleas failed to convince Bernardi, who on his return home in 2017 quit the party in ­disillusionment at Turnbull’s lead­ership and founded the unsuccess­ful Australian Conservatives.

“I understood why he did it. But he sacrificed what would have been a long and successful senior ministerial career. He could have gone all the way,” Minchin says.

This week, Bernardi announced he was leaving politics for good, but with no sense of ­regret at having quit the Liberals or derailing his own career. “I remember those chats with Nick and he definitely did sound a cautioning note in our conversations,” Bernardi tells The Weekend Australian.

“I had confided in a couple of people about where I was at. He said that I needed to realise what it would mean for my life and my ­career. It was a mentor’s concern, that I needed to understand the implications of leaving. But like all my good friends he understood the motivations for my decision. And I can console myself in the fact that the people who said bad things about me after I quit were already saying bad things about me before then ­anyway.”

Bernardi may be unique in the annals of Australian political betrayal in that he is the only politician to have “ratted” on his party and still received a warm send-off from many of the people he abandoned.

Bernardi, who turned 50 this month, will leave the parliament at the end of the year, with the SA Liberals to hold a fresh preselection to find his replacement.

The announcement came almost three years after he walked away from the Liberal Party, for whom he was elected a senator for South Australia back in 2006.

Unlike most other famous political defections and departures, Bernardi’s was motivated by ­neither spite nor self-interest.

He wasn’t Mal Colston walking out on Labor in 1996, enraged at having been denied the glorious honour of elevation to the Senate deputy presidency.

Bernardi’s reasons — like Bernardi himself — were 100 per cent ideological.

He had come to regard his relationship to the Liberal Party, then under the leadership of Turnbull, as akin to a bad marriage, where he felt that his own role was pointless and that he was living a lie ­remaining in a party that, he believed, was swinging leftward away from its traditional values.

And rather than acting out of self-interest, he acted against his own interests, in that the party he founded on his departure, ­Australian Conservatives, endured what Bernardi described with trademark bluntness as “an unmitigated disaster” at this year’s election, polling just 16,000 first-preference votes in his home state, less than one-third the result enjoyed in South Australia by One Nation.

The fledgling party had been caught in a pincer movement with traditional Liberal conservatives returning to the fold once Scott Morrison replaced Turnbull, and the headline-grabbing Pauline Hanson scooping up disaffected blue-collar and regional right-wing voters.

“The inescapable conclusion from our lack of political success, our financial position and the re-election of a Morrison-led government is that the rationale for the creation of the Australian Conservatives is no longer valid,” Bernardi wrote on the party’s website in June on announcing its deregistration.

Bernardi is now in the business of cleaning out his office in the inner-eastern suburb of Kent Town ahead of a return to the family business where he received his start in the 1990s, as publican of the now-defunct hotel Bernardi’s, a rollicking city pub propped up by an army of drunken journalists from the neighbouring Advertiser building.

Bernardi became famous for a string of so-called controversies that stemmed from his enthusiasm for plain speech, be it on ­issues such as banning the burka or his defence of the traditional family unit. While in New York, he had a front-row seat for the unheralded rise of Donald Trump, deliberately goading his lefty critics back home by posing on social media wearing a red “Make America Great Again” baseball cap.

He says this week he has been reflecting on the battles he has had during the past 13 years, most of which emanated from his lived commitment to freedom of speech. He fears that censorship, self-censorship and a growing inability to agree to disagree are now the biggest threat to the exchange of ideas.

“A lot of the battles I had were really because people weren’t ready for the conversations,” he tells The Weekend Australian.

“In the fullness of time we can now have mainstream talk about the problems with China and its interference in our political system, the merits or otherwise of high immigration levels, or altering our cultural norms. I am happy to have participated and in some cases led those ­debates.

“If we stifle free speech or the battle of ideas we will go backwards as a country. I know it’s not what Australians want.

“When I consider the relationships I have formed in Canberra, there are people I respect on all sides of the political divide. It’s because I respect their intellect, their consistency, their application of principle, and the fact that they are prepared to counter the political battle in a rational and sensible way. The ones I have the least ­respect for are those who are reactive, emotionally driven, rather than driven by an actual factual nature.

“We can’t have a society where we say ‘we are going to denigrate your character because we disagree with what you say’.

“Now too often it’s about shrillness and denigrating others. Any society where 100 per cent of the people are agreeing 100 per cent of the time is a false one. You can go to North Korea for that.”

Minchin says that when Bernardi emerged on the SA political scene in the late 1990s, he was keen to enlist him to the cause in a state where the party had been historically dominated by small-l Liberals. At the time, Minchin was at the height of his enmity with moderate powerbroker Christopher Pyne. The Howard cabinet also replicated the SA factional split, with Minchin and foreign minister Alexander Downer flying the flag for the Right in a sometimes uneasy coalition with moderate ministers Amanda Vanstone and Robert Hill.

“When I got to know Cory I was struck by our common judgment on a whole range of issues,” Minchin says. “He and I shared a common view of the world. He was a fellow traveller for me, a fellow conservative. He was also a very commanding figure, and a good mate. A loyal mate. Someone who was keen to get stuck in and help the party.

“My friends and I were always on the lookout for young conservative talent to bring through the ranks. He wasn’t someone who was there out of ego or a thirst for self-promotion. At the time the moderates did have a bit of a grip on the younger side of the party and Cory helped challenge that. He did it by being honest and ­direct. He was never a game-player, he was never devious, he was what you see is what you get, not like some of the cockroaches that scurry around.”

Bernardi feels no qualms about ending his career the way he did. “I don’t take any angst or unhappiness out of this. I’ve had a wonderful journey and I’ve met some extraordinary people. Your opponents often make you better. The qualities I admire in others — integrity, honesty, resilience — are all enhanced by your opponents picking on you when they think you’re wrong.”

And while he won’t name names, he confirms that there are several farewells planned in Canberra by his former party colleagues. “There are a lot of dinners,” he says. “They’re all secret though.”

SOURCE  

Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

Are the Left now toning down the hate?

I believe Joe Hildebrand is right below in saying that the current level of hate in Australian Federal politics is an historical departure. 

Sir Robert Menzies, Australia's most storied conservative Prime Minister, ran Australia for most of the 50s and 60s and always had a good reply to his Leftist critics.  And he kept them out of office over many elections. 

In his retirement he wrote two autobiographies.  I read both  shortly after they came out.  That is a long time ago so I remember now little of what I read then.  The one thing in them that has stuck in my mind is his praise for his erstwhile opponents in the Labor party.  He described them quite warmly -- as good and sincere men who honestly believed they were working for the good of the country.

So what Hildebrand says below of the Hawke era in fact goes back a long way.  Politics in Australia were for a very long time marked by real interpersonal civility


I was talking to Bob Hawke’s widow Blanche d’Alpuget.

It was the first time we had spoken since Hawke’s death – which is hardly surprising since we hardly know each other – but like anyone with a passing relationship with the Labor Party, I somehow felt that they were part of my extended family.

At any rate, I certainly felt very close to her then and as we talked about Bob’s death it was clear that she was a woman blown apart. You could see right through to her shaken soul.

But when we talked about Bob’s legacy that soul turned to steel. Hawke was, above all else, a consensus builder – a peacemaker. He took not just his party with him on his and Keating’s grand economic project but often the opposition too.

