A Government of Idiots?

Until the unions did their best to sink him, Australia's presumptive next Prime Minister was doing a good job of presenting himself as relatively conservative. The article below by Colebatch the Younger is therefore a useful corrective

Australia is a stable, well-governed country, but if Kevin Rudd becomes Prime Minister it may not be possible to go taking this for granted.

In the 11 years since it was elected, the right-of-centre government of John Howard has proved itself Australia's best government ever. That is not to say it has been perfect, just very good indeed. The economy has boomed and gone on booming. Per capita income has soared, inflation, unemployment and interest rates have all been low. More Australians are wealthy and enjoy a higher living-standard than ever before. A number of potentially serious regional foreign crises have been handled effectively. Australia in general is one of the most respected countries in its region and a leading player in south-east Asian international co-operation and diplomacy. It has taken a strong position in the war on terror and supported the U.S. internationally both diplomatically and militarily.

Australia has been well-governed and prosperous for so long that there is a feeling that such is the natural and unchangeable order of things. This could be a dangerous delusion. Kipling once warned of:

Life so long untroubled, that ye who inherit forget.
It was not made with the mountains, it is not one with the Deep.
Men, not gods, devised it; men, not gods, must keep ...

Alvaro Vargas Llosa wrote recently of the "Return of the Idiot" -- of economically illiterate populists like Hugo Chavez fired by anti-Americanism and the ghost of communism: "Today, the species is back in force in the form of populist heads of state who are reenacting the failed policies of the past, opinion leaders from around the world who are lending new credence to them, and supporters who are giving new life to ideas that seemed extinct." There are signs of this attitude re-surfacing on the Left in mainstream Australian politics.

That the opposition Australian Labor Party is now ahead in the opinion polls, with an election a maximum of about seven months away, is ominous, given what it has become. Bob Hawke, Labor prime minister for much of the 1980s, proved a sound, responsible and beneficial economic reformer. But it seems times have changed, and not for the better. The present leader, Kevin Rudd, despite wearing nice suits (he is an ex-diplomat) and projecting innocuousness, seems to have a grasp of economics comparable to that of Hugo Chavez. Indeed a group of Rudd's supporters -- including the national president of the Labor Party and a host of Labor-affiliated union leaders -- signed a letter inviting Chavez to Australia to advise on the governance of the country, claiming:

We have watched developments in Venezuela with great interest. We have been impressed by the great effort that your government has taken to improve the living standards of the majority of Venezuelans. Although we are on the opposite side of the globe, we feel that our shared ideals of social justice and democracy bring us close together ... what Venezuela has been able to achieve in so little time will be a source of inspiration and ideas for many in Australia.

Rudd has condoned this poisonous nonsense and refused to discipline or rebuke those responsible, despite or perhaps because of the fact that apart from anything else it is an obvious insult to Australia's closest ally, the U.S. Rudd himself spouts simplistic anti-market extremism:

Our common enemy is the political project of John Howard which seeks to reconstruct Australian society ... Howard's vision for Australia is Friedrich Hayek's rampant individualism where unfettered free markets determine the value of not only every commodity but of every person and institution.

Rudd bolsters his self-righteousness and economic ratbaggery by invoking religion. In the U.S. this might be normal for a politician. In Australia, where politicians don't wear their religion on their sleeves (Howard is a Christian but doesn't invoke the fact to justify his actions), it is a disquieting departure. This is particularly so when it is bracketed with anti-capitalism and eco-extremism, with implied or explicit claims to superior moral worth over the so-called "common enemy" and of a general monopoly of moral rectitude. Rudd has claimed:

What, for example, is a Christian view on the impact of the Americanization of our industrial relations system on family living standards and family life? What is a Christian view of global climate change, given Christian teachings on the proper stewardship of creation?

In a recent article titled "Child of Hayek," Rudd demonstrated a truly scary, Chavez-like blend of moral self-righteousness and ignorance of economic thought, theory and history. He claimed: "Friedrich Hayek...argued that the only determinant of human freedom was the market."

Actually, Professor Friedrich von Hayek said centrally planned economies are incompatible with liberty. In free societies he should be regarded as a hero. Rudd also claimed absurdly that: "Hayek argued that any form of altruism was dangerous because it distorted the market." Nothing like this is to be found in Hayek's writing. Is Rudd confusing Hayek with Ayn Rand? Or trusting no-one in his audience knows the difference? Hayek's commitment to humanity, compassion and charity was abundant and has never been questioned by competent scholars. That Rudd is capable of such perversion of history and economic ideas, whether through ignorance or irresponsibility, might seem a small thing for a private individual -- but not one who may well be Australia's next prime minister.