As Blanche angrily lamented, even amid all the fire and fury of political and parliamentary life, politicians always used to work together behind the scenes to get things done. They would shake hands, do deals and share jokes behind the Speaker’s chair. They would work across the aisle – bridging the often artificial divide between left and right – in pursuit of what used to be known as the common good.

This was Australian politics’ dirty little secret: The people that pretended to hate each other actually quite liked each other.

And this was the culture that prevailed in Canberra under both Labor and the Coalition for a quarter of a century – so much so that when an escalating travel rorts war resulted in a senator attempting suicide both sides immediately agreed to a ceasefire.

But a decade ago that all changed. A nasty condition known as “the NSW disease” crept into Canberra, a culture in which leaders were brutally knifed at the first whisper of discontent and which swept through both the Labor Party and the Coalition, decimating them both.

It is no coincidence that all of this took place in the new age of social media – in which politicians, activists and any member of the public could slug it out directly without the niceties of standing orders or news cycles.

And it is no coincidence that it happened amid the online news revolution, in which both old and new media outlets became more tribal than ever in an effort to hold or attract their audience.

One man who was at the centre of it all was Craig Emerson, a softly-spoken economist and academic who was an adviser to Hawke before entering parliament and becoming a minister under the fractious Rudd and Gillard governments.

Emerson’s latest thankless task for Labor was to find out how it lost the unlosable election, which he and former premier Jay Weatherill dutifully performed. Their conclusion is neatly summarised in the report as follows:

“Labor should position itself as a party of economic growth and job creation. Labor should adopt the language of inclusion, recognising the contribution of small and large businesses to economic prosperity, and abandon derogatory references to ‘the big end of town’. Labor’s policy formulation should be guided by the national interest, avoiding any perception of capture by special interest groups.”

In short, the party needed to be inclusive, not divisive. And it was a philosophy Emerson took to heart when he bravely defended Barnaby Joyce in the unbecoming shitstorm that accompanied last week’s bushfire disaster.

Emerson observed that contrary to the outrage being generated by both social and mainstream media, Joyce had not been attacking two dead bushfire victims for being Greens supporters but clumsily trying to say that he wouldn’t – albeit for reasons known only to Barnaby himself.

For this attempt at nuance Emerson was naturally crucified on social media, leading him to write a thoughtful piece for the Australian Financial Review lamenting the blind ideological tribalism that had taken hold of politics.

And of course for this he was naturally crucified by blind ideological tribalists. He was condemned for breaking a cultural embargo in his effort to bridge the divide.

But he was not alone. In the small pond of Australian politics, Emerson’s piece received a tsunami of support – not from alt-right fascists, as his extreme left accusers tried to claim – but from the leading lights at the ABC. The Germans might have brought down the Berlin Wall but it was Annabel Crabb who brought down the AFR paywall when she tweeted a picture of the whole column as a vital read for her half a million followers.

And of course Emerson joins a growing number of leaders from the moderate left who are coming to realise the extreme left poses a greater threat to their cause than the moderate right does. No less a figure than Barack Obama this month condemned “woke” cancel culture and plenty of once-woke celebrities from Sarah Silverman to Michael Leunig have found out the hard way that the hard left only loves you until they come for you.

The champions of censorship like to claim that they are on the right side of history but it is just possible that future historians may remember this November as the time when cancel culture got cancelled.

Man, I hope I live to see that.

SOURCE  





Update from Bettina on firefighters

Just a quick post-script to my recent firefighter skirmish.

Last week I heard from a professional firefighter telling me he’d approached his employers for funding for a small event to be held on International Men’s Day. He was told none was available but he could “apply for funding” for possible future events. Last March their organization, which consists of over 95% male employees, held lavish celebrations for International Women’s Day.

Here’s what he wrote to me: “I would love for you to be a voice for male firefighters to bring attention to this brazen inequality and insult to men; who risk their lives for others day in day out during their professional careers as firefighters. As you know, sadly in this current climate it is probably not wise for me to make noise about it myself for the backlash and fallout may be career limiting. 😔”

I was very happy to be able to appear on Sky News last Tuesday, for International Men’s Day. And my short interview with Chris Kenny did focus on our brave firemen and the fallout over former Victorian equal opportunity commissioner Moira Rayner’s attempt to smear me.

We’ve made a short video of that interview. Given that over 5,600 people ‘liked’ her twitter post having a go at me, it would be great if you could circulate this video so people know she fell flat on her face. Here’s the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDYF3hSAgG4

Via email




Decline in nurse education standards

Union claims graduates unable to perform basic tasks

Student nurses nearing the end of their training are unable to perform basic tasks such as calculate medication doses, set up IVs or take blood pressure, leaving them flailing in high-pressure hospital wards.

Explosive claims by the Nurses Professional Association of Queensland highlight the career is in crisis and some graduates are declaring their $20,000 nursing degrees are worthless.

The union says the "dumbing down" of bachelor of nursing degrees means necessary practical skills are missing, knowledge of anatomy is poor and patient interaction often appalling, posing serious risk not only to patients but to the students themselves who are filled with anxiety and fear.

Veteran nurses report that many registered nurse trainees lack the stamina for a busy shift in today's hospitals that have fast turnover of patients and some have no more knowledge of health conditions than the patients themselves.

The Queensland Nurses and Midwives Union says that the problem lies with the lack of time available for experienced clinicians to act as mentors and instructors to students on clinical placement and to nurses at other stages of practice development.

"That is the systemic fix we need far more than any tinkering with the educational preparation program," QNMU assistant secretary Sandra Eales told The Sunday Mail. The QNMU insists that nursing work is at the core of why hospitals exist and nurses are not "bottom rung".

The Nurses Professional Association of Queensland was set up five years ago as an alternative to the QNMU. It is not a registered industrial body but has close to 4000 members.

Phill Tsingos is 'a clinical nurse in the emergency department of a Queensland hospital. He has been nursing for 27 'years and is a supervisor to student nurses, and is very concerned about the level of nurse education. "I have worked with students who were doing a bachelor of nursing and gained access to the degree with an OP 20.[A very low high school mark]

I see some in their third year and am stunned at times over the lack of knowledge. "Don't get me wrong, we have some great young people but the general standard is not up to scratch," he said. "Many do not know how to spike an IV fluid bag or calculate medication doses when they are at the end of their degree. "Patients often know more about health conditions than the students. "I would struggle to trust some of the students."

Mr Tsingos says student nurses need more on-the-job experience rather than being stuck in a classroom learning the difference between private and public hospitals.

"The universities are turning out a glut of nurses, many of whom have little chance getting a job," he said. "One girl went for an interview for one of 30 jobs in Brisbane and there were 90 plus vying for the positions. "The whole sector needs an overhaul."

State Health Minister Steven Miles says he is disappointed to hear an association talk down the skill set studies of nurses. "We have highly trained and hardworking nurses and midwives employed in our public hospitals," he said. "There are many rutal areas in Queensland that are struggling to recruit nurses  and midwives.

"The National Graduate Outcomes Survey suggests that 90.4 per cent of graduate nurses were employed in 2019 and 91.5 per cent in 2018.” Tertiary education, including university places, are the responsibility of the Federal Government.

Flagging the need for change, an independent national review "Educating the Nurse of the Future" has just been completed and the final report, taking into consideration 83 submissions, has been presented to federal Health Minister Greg Hunt. The report will be considered by government and a plan for public release developed soon. The review was announced as part of the 2018-19 Federal Budget.