Rudd's green extremism crosses the borders of the irrational, with a bizarre promise to reduce Australia's carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. Terry McCrann, one of Australia's most respected and politically impartial economics journalists, summed the matter up starkly:

Kevin Rudd has recommitted a Labor government to damaging the economy in the short-term and destroying it in the longer-term.

What he proposes would do far more economic damage, sow far worse social chaos, and specifically and directly hurt individual Australians more than the damage we are still suffering from the disastrous Whitlam period in the 1970s.

Michael Chaney, president of the Business Council of Australia, has said: "You run the real risk that you'll destroy the economy without any benefit to the world's climate." This is extraordinarily strong language from the council, a normally cautiously-spoken body that works hard to cultivate good relations with all political parties.

Rudd's deputy, Julia Gillard, is a far-leftist who claimed in the national daily the Australian that a "strong economy should not be at the cost of fairness" -- and it is hardly rocket-science to work out what that means. Rudd's environment spokesman, Peter Garrett, is a lawyer but best known as a rock-singer and anti-development, anti-capitalist, anti-U.S. activist and general subscriber to the package-deal of modern far-leftism. He has said that economic growth "almost always" leads to a worse environment. Shadow Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner is a member of the Party's "socialist left," the most left-wing faction in the Labor Party spectrum. He is a former student radical and strong advocate of compulsory student unions (abolished by the Howard government, to the great benefit of most of the country's university students).

Senior journalist Paul Kelly, who is anything but an uncritical supporter of the present government, has written in words of astonishment about Rudd's economic primitivism: "Rudd has seized a bizarre fate -- a resurrection of trade union power, collective bargaining rights and a far stronger industrial umpire as the keys to [the prime ministership]. Rudd's new industrial policy is a giant step into the past. Indeed, so sweeping is Labor's embrace of the principles of collective power and re-regulation that it must be wondered whether Rudd fully comprehends what he has done."

Even the Labor Party premier of Western Australia, Alan Carpenter, heading a state whose mineral exports make it one of Australia's principal economic power-houses, seems unnerved at what is being proposed.

In 1972, Australia elected a Labor government led by Gough Whitlam, a smooth, pragmatic-seeming lawyer, who came to office with an image of suave modernity not dissimilar to that of Rudd today. It took Whitlam and his cabinet, enthralled by economically illiterate populism, only a few months to reduce Australia to economic chaos. Inflation went from 4.5% to 16.9%, devastating the lives of pensioners and others on fixed incomes (Mrs. Whitlam dismissed it as "a lot of hoo-hah"). A later Labor finance minister, Peter Walsh, said: "Most of the time Whitlam behaved as if the economy didn't matter. Most of the 10 or 12 dominant ministers were economic cranks."

When Whitlam came to power, Australia had an unemployment rate of 2.4% and falling. It went into double-digits. Economic growth rate went from 4.9% in 1972 into minus figures. In September, 1974, with the country ravaged by inflation and unemployment, the Whitlam government approved a 32.5% increase in government spending. By the end of 1974 this had risen by 45%, the budget deficit had gone from 0.6% to 4.2% of GDP, and unemployment had more than doubled over the year.

The crackpot Jim Cairns, sometime deputy prime minister and treasurer, was probably a Soviet agent of influence (Whitlam himself tacitly admitted to the U.S. ambassador that Cairns was a security risk and would not share U.S. intelligence briefings with him). Cairns as treasurer printed money ever faster in an attempt to destroy capitalism. A multifaceted attack was made on the federal system, with the intention of destroying the states lest they obstructed grandiose plans of social engineering. It culminated in a bizarre attempt by the federal government to borrow money from Iraq for an undisclosed quid pro quo. Finally, with the government in complete dysfunction, the governor-general intervened to call a general election. Australia has strong democratic institutions and traditions and it survived. Nonetheless it took many years to recover from the economic damage. Though the Whitlam government's wrecking activities were limited by its relatively short term in office, the lesson is chilling: Australia elected a government of Llosa's idiots once and it could do so again.

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Rudd's union problem

Plainly industrial relations is by far the most important policy issue to emerge in this election year, the one with the potential to decide the election outcome. The strongly adverse business reaction to the launch of Labor’s industrial relations policy took the political momentum away from Kevin Rudd for the first time, but only in the parliament, not the opinion polls.