Ms Eales says there is no evidence of admissions to nursing with OP 20s. "Skills acquisition within the workplace, both practical and theoretic, is as important as classroom or simulated learning environments," she said. "Professional Practice Environment is key to ensure safe learning at all levels and stages of nursing practice development."

NPAQ founding director Graeme Haycroft says if there is a shortage of nurses their value goes up. "The first responsibility of any union is to ensure there is a 'small' shortage of your member base skills," he said. "If there is a shortage of nurses wages go up in response."

Mr Haycroft says there has been an ongoing campaign by the QNMU to constantly train and recruit more nurses to the point that there is a glut "There are thousands and thousands of three-year degree nurses who will never get a fourth and final grad year enabling them to become a trained nurse who can start on the bottom rung in a hospital" he said.

From the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" of 24 November, 2019





Fuel tax hike will send us broke, truckies warn

A massive hike in trucking taxes, being secretly considered by state and federal transport ministers, could send firms broke and increase the cost of groceries and other goods, the industry warns.

Transport industry associ­ations have told The Australian they are aware of plans to increase the Road User Charge, which already adds 25.8c to the cost of every litre of diesel used by heavy trucks.

The Queensland Trucking Association said it understood the hike, ending a three-year freeze on RUC rises, to be as much as 11.8 per cent over three years when combined with increases in the roads component of state registration charges.

“When you’re looking at companies on margins of about 4c in the dollar, an increase like this could well send a number of businesses to the wall,” QTA chief executive Gary Mahon said.

“It is three times the CPI for three consecutive years. It may only be 3c a litre but when you look at the consumption levels of our industry, that is big money.

“The second biggest bill a transport company gets is fuel, after wages. It’s a significant component of road freight, and there is nothing that happens in the economy that road freight does not underpin.”

He said the proposed tax hike would cost trucking companies an estimated $650m over three years, flowing through to consumers when contracts were renegotiated, or else forcing firms to cut jobs or close.

In an industry contributing to 8.6 per cent of the nation’s gross domestic product, this could have a disastrous further dampening effect on the sluggish national economy.

“One way or the other, the taxpayer is going to feel the difference,” Mr Mahon said.

The Transport and Infrastructure Council of state, federal and New Zealand ministers is due to meet in Melbourne this week to discuss the proposed tax hike.

Any commercial heavy vehicle weighing more than 4.5 tonnes pays the RUC, as well as state heavy vehicle registration charges, with proceeds used to fund road construction and maintenance. The federal transport minister can vary the rate and collects the diesel component of the charge, which was set at 25.8c per litre in November 2016.

Mr Mahon said the industry already paid its “fair share” towards road funding. This included via toll charges, which had grown in recent years to raise $1.5bn a year along the eastern seaboard alone, an amount equal to ­registration charges levied by all jurisdictions.

The industry believed increases in the RUC above inflation treated the sector as a “cash cow” and were unjustified and “intolerable”.

The national Australian Trucking Association has been in talks with federal Infrastructure and Transport Minister Michael McCormack, seeking to head off the plan.

ATA chairman Geoff Crouch, also managing director of Ron Crouch Transport, said trucking firms were already overcharged for their impact on roads.

“The projected over-recovery for 2018-19 was $189.5m, all money that trucking operators should have been able to use to employ more staff and buy new equipment,” Mr Crouch said.

“There is no justification for ­increasing the Road User Charge and registration charges.

“It’s a tax grab by the state and territory governments, and comes on top of dramatic increases in toll road and port access charges. The trucking industry simply can’t ­afford another tax hit.”

Mr McCormack’s spokeswoman said: “No decision has been taken on heavy vehicle road users. This is a matter for all states and territories to discuss at a ministerial council meeting next week. “No changes will be made without extensive consultation with industry.”

SOURCE 

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

As Australia Burns, Its Leaders Trade Insults

The NYT has noticed our bushfires.  Bushfires suit their agenda a lot better than the punishing cold that is gripping most of America at the moment. Global cooling?

As was to be expected from the NYT, the fires are all due to global warming.  Global warming explains everything.  It would be good if we DID have warming at the moment.  Ocean warming causes more rain, which would tend to put the fires out

Excerpt only below


When a mass shooting shattered Australia in 1996, the country banned automatic weapons. In its first years of independence, it enacted a living-wage law. Stable retirement savings, national health care, affordable college education — Australia solved all these issues decades ago.

But climate change is Australia’s labyrinth without an exit, where its pragmatism disappears.

The wildfires that continued raging on Wednesday along the country’s eastern coast have revealed that the politics of climate in Australia resist even the severe pressure that comes from natural disaster.

Instead of common-sense debate, there are culture war insults. The deputy prime minister calls people who care about climate change “raving inner-city lunatics.” Another top official suggests that supporting the Greens party can be fatal. And while the government is working to meet the immediate need — fighting fires, delivering assistance — citizens are left asking why more wasn’t done earlier as they demand solutions.

“We still don’t have an energy policy, we don’t have effective climate policy — it’s really very depressing,” said Susan Harris Rimmer, an associate professor at Griffith Law School. [LAW school?]

But in Australia, where coal is king and water is scarce, the country’s citizens have spent the week simmering with fear, shame and alarm. As a 500-mile stretch from Sydney to Byron Bay continued to face catastrophic fire conditions, with 80 separate blazes burning and at least four deaths reported, Australians have watched, awe-struck, as life-changing destruction has been met with political sniping.

Michael McCormack, the No. 2 official in the conservative government, kicked it off on Monday, telling listeners of the country’s most popular morning radio programs that fire victims needed assistance, not “the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies.”

Barnaby Joyce, the government’s special envoy for drought assistance, followed up by suggesting that two people killed by fires near a town called Glen Innes over the weekend might have contributed to their own deaths if they supported the Greens.

The victims’ neighbors called his comments “absolutely disgraceful.”

But a Greens party senator responded with his own outrage: He said the major parties were “no better than arsonists,” an insult carrying special weight for the world’s most arid inhabited continent....

Just a few days before the fires, for example, Prime Minister Scott Morrison told a mining group that new laws were needed to crack down on climate activists and progressives who “want to tell you where to live, what job you can have, what you can say and what you can think.”

What’s galling for many scientists is that the public wants the federal government to do more; polls consistently show that Australians see climate change as a major threat requiring aggressive intervention.





Aborigine shot after attacking police

He was an habitual law-defying criminal so his behaviour was in keeping with his record.  But because he was black there is a furore

He was a decorated rookie cop commended for his bravery. Now, he stands accused of the shooting murder of a young Aboriginal man.

Footage from police body cams will likely play a vital role in finding out exactly what happened last Saturday night that led to the final moments of the teenager’s life.

Police and the family of 19-year-old Kumanjayi Walker dispute what occurred in those fraught and violent few minutes before Constable Zachary Rolfe allegedly shot him either two or three times, splattering his blood across a mattress.

The footage may shed a light on why the cop made the decision to unload his firearm.

Police said Mr Walker was attacking officers. His family say the force used was out of proportion and he could have been Tasered rather than shot multiple times.

There are also questions as to why there were no medical staff in Yuendumu, deep in the Northern Territory, that night.

And why locals weren’t told of Mr Walker’s death until about 10 hours after it was confirmed as police tuned off the lights at the station and refused to speak to the distraught family outside.

Yesterday, Constable Rolfe, 28, was charged with murder.

At court hearing in Alice Springs, Constable Rolfe was granted bail and suspended with pay. The NT Police Association said he would plead not guilty. He is understood to have now left the Territory due to death threats.