The challenge for John Howard and Peter Costello if they are to retain power is to communicate the very real economic threat posed by Labor’s policy and translate it into a broader electorate concern with Rudd’s economic credentials. This is something they have notably failed to do so far. Yet Labor’s industrial relations platform is a repudiation of the very basis of Rudd’s claim for legitimacy as the next prime minister.

He is selling himself as the fresh new leader who will ensure Australia’s prosperity outlives the mining boom, and paints Howard as the ageing Prime Minister who failed to grasp his policy opportunities to secure Australia’s future. Rudd’s address to the ALP’s National Conference at the end of April was called “A Party for the Future”, and he told his audience his first step would be “to throw out Mr Howard’s Work Choices laws lock, stock and barrel”. This is not a step into the future but a retreat into Australia’s failed economic past. Paul Keating liked to call it an industrial museum. The three biggest dinosaurs in the museum were protectionism, and the unions and arbitration system that depended on it.

Under Bob Hawke and Keating, Labor largely dismantled the tariff wall and Keating introduced enterprise bargaining, albeit union enterprise bargaining. Under Howard, and with the market pressures from globalisation, the opening of the Australian labour market has continued. Until now.

It says a lot about Rudd’s industrial relations policy, none of it good, that the great resource companies at the forefront of Australia’s dynamic interaction with the global economy are also the ones bearing the brunt of Labor’s attack - with its pledge to abolish the Australian Workplace Agreements that have been crucial to these companies’ competitiveness in global markets, and the aim of returning the unions as a force in the iron ore fields, where they used to create industrial havoc. Regular strikes over such compelling industrial issues as the tomato sauce in the canteen so undermined Australia’s reputation as a reliable supplier that it hastened the emergence of Brazil as a major competitor. It is no coincidence that the mining companies, operating in fiercely competitive world markets, led the charge to dismantle Australia’s tariff wall and demanded the right to talk directly with their workers and not through unions and their cat’s-paws in the state and federal industrial commissions.

Julia Gillard, the architect of Labor’s policy in consultation with the ACTU, and Rudd - who admitted knowing little of the policy detail when he announced it - have been obliged to engage in sham “negotiations” with the miners. Rudd told The Australian that the mining sector had a legitimate interest when it came to flexibility because it was exposed to international trade, then promptly confirmed he would abolish AWAs.

But it isn’t only the resources sector that has a vital interest in labour market flexibility. As Rudd acknowledged, it is a “legitimate expectation” of the general business community. Which makes all the more extraordinary Gillard’s reaction to the suggestion that business might run its own advertising campaign to explain the virtues of Work Choices. She immediately warned Australian business it could get injured, code for union biffo. “I’d be concerned if the business community got itself into the political fray. I’d be concerned if they became, if you like, propagandists for Mr Howard,” an unblushing Gillard said.

Apparently it’s OK for the ACTU and the unions to spend $25 million or more of their members’ funds engaging in the political fray and running a virulent scare campaign against Work Choices, but nobody else is supposed to have a say. Subsequent attempts by Gillard and Rudd to play down Gillard’s revealing blunder as a joke that misfired have been unconvincing.

Business is only too familiar with union violence. Labor loves to deride Howard as a politician from the era of the white picket fence. Labor’s picket fence is the one manned by violent unionists engaging in illegal industrial action and contemptuous of the law, and Labor’s proposed industrial relations framework, from what we know of it, will create an institutional and legal structure where this may again become acceptable behaviour.

Obviously the problems with Gillard’s industrial relations policy run much wider and deeper than just AWAs, important as they are. The proposal to get rid of the Australian Industrial Relations Commission, for example, is driven by the unions, who resent the fact that the Howard Government has been able to make enough appointments to the commission to stop it being a reliable instrument of union power. It is to be replaced by a union-friendly bureaucratic octopus with tentacles that can reach into every workplace, from offices located in city suburbs and regional centres.

Shutting down the highly successful Australian Building and Construction Industry Commissioner, who has brought industrial peace to an industry long marked by constant industrial disputes and rampant union thuggery, is another disturbing development. So is the introduction of compulsory collective bargaining and Labor’s unfair dismissal proposals.

And the reason for all these changes? Because the unions want them, and the unions still control Rudd Labor. Yet in the engine room of the economy, the private sector, about 85 per cent of employees are not members of a union. So who is Rudd representing with his anachronistic industrial relations policies? Union bureaucrats and public servants? Hardly the most likely progenitors of our future prosperity.