The killing, which has been declared a death in custody, has stirred up ongoing anger about the deaths of Aboriginal people at the hands of police.

Again, questions are being raised as to whether the police’s responses to incidents involving Aboriginal Australians veer too quickly to lethal force.

This morning, NT Chief Minister Michael Gunner urged people to let the justice system do its job. “There are many people hurting in Yuendumu and around the Northern Territory and in our police force,” he said. “As Territorians we have been through challenging times before, we cannot and will not let this divide us.”

Constable Rolfe was a decorated officer before he was charged with murder.

According to the NT News, he was a star pupil at exclusive private school Canberra Grammar before joining Northern Territory Police in 2016.

Just days after he graduated from police college, he rescued two Hong Kong tourists who had been swept away in floodwaters at Alice Springs.

His valour won him the National Bravery Medal and the Royal Humane Society’s Clarke Medal for bravery, and Hong Kong awarded him the Bronze Medal for Bravery, the first time a foreigner had been given the gong for an incident outside of the Chinese territory.

As last Saturday dawned, police set off for Yuendumu, 300km northwest of Alice Springs.

Their plan was to arrest Mr Walker, a Warlpiri man. He was released from prison in October after serving eight of a 16-month sentence for unlawful entry, property damage and stealing offences with the remainder suspended, AAP reported.

But Mr Walker was allegedly breached his parole by removing an electronic monitoring device, among other offences.

Police had agreed to postpone the arrest to later that day to allow Mr Walker to attend the funeral of a relative.

It was a busy day in Yuendumu. As police were arriving and the funeral preparations were under way, medical staff were shipping out. There had been break-ins at the local clinic and rocks thrown through the car windows of staff. Health bosses said it wasn’t safe.

Once the funeral was done, at least two officers, including Constable Rolfe, went to arrest Mr Walker. It was 7pm and there was no immediate medical staff available should the arrest turn violent.

Which it did in the worst way.

“They came with two police cars; one parked on the other side of the house,” witness Elizabeth Snape told The Australian.

According to some reports, Mr Walker was on his bed looking at his phone when police entered the property.

The NT News has quoted a source “close to the police” who said there was “face-to-face combat” between Mr Walker and the officers. One officer was reportedly stabbed, which allegedly led to the teen to be shot.

“During that time a struggle ensued and two shots were fired and he sadly passed away later,” NT acting deputy commissioner Michael White said.

The teenager allegedly lunged at one officer as the pair tried to arrest him. “My understanding is he was armed with a weapon,” Mr White said.

SOURCE  







Farmers ‘subsidising drivers of electric cars’

Farmers who drive long distances, and pay hefty petrol excise, are subsidising inner-city electric car drivers who pay none, prompting a peak infrastructure body to call for a “road user charge” on electric vehicles to share the tax burden more fairly.

Rapid forecast growth in electric vehicle sales will sap federal government fuel tax revenue but give state governments an ­opportunity to secure a growing source of revenue, according to a report by Infrastructure Partnerships Australia. “Applying a simple distance-based charge to electric vehicles will ensure every motorist makes a fair and sustainable contribution to the use of the roads and will help secure a vital stream of transport funding for generations to come,” said IPA head Adrian Dwyer.

The report, released on Thursday, says: “Electric vehicle motorists pay nothing at the pump, and only contribute to the road network through state-based road access charges such as registration and licence fees.

“All motorists should pay their fair share. Without reform fewer road users, especially in regional areas who drive vast distances, will increasingly subsidise electric vehicle motorists.”

Fuel excise collected per kilometre driven has steadily fallen from more than 7c in the late 1990s to just over 4c in 2017 as consumers switch to more ­efficient cars and electric vehicles, which are expected to grow from 0.3 per cent of new car sales in 2018 to 8 per cent by 2025.

“While a shift to electric vehicles could be great for the environment, we still need to make sure we can fund transport services to help people spend less time in their cars,” Mr Dwyer said.

The IPA said a 4 cent per kilometre road user charge, broadly equivalent with what most other motorists pay, wouldn’t discourage take-up of electric vehicles, which are expected to increase in cost effectiveness against petrol-powered cars as battery technology improves and charging stations become more prevalent.

It was imperative to act soon, though, given electric vehicles made up only 0.076 per cent of the light vehicle fleet, before a new tax became politically untenable. “While the revenue raised is unlikely to be substantial in the short term, it could raise rapidly as uptake grows — into the hundreds of millions each year for a large state and the billions by 2030,” the report says.

The NSW government’s review of federal financial relations, released last month, canvassed alternative state revenue sources to replace “highly inefficient” property stamp duty, shrinking coverage of the GST, including road user chrging.

The Bureau of Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Economics predicts the electric vehicle share to hit 27 per cent in 2030 and 50 per cent by 2035.

SOURCE  






Phonics a recipe for reading progress

Independent schools across NSW have bolstered thousands of students' early literacy skills through an evidence-based explicit phonics program. Data from the program has revealed a substantial lift in the number of first-year primary students mastering the key foundational skill of phonological awareness, which includes the blending of sounds to form words, from 13 per cent at the beginning of 2018 to 84 per cent by the end of the school year.

The word-reading ability of Years 1 and 2 students also improved, with at least three-quarters of them able to read fluently from a selected list of single-syllable words by the end of the year, up from 42 per cent and 30 per cent respectively.

The targeted initiative, rolled out to 38 previously underperforming schools across the sector, has so far trained 600 teachers to provide explicit and systematic literacy and numeracy instruction to students.

In the case of literacy, phonemic awareness and phonics, which is the ability to map speech sounds to letter patterns, are considered key components of effective early reading and writing instruction.

Despite research recommending the skills be taught explicitly, systematically and sequentially, many schools continue to preference a "whole language" or "balanced literacy" approach, which emphasises learning whole words and phrases in "meaningful contexts", such as reading a book or a poem, rather than through phonics exercises.

Association of Independent Schools NSW chief executive Geoff Newcombe said the pro-gram was a "resounding success", having benefited more than 6300 students. "The initiative has had an amazing impact on the students and teachers in the schools where it is being implemented," he said. "It ensures K-2 teachers are supported and equipped to teach foundational skills to students who would otherwise struggle."

Participating school St Philip's Christian College in Cessnock has recorded impressive results since introducing an explicit and systematic approach to teaching phonics two years ago. At the K-12 college, which operates in a low socio-economic area, it is not uncommon for students to start school lacking basic early literacy skills. Among the current Year 2 cohort, 80 per cent started kindergarten below the expected level for a five-year-old, with 40 per cent flagged for needing "significant support".

Two years into the new program, almost all of the 80-plus students are performing at expected levels. Its NAPLAN results have also shown sustained improvement, with Year 3 spelling and grammar average scores lifting from below state average in 2017 to at and above average in 2019. "We've seen a massive difference," said principal Darren Cox. "The pace of lessons is a lot quicker, students are focused and on task ... every teacher knows with certainty what they need to deliver and when."

Mr Cox said a similar explicit approach to teaching mathematics had also improved base numeracy skills.

From the "Weekend Australian" of 16/11/19






Government flags changes to union laws

The Morrison government has released its proposed amendments to union-busting legislation after extensive negotiations with Senate crossbenchers.

Katina Curtis, AAP Senior Political Writer
Australian Associated PressNOVEMBER 22, 20195:10PM
Union officials could rack up $37,800 in fines in a 10-year period before being sacked under government amendments to its union-busting legislation.

The government hopes changes released on Friday will get its "ensuring integrity" laws over the line in the Senate.

Unions have flagged a last-ditch lobbying effort to battle the laws.

The new so-called demerits scheme would also apply a threshold of $189,000 in fines to an organisation before it could be deregistered.

Industrial Relations Minister Christian Porter says the "sensible" amendments were developed in discussions with Senate crossbenchers.

"Both Centre Alliance and One Nation have engaged by suggesting and discussing amendments; their constructive engagement on the bill to address issues of relevance has been a very positive process," he said.

"The amendments circulated by the government today reflect those discussions and provide additional safeguards, whilst still ensuring the bill is able to achieve its key purpose - ensuring registered organisations and their officers finally obey the law."

Other changes include removing the minister's power to apply for deregistration, reducing the grounds for disqualification, and only applying a public interest test to union mergers if one of the organisations has a history of rule-breaking.

ACTU president Michele O'Neil said while the union movement appreciated the efforts of crossbenchers, the amendments did not stop attacks on ordinary working people.

"If the tests in these amendments, and this bill, were applied to politicians, political parties or corporate executives many would not be able to continue to hold office or run corporations," she said in a statement.

"We will now meet with the crossbench senators and ask them to only consider their final position on the bill after they have heard from and considered the views of those directly affected and experts in this area of law.

"This proposed bill will have serious implications for all Australian workers and should be treated with the utmost care."

The government needs crossbench support to pass the legislation because Labor is staunchly opposed to what it sees as an existential attack on unions.

Opposition industrial relations spokesman Tony Burke says even with the changes, the bill remains "fundamentally unfair".

"It will entrench the double standard where if a bank breaches the law 23 million times the prime minister considers it 'a matter for the board' - but three paperwork breaches could bring down an entire union without the members getting a say," he said in a statement.

"The truth is these laws will hurt ordinary workers by taking away their advocates: the organisations that fight for better wages, combat wage theft and exploitation, and keep workers safe."

The legislation is set to be debated in the upper house on Monday.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

Children who start school later gain advantage, new study shows (?)

The paper underlying this report does not yet appear to be online but the Centre seems very Leftist so the research is unlikely to be very rigorous.

Even the report below does however reveal a lack of rigour.  It is apparently based on the nonsensical "all men are equal" dogma.  No attempt is made to take account of student IQ. High IQ students have often been shown to thrive when enrolled early and the usual squawk about their social fitness has been shown to be a snark.  Smart kids are in general better socially as well as academically

So the study tells us nothing certain.  There were presumably a number of low IQ students in the sample who would benefit from a late start.  So the finding of an overall benefit from a late start could be entirely a product of the low IQ element in the sample.  How students of around average IQ fare is simply not addressed


Children who are held back and start school later than their peers gain an advantage that is still felt up to six decades later, a new study shows.

They are more self-confident, resilient, competitive and trusting, which tends to be associated with economic success.

The analysis of 1007 adults aged between 24 and 60 illustrates the “potential adverse effect of school entry rules,” lead author Lionel Page from the University of Technology, Sydney said.

“Our findings indicate that school entry rules influence the formation of behavioural traits, creating long-lasting disparities between individuals born on different sides of the cut-off date,” he said.

School starting ages vary between Australian states. In Victoria, children starting school must turn five by April 30 in the year they start school, whereas in Queensland and Western Australia the cut-off is June 30. In South Australia,, they must be five by May 1 and in Tasmania they must be five by January 1.

Dr Page said the study’s findings suggested the relative age at school had an impact on people’s success in adulthood.

“We find that participants who were relatively old in school exhibit higher self-confidence about their performance at an effort task compared to those who were relatively young,” he said.

“Moreover, they declare being more tolerant to risk in a range of real-life situations and trusting of other people in social interactions.

“Taken together, this set of results offers important insights on the long-term effects of relative age at school on behavioural traits.”

The new study was published by the Life Course Centre, a joint research project between the federal government and the University of Queensland, the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne and the University of Western Australia.

It involved adults from Queensland, Tasmania, Victoria and Western Australia.

The findings come as a UNSW study found a quarter of students are held back so they start school when turning six, not when they turn five.

SOURCE  





‘Offensive and wrong’: Proud Baby Boomers hit back

I commented on this issue yesterday

How sad it is to see yet another economist joining the “bash-the-Baby-Boomer” bandwagon.

Yesterday, news.com.au published a piece declaring Baby Boomers to be the “luxury generation”, who have “a sweet ride on a gravy train consisting of franking credits and loopholes in superannuation and pension rules”.

There has to be smarter and kinder way to find policies that will take our country forward into continuing economic prosperity without playing the old class warfare or generational warfare cards that so easily divide us.

Many Baby Boomers have long argued for a more balanced tax system but so far none of the political class have had the wit or the courage to make the changes necessary so that everyone from students to nursing home residents would receive a fairer go.

And speaking of fairness, franking credits are frequently raised, as they were in yesterday’s piece, as an example of an unfair policy that largely benefits retirees. But it’s not as simple as that - most simply, franking credits exist to stop tax being paid twice. If a company has already paid tax on its profits, why should its shareholders have to pay again?

Negative gearing is another policy touted to favour older people - but that ignores the fact that negative gearing and investors have driven the surge in Australia’s property market, boosting our economy in the process.

As economists and academics seek to influence the debate about the growing cost of our ageing population they would do well to steer clear of the sort of inflammatory rhetoric that caused such controversy when “smashed avocados on toast” stole the headlines.

For those of us who have worked full-time for more than 40 years and dutifully paid our taxes while raising families, educating children, creating wealth and – by the way – generating decades of sustained economic growth and national good fortune, the idea that we should be tagged the “luxury generation” is offensive and wrong.

If retirees decide to spend some of their hard-earned superannuation savings or a windfall from downsizing on an overseas trip, they should not be vilified by people who feel there is no golden future for them and who would happily sentence their parents’ generation to a life of poverty.

Many older Australians may not have enjoyed overseas trips as they raised their families, paid their mortgages, taxes and super contributions. It would be interesting to see how many overseas holidays have been taken by 25- to 45-year-olds compared with their Baby Boomer parents at the same age.

Here are some of the things that Baby Boomers didn’t have early on, that have made life much better for all Australians since then:

* Free tertiary education, until 1973: The first wave of Baby Boomers – born between 1946 and 1955 – had to either pay for it themselves with no student loans or else win scholarships that were only available to the few. And there were only a handful of universities, so there were far fewer places.

* Medicare, until Bob Hawke introduced it in 1984.

* Compulsory superannuation – until the Hawke-Keating government introduced it in 1991.

* Easy access to subsidised childcare at regulated childcare centres.

* Flexible working conditions.

* Paid (and unpaid) maternity/parental leave.

* First homebuyer government grants (or, for the most part, the “bank of mum and dad”).

* Anti-discrimination legislation until racial discrimination was outlawed in 1975 and other laws followed on.

* The power to say “no” to military conscription between 1964 and December 1972.

The nation does have an ageing population crisis and successive governments have been warned about it for decades, but what have they done? Answer, very little.

Bob Hawke and Paul Keating gazed into the demographic crystal ball and saw compulsory superannuation as a key component of the solution.

Now we are faced with academics and economists arguing against increasing super to 12 per cent while applying heavier taxes to the national nest egg. If they succeed then the very problem they are concerned about will worsen exponentially.

One way to ease the burden is to keep older Australians in the workforce, but that would involve a total rethink of the ageist policies adopted by both the private and public sectors that openly discriminate against older worker despite the law.