In a world economy that has to absorb the output of many millions of new, largely unskilled, workers from developing countries such as China and India and cope with shrinking workforces due to population ageing in developed economies such as Australia, a flexible labour market will be crucial. Rudd promises flexibility but his labour market policies will not deliver it, and this failure strikes at the heart of his claim to have the economic credentials to be Australia’s next prime minister.

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Agrarian socialism lives on

No disgrace seems enough to kill it -- and the Australian Wheat Board got it very wrong indeed -- as one of Saddam's little helpers

THE Howard government had a tremendous opportunity to radically reform one of the last bastions of socialism, and scrap forever the single desk for wheat exports, to crack open the market to competition, to create a new world, where grain growers would have freedom to trade in the same way as other businessmen.

Clearly, this was too much to expect. It’s an election year. The National Party is under siege. Growers threatened mutiny if the single desk was scrapped. Many of them still support AWB.

Never mind that AWB doesn’t deliver the best prices; that it charges hefty service fees; that it has damaged, perhaps forever, Australia’s precious trading reputation. Never mind that free trade is always better than shackled trade.

The government’s “reform” - announced during question time this afternoon - essentially maintains a single desk for wheat exports, run by a company that will look and smell very much like AWB. Also, no punishment for any minister or official; but again, what more can one expect in an election year?

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Last days of literature

ENGLISH literature was in danger of disappearing and should be taught as a separate subject in schools, an education conference has heard. Griffith University Associate Professor Pat Buckridge told more than 150 English teachers on Saturday that Queensland faced the "imminent disappearance of the literary canon" if literature was not restored in schools. "In ecological terms, the thing we're on the brink of losing can be thought of as a huge and priceless piece of cultural heritage to which everyone in Australia and the rest of the world has an inalienable right of access and to which - if they want it - everyone in Australia should be offered the means of access," he said.

Professor Buckridge said a major difference he noticed in current students from those leaving school 30 and even 10 years ago was how much English and world literature they had never heard of, let alone read. "Most of them have studied, in some fashion, a couple of Shakespeare plays, but unless they're from interstate or overseas or an older age group they know of nothing beyond a few mid to late 20th century novels." He was speaking at a symposium on English Beyond the Battle Lines: Rethinking English Today hosted by the English Teachers Association of Queensland (ETAQ).

Association President Garry Collins said most English teachers were actively engaged in teaching students to use language well, including correct functional grammar and engaging students in literature. Mr Collins said the association was keen to give classroom teachers a major say on English curriculum content as part of the current review of the Queensland syllabus and the prospect of a national syllabus.

Mr Welford said a literature stream for interested students would broaden choice, just as many schools offered several maths subjects. "We could have literature, mainstream English and English communication for students intending to pursue vocations pathways," Mr Welford said. Sunshine Coast University academic and The Courier-Mail columnist, Dr Karen Brooks, said a balance between popular culture texts and traditional literature from antiquity to the present was vital.

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No justice - rape victim's father

What is not mentioned below is that the victim of the rape was treated exceptionally poorly because the NSW justice system went into overdrive to water down severe sentences handed to a Muslim gang. Being kind to Muslims was the driving priority in the matter -- anything to achieve that

THE father of one of the Sydney women raped seven years ago by Bilal Skaf's gang says rape victims should avoid court, and take matters into their own hands instead. The father, who cannot be named, said criminal justice in the state was so biased against victims of crime that rape victims should have nothing to do with it. "Do not go to court. Sort it out outside of the court, if you get my drift," he said. "Once you get to court, you will not get justice. It is a justice system in name only."

This father's damning assessment was delivered after a man known as MG was acquitted of raping his daughter, who can be identified only as Miss C. While MG was acquitted of raping Miss C, he did not walk free. He is serving two 15-year sentences for his role in other rapes. Skaf and other members of his gang are already serving prison sentences for attacks on Miss C.

Her father's advice to avoid the justice system prompted the NSW Rape Crisis Centre to call for urgent reforms to ensure people are not tempted to take the law into their own hands. "Violence solves nothing," said manager Karen Willis. "I empathise with this man's position. What his daughter has gone through for seven years would be appalling. It shows we still need more changes such as special sexual assault courts to ensure people do not take the law into their own hands."