Some enlightened sectors of the economy have come up with ways to keep older workers and their wisdom and experience on the payroll, but sadly most haven’t. Age discrimination is rife.

One of the most bizarre attacks against Boomers involves the family home. It is rare to hear anyone complaining about inheriting a property, whether valuable or quite modest, that was paid for by the sweat and tears of their parents.

SOURCE  







Uncaring Australian army top brass

Maybe just another bureaucracy but if he had been female you would never have been able to shut them up about it.  They are very politically "correct" these days and real heroism such as we saw from Ben are old hat or even contemptible in that mindset

The country's most decorated soldier, Victoria Cross recipient Ben Roberts-Smith, has lashed out at the nation's defence chiefs for failing to publicly back him as his reputation and military record suffered sustained attacks over allegations he committed war crimes during his service in Afghanistan.

Mr Roberts-Smith said be had recently been contacted by .the Australian Defence Force to conduct a "welfare check", seven years after he left the army and nearly two years after he first appeared in a series of media reports accusing him of war crimes.

The call came just days after he publicly criticised the leadership of the ADF for failing to look after soldiers after they left the military.

Mr Roberts-Smith confirmed he had been contacted by the ADF, telling The Weekend Australian: "While I appreciate the sentiment of a welfare check, it does highlight the issue at hand — it is a reactive step that occurred after my public comments."

Mr Roberts-Smith said the ADF culture "has always been this reactive self-protection from the senior leadership" and criticised the lack of support offered to transitioning Diggers, who were statistically at a higher risk of suicide after they left the military.

Mr Roberts-Smith is locked in a personal battle to clear his reputation after being accused of war crimes in a series of stories by Nine Media. He is also being investigated by the Australian Federal Police over a possible war crime committed in the Afghan village of Daman in 2012.

Mr Roberts-Smith vehemently denies any wrongdoing and is suing Fairfax Media, now owned by Nine, over the stories. He said he was loathe to compare his own troubles with those of struggling former soldiers, who he said were at greater risk. But he noted that at no point had his former bosses offered any public comment of support; despite the allegations against him being unproven.

"Given the public scrutiny I've faced and the false accusations made against me, I would have assumed the Defence Force, which created my profile and placed me on a pedestal in the public arena, would have made some public comment about my good character and service given that at no stage have I ever been approached by law enforcement," Mr Roberts-Smith said.

Mr Roberts-Smith clarified he was. not calling for Defence chiefs to be sacked after being quoted on Friday morning saying he "absolutely" believed new leadership was needed at the top of the ADF.

National president of the RSL Greg Melick said there was no need for ADF leadership to step down because of their treatment of veterans. Mr Melick said if this was the view of Mr Roberts-Smith, then "I don't agree with him".

From the "Weekend Australian" of 16/11/19






Leaked emails show ABC journalists conspiring on Global Warming

Leaked emails have shown ABC journalists and producers conspiring together behind closed doors to push an ideological line on Global warming.

The first leaked email was sent on Sunday to journalists at the taxpayer funded public broadcaster by Melbourne executive producer Barbara Heggen. Heggen wrote that she was inquiring after “interest in an ABC-staff climate crisis advisory group”. The purpose of this new group was to “gather together the brains trust of the ABC staffers to develop ways to report on and inform Australians about the climate crisis using a solutions journalism approach”  and “to report back to ABC management our ideas and strategies for responding to the climate crisis both internally and externally”.

For those unaware, Ms Heggen is the woman responsible for such sterling journalism as this article discussing the possibility of fleeing to Tasmania to escape climate change and this radio segment talking about whether or not Australians should stop having children to save the planet.

The “Solutions journalism approach” she advocates is a theory of journalism developed in the late 90s which suggested that journalists shouldn’t simply report the facts but should suggest “solutions” to social problems. How this fits in with the obligations of the ABC charter is of course an interesting question.

Barbara’s friends and colleagues were excited at the prospect of what would effectively be an internal lobby group inside the ABC pushing for even more extreme alarmism and bias than currently. The ABC’s national rural reporter, Dominique Schwartz replied: “I’m keen. I have just been looking into how other media organisations are dealing with coverage of climate change.”

Investigative reporter Stephen Long agreed: “Also keen to discuss this. You should be aware also that [Editorial Policies] is having a look at this issue.” To get an insight into Stephen’s view on the matter one only needs to peruse the over two dozen articles he’s written slamming the proposed Adani coal mine, plus his other articles spruiking the benefits of renewables and downplaying the threat of blackouts caused by them.

ABC PM Presenter Linda Mottram also agreed: “We must report established science, the evidence, and not myth.” Presumably when Ms Mottram is speaking of reporting “evidence” instead of “myth” she’s referring to stories such as the one from earlier this month where the ABC breathlessly announced that 11,000 scientists were “declaring a climate emergency. The ABC of course neglected to mention during this “evidence” based reporting that many of the signatures were obviously false and that one of the signatories was a Professor “Mickey Mouse”.

I guess if they want to improve their “evidence” based reporting they can always give Tim Flannery another bag full of money to film yet another series. Maybe this time he can expand on his belief in a Gaia-like earth spirit.

The ABC receives over a billion dollars a year of taxpayer funds. If its journalists weren’t publicly funded then these leaked emails showing them conspiring to slant coverage behind closed doors would be annoying; but as an organisation funded by involuntary contributions of taxpayers it’s enraging.

The ABC will never reform unless it is under the threat of complete defunding. The time to start threatening that defunding is now.

SOURCE  






‘Inside’ the ABC’s climate group

Alas, the latest ABC staff-initiated brainchild is no more. As revealed on Monday through emails obtained by The Australian, senior journalists at Aunty had discussed establishing an “ABC-Staff climate crisis advisory group” to “report back to ABC management our ideas and strategies for responding to the climate crisis both internally and externally”.

ABC producer and presenter Barbara Heggen had made the proposal, suggesting a “solutions journalism approach”. ABC Melbourne journalist Karen Percy described it as “a fabulous idea,” national rural and regional correspondent Dominique Schwartz said she was “keen”. Senior journalist Linda Mottram said it was a “great idea”, also speaking of the “need (for) constant reminders that we must report established science, the evidence, and not myth”. Incidentally, Mottram’s ABC bio notes “Most recently she has taken a strong interest in editorial training at the ABC”.

The Institute of Public Affairs director of policy Gideon Rozner summed it up best. “Because if there’s a gap in ABC coverage, it’s climate change,” he quipped. As noted by The Australian’s media editor, Leo Shanahan, ABC policies require that “editorial decisions are not improperly influenced by political, sectional, commercial or personal interests”.

Yesterday ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose put the kybosh on these journalists come crisis activists, stating “it was one of those ideas that is not going to happen.”

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here

An addled attack on the elderly

The comments below were front-paged on some News Corp sites on 20/11/19.  They are all the more disgraceful for coming from an economist, Jason Murphy, -- who should know better. They are just an attempt to stir up hatred of the elderly. One gathers Jason is a rather young economist.

His little trick is to refer to people in their 60s and 70s as "Baby Boomers".  But let's call a spade a spade and refer to them as elderly.

He says that the elderly are on a gravy train.  Lots of men die in their '60s. Is that a gravy train?  Their widows certainly don't think so. Those who do not die very often develop health problems.  Is bad health a gravy train?

He talks of franking credits as gravy but that is just a Leftist smear put about by socialist failure Bill Shorten.  Franking credits are a refund of overpaid tax, nothing more, nothing less. And the system was devised in 1987 by Paul Keating, no friend of the rich

And is superannuation gravy?  It reduces payments to pensioners.  Is that gravy?

And elderly people on holiday are apparently particularly reprehensible. But many of them are people who took very little in holidays so that they could save up to have one big holiday after retirement, when they would be relaxed enough and have time enough to enjoy it fully.  Is postponing your holidays gravy?

It is true that for many elderly the family home is rather empty after the children have moved out but the owners concerned spent many years paying off a mortgage to have that home.  Should they be denied what they sacrificed for? Should they be denied a bit of ease and comfort after many years of scrimping.  Is scrimping and saving gravy?

And the family home is often retained as a place of refuge if any of the children get into financial or other trouble. The home really is retained "for the children". It is an important fall-back option in times of trouble.  Is it gravy to provide that?  Or should it be only the taxpayer that provides for people in strife?

The writer also says we should have a resources tax.  Julia Gillard could tell you about that idea.


Australia’s Treasurer has been out and about this week justifying the need for a surplus by talking about the “economic time bomb” that is our ageing population.

Yesterday, Josh Frydenberg told young people they will have to pay for the retirement of the old as we have fewer and fewer working age Australians to support each old one.

It was an impassioned speech, but it ignored one key thing — Baby Boomers, aged 55-75, have a sweet ride on a gravy train consisting of franking credits and loopholes in superannuation and pension rules.

Australian households aged over 65 have 2.5 times as many assets and 16 per cent as many liabilities as those aged 25-34, according to official data.

Their average net worth is about $1.4 million.

But there’s no urgency whatsoever from the Treasurer to tax them more fairly. He’s let a hundred terrific opportunities go by to tighten the screws on Australia’s luxury generation, from franking credits, to the pension age, to superannuation.

The older generation is all over Facebook these days and they’re filling it up with holiday photos from yet another terrace overlooking the Pacific Ocean or the Adriatic coast.

As we glumly scroll past them, we have a right to feel aggrieved to hear the fiscal obligation of Australia is ours.

Younger Australians should utterly reject the false burden being placed on their shoulders by a Treasurer too gutless to tax the boomers fairly.

“If we don’t remain fiscally disciplined today, the next generation will have to pick up the bill tomorrow,” he told the Business Council yesterday.

This is the line Mr Frydenberg is pushing as he seeks to justify his surplus. It seems so simple. Almost a truism.

But it disguises a set of entirely optional choices that helps one generation live in near empty multimillion-dollar homes and collect the pension, while many in the younger generations are locked out of the housing market and paying off enormous higher education debts.

Both parts of the seemingly benign statement involve pain falling on younger generations. Fiscal discipline falls principally on the young, while the boomer cohort romp merrily through a world of superannuation tax discounts and pensions that rise faster than inflation.

The Treasurer is talking about putting older Australians to work. But don’t assume this means bringing the current crop of older Australians out of retirement. He’s not talking about the current retired generation. He’s talking about making people work longer in future, i.e. just another way to make the burden of today’s generosity fall on a younger cohort.

Four times the Government has made choices that could have evened up the burden and saved the Budget.

For example, Australians of pension age face a “means test” that determines if they are eligible to collect the pension. It determines if they have “the means” to look after themselves — after all, it doesn’t make sense to give the pension to a retiree with $2 million in cash and shares. But the Government chose to leave the principal place of residence out of the means test. A retired couple living in a $2 million home can still collect their combined $1282 a fortnight. (You even hear rumours of people upsizing their home in order to reduce their cash holdings and qualify for the pension.)

The Government has begun a major review process of retirement incomes. But Finance Minister Matthias Corman neutered it before it even got going, promising in October it “will not lead to any change”.

The Government scrapped existing plans to lift the pension age from 67 to 70.

Franking credits, mean if you own shares in a company and you pay no tax, you get a check refunding you for any company tax that company paid. That benefits retirees disproportionately. Labor wanted to change the rules on this at the last election and lost in part because of it.

The electoral mathematics behind these choices are apparent. Younger voters tend not to vote for the Coalition while older voters are more prone to. Polls at some points have shown a dramatic generational divide from 60-40 to Labor among the young (18-24), to 60-40 to Coalition at the other end of the age spectrum (65+).

Of course, while generational war wages, certain corporations are enjoying the fireworks. Boomers might get a nod and a wink from the Treasurer but resources companies get all that and more.

It didn’t have to be a battle between young and old. There are other entities you can tax. Norway socked away $US1 trillion in assets in its sovereign wealth fund by levying taxes on the exploitation of its enormous oil resources.

Australia, you will remember, proposed a resources super profit tax that would have taken the cream off the top of the profits of the massive mining and extraction companies when the price of coal and iron ore were high. Instead those extra profits from digging up Australias dirt resources went to the owners of those companies, many of which are based offshore.

So while the generations go to war, don’t forget that it didn’t have to be this way.

SOURCE  






Taxpayers fleeced, betrayed as unis ponder why Christ born a man

Australian universities are abandoning their role as custodians of Western civilisation in favour of a seemingly endless obsession with identity politics.

I wrote recently about the University of Sydney’s Resurgent Racism project, a flagship program that provides taxpayer funds to academics so they can berate Australians for supposedly being racist.

But it is the tip of the iceberg when it comes to taxpayer-funded identity politics research.

A new report by the Institute of Public Affairs has confirmed the extent to which our universities are fixated on class, race and gender — and just how much Australians are paying for it.

The Humanities in Crisis: An Audit of Taxpayer-funded ARC Grants found the Australian Research Council’s national competitive grants program has distributed $1.34bn in funding to humanities research since 2002.

These projects cover historical studies, linguistics, cultural studies, human geography, and communication and media studies.

According to the ARC, its purpose is “to grow knowledge and innovation for the benefit of the Australian community”. It also claims “the outcomes of ARC-funded research deliver cultural, economic, social and environmental benefits to all Australians”.

So, has the research of the past 17 years done that and helped ensure our success as a prosperous, peaceful and stable nation?

Not quite. What the audit reveals is academics spending millions on projects that are narrow, incomprehensible and reflect the obsession with identity politics, cultural studies, critical theory and radical feminism.

At Macquarie University academics received $391,000 for a historical studies project called Sexing Scholasticism: Gender in Medieval Thought, which explored “medieval theological debates about why it was necessary that Christ was born as a man”.

Academics at the University of Sydney were awarded $735,000 for a cultural studies research project called Reconceiving the Queer Public Sphere: An Interdisciplinary Analysis of Same-Sex Couple Domesticity. By “critically analysing queer home life” the project would “transform current understandings of the relation between homosexuality, private life and the public sphere”.

The ARC awarded the University of Melbourne $100,000 for a cultural studies project examining Female Stardom and Gay Subcultural Reception. And James Cook University was given a bumper $2.7m for a cultural studies proposal, How Gender Shapes the World: A Linguistic Perspective, the authors claimed would “enhance our nation’s capacity to interpret and manage gender roles in multicultural contexts”.

The preoccupation with identity politics is especially notable in historical studies.

There have been 616 such research proposals to have received funding since 2002 — with the total cost amounting to $192m.

The most common theme is “identity politics”, with 112 of the proposals focusing on the leitmotivs of class, race and gender.

The second most common theme is “indigenous history and studies”, with 99 projects, while the third most common, “war and conflict” attracted 88 proposals. In contrast, there are only three research projects that talk about the rule of law and a solitary proposal examining free speech.

This shows our universities are not interested in the history or values of institutions that are essential to understanding Australia’s present and shaping its future.

As curators of Western civilisation, academics have a duty to look after some of society’s most valuable material. But two decades of ARC funding shows they are neglecting their duties.

Having bought into the postmodernist notion that Western civilisation is a white patriarchy, they have released themselves from the obligation to study the Western canon. Aristotle’s thoughts on the meaning of tragedy are apparently irrelevant, as are Shakespeare’s observations of human nature and John Stuart Mill’s views on democracy. There is a great deal that universities could pick up from Machiavelli when it comes to the problem of free speech on campus.

Today’s academics mostly believe there is nothing we can learn from the 2500 years of accumulated wisdom and knowledge passed down to us by those who have lived before us. This arrogance was articulated by academics at the University of Sydney when they rejected the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation’s proposed curriculum, which at the time was derided as “structurally, institutionally, morally and epistemically violent to other knowledges” and summarily dismissed as “white supremacy writ large”.

By rejecting the Western canon, academics not only are depriving university students of their dues but they also are depriving us all of the intellectual and moral nourishment that only the humanities can provide. Academics are no longer interested in properly feeding the society that ultimately feeds them.

SOURCE  






Big blow to animal activists

CONTROVERSIAL animal activists Aussie Farms — which Prime Minister Scott Morrison labelled "grubs" for publishing an interactive map showing farms and abattoirs — have had their charity status revoked.

It comes after the Australian Charities and Not-for-Profits Commission was urged by the Federal Government to launch an investigation into the group last year. The Aussie Farms website sparked Outrage and calls for trespass laws to be strengthened when it provided the exact location of farming properties and encouraged vegans and activists to upload photos of what they believed was cruelty to animals.

In days of action earlier this year, activists stormed properties, sparking concerns there could be retaliation by land-holders at the end of their tether.

Assistant Minister for Finance, Charities and Electoral Matters Zed Seselja told The Courier-Mail that he welcomed the decision. "The Government recognises the special place that charities occupy in Australia, and it is important that charities recognise their privileged position and do not take advantage of it," Senator Seselja said.

Without charity status Aussie Farms loses its tax concessions endorsement, including income tax exemption, GST concessions and FBT concessions.

From the Courier Mail of 19/11/19





Religious freedom bill: Christian Porter expands bill to protect hospitals, aged care providers

Christian Porter will grant religious hospitals and aged-care providers the same protections as faith-based schools and organisations to employ staff according to their beliefs in his final religious discrimination bill.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Wednesday, the Attorney-General confirmed he will apply the same level of protections for religious health and aged-care companies, which were not included in the draft bill released on August 29.

Mr Porter, who has held two-hour consultation meetings with more than 90 stakeholder groups since releasing the draft legislation, said religious hospitals and aged care providers should have the “ability to take into account religion in staffing decisions”.

He said religious hospitals and aged care operators had stressed the importance of retaining a “religious ethos and culture” within their organisations and had “reasonably sought an exception to the general prohibition on religious discrimination in employment that allows them to make staffing decisions in accordance with their faith”.

“The religious hospitals and aged care providers themselves recognise that competing objectives of providing access to health services and maintaining a faith-based identity must be reconciled, and seek to maintain the balanced position they themselves have arrived at reflected in the bill,” Mr Porter said.

“In the Bill that will be introduced, I can flag that one significant change from its first draft will be that religious hospitals and aged-care providers will be given protections equivalent to those given to other religious bodies, in relation to employment of staff.”

Mr Porter said consultation with religious hospitals and aged care providers had made clear that they do not “make decisions about the admission of patients based on any given patient’s religion or absence of religion, and do not seek to do so”.

“Likewise for aged care providers (with very few exceptions) they do not appear to consider religion or lack of religion before making a decision to accommodate a person,” he said.

No deadline for final vote as Senate inquiry looms

Mr Porter, who will table his final bill in parliament before December 5, confirmed he had no deadline for a final vote in parliament to push through the religious discrimination bill.

The Australian understands the legislation is likely to be referred to a Senate inquiry, and drag well into next year.

Responding to criticism from the nation’s most powerful religious groups, Mr Porter said he was seeking a “stable result and better outcome than the circumstance we have at the moment”.

“It would be a bad outcome if everyone felt that they got everything that they wanted out of this process. It is ultimately the most grinding process of balance and compromise.”

Mr Porter said he didn’t expect all religious groups and stakeholders to be “deliriously happy” once the process was finalised.

“If you imagine a continuum of happiness that goes from very unhappy to deliriously happy somewhere on that continuum is endorsement. Where while the bill doesn’t do everything that everyone might like, people nevertheless think that it’s at a reasonable point that’s worth supporting.”

Discretion ‘not viewed as discriminatory’

Mr Porter said a “particular challenge in the religious context is freedom of association”.

“Where we seek to protect people from being excluded because of their religion, we equally recognise that for religion to exist at all; religious bodies must be able to maintain a chosen level of exclusivity to their premises or composition or services.”

“For instance a religious school may admit students of many faiths or it may prefer students only of its own faith; but that discretion is not viewed by other faiths as discriminatory because they understand and accept its existential importance to all faiths.”

Mr Porter, tasked by Scott Morrison to deliver the Coalition election pledge to deliver the religious discrimination bill, said the draft legislation had adopted a “broad approach” informed by the exception in section 82 of the Victorian legislation.

“The effect is to preserve the status quo whereby a defined religious body can, in dealing with the exclusivity of its premises or composition or services, apply its own determination of the best application of its own doctrines and beliefs; and does not discriminate by acting in good faith on that basis.”

“So, for example, in Victoria it would not be discriminatory for an Islamic school to decline to employ catholic teachers (or vice versa). Or for the same school to decline to employ an irreligious person.

“For the avoidance of any doubt it cannot be stressed enough that this type of exception for religious bodies applies only in respect of decisions on matters of religious doctrine that pertain to people of different religious beliefs.”

Mr Porter confirmed his bill did not “affect the current exemptions that exist for religious bodies within other Discrimination Acts, at either State or Commonwealth level”, which has attracted criticism from religious and other groups in their submissions to the Attorney-General’s Department.

‘People will disagree’

He said religious groups had stressed to him during the consultation process that the “definition of religious body is important because of the reasonable autonomy it provides any organisation that falls inside its ambit”.

“One thing is clear, people will disagree on which rights are more important than others and where to draw the lines between them. Consultations, while constructive, inevitably end at a point where it is factually obvious that freedoms collide.”

“The unavoidable fact is that the colliding nature of rights means there is simply no way to exhaustively define their boundaries with each other in a way that sees them perfectly contour with neighbouring rights.”

Mr Porter said freedoms to associate would need to be balanced “against the right for individuals to access places and institutions free from the arbitrary exclusion of others”.

“In a structural sense the four existing Commonwealth Discrimination Acts dealing with race, sex, disability and age actually give expression to the most traditional conception of rights.” “That laws should protect us from others infringing on our natural rights as far as is reasonable.”

He said a balance needed to be struck “between anti-discrimination clauses of any type and other rights including rights to free expression and free association”.

SOURCE  

 Posted by John J. Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.).    For a daily critique of Leftist activities,  see DISSECTING LEFTISM.  To keep up with attacks on free speech see Tongue Tied. Also, don't forget your daily roundup  of pro-environment but anti-Greenie  news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH .  Email me  here