Miss C's father said his daughter had received "horrific" treatment by the courts and defence lawyers. "They subpoenaed her medical records and even said in court that she had an orgasm during one of the rapes. How in the hell would they know?" he said. "She now rarely goes out. She won't go out in crowds and when she does, she won't go out for very long. "She hates being outside, particularly when she sees Muslims. She is so anti-Islam it is unbelievable, and to be honest, so am I."

The fact that the MG case dragged on for more than five years meant he no longer had any faith in the adversarial system of justice. "The prosecution are hindered in what they can do, whereas the defence can rip these girls apart," he said. "It took seven years and my daughter could not do it any more and she was one of the strongest of the lot."

Miss C abandoned her involvement in the MG case because of delays and the removal of top prosecutor Margaret Cunneen. Her father said it was time to switch to a more inquisitorial system to stop defence lawyers dragging out cases. He also called for a better system of selecting judges. "They say the law is equal. Don't believe it," he said.

During his daughter's ordeal in the court system, he had taken his concerns to the NSW Law Society and both sides of state politics. He said he had been "spoken down to" by the Law Society, ignored by then Attorney-General Bob Debus and told by the state Opposition that real reform would require constitutional change.

He contacted The Australian after the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal wrote to this newspaper last week about the MG case. Miss C's father said he rejected the court's statement that Ms Cunneen's removal had not triggered his daughter's decision to walk away from the case.

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Patients booted out of Melbourne public hospital

SICK elderly patients will be among hundreds ejected from the Royal Melbourne Hospital in a management bid for government-sanctioned performance bonuses. Documents seen by the Herald Sun reveal the hospital is planning to discharge one patient from selected units by 10am each day for the next seven weeks. Up to 490 patients, including those from the acute geriatric medicine unit, will be discharged as the financial year draws to a close. Health Minister Bronwyn Pike says the practice is common in Victoria and overseas.

The documents, which describe patients as "system blockages", also reveal elderly patients are among the 65 per cent made to wait more than eight hours for admission. In an email to senior staff, the director of the hospital's division of medicine, Tony Snell, says the discharge tactic aims to secure bonus funding under a Department of Human Services performance scheme. "The aim is to get a significant amount of the available bonus pool funding," Dr Snell writes. "We seek your support in achieving these improvements in patient care (i.e., less delay in the emergency department), which will also improve our budget situation. "In order to achieve this we are targeting the key performance indicators of length of stay in the emergency department and waiting list reduction."

Ms Pike, who says she has not seen the email, backs the practice. "We want to make sure we don't have people on a bed with a suitcase packed waiting for the hospital to get the paperwork right, or that the patient has their medication with them," she says. "I fully support setting targets for the units, because it's saying to them this is best practice." Asked whether she would encourage other hospitals to set similar standards, Ms Pike says: "I know they already are and I'm very pleased. "Anyone who would suggest this is compromising patient care is insulting the doctors and nurses who work in the system."

A Royal Melbourne spokeswoman yesterday insisted patients would not be sent home before they were ready. "It's really just asking doctors to do their rounds earlier in the morning," she said. The spokeswoman said about a third of the 170 patients presented to the emergency department each day required hospital admission. The email says that in previous years, patients have had to wait 24 hours in the emergency department before admission. It says that 64 per cent of patients are admitted from the emergency department within eight hours. But last month, in the medical division, only 35 per cent were admitted within that time frame. "To improve this we need to increase morning bed capacity and move out patients more quickly from the emergency department," Dr Snell writes. "We are aiming to have at least one patient per unit discharged by 10am." Dr Snell and another staffer would also audit patients who had remained in hospital for longer than a fortnight to see where they could assist in removing blockages in the system.

A second email from a senior staffer orders that patients identified for discharge be moved to the transit lounge and vacant beds be filled immediately. The hospital's division of medicine has 10 units, which include acute geriatrics, haematology and diabetes.

Opposition health spokeswoman Helen Shardey says the Royal Melbourne had suffered a drastic bed shortage. "The funding is not coming in on a sustainable basis, so the hospitals are having to play these games all the time," Ms Shardey says. Latest figures reveal there were 2872 patients on the Royal Melbourne's elective surgery waiting list in December last year, up 100 in six months

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Reduced surgery in another Melbourne public hospital

SICK children and pregnant women will be denied surgery at a major Melbourne hospital next week. Monash Medical Centre has slashed its elective surgery list as the financial year draws to a close. Doctors believe the move is aimed at cutting costs but Monash insists it is part of normal scheduling.

Theatre schedules seen by the Herald Sun reveal a blackout on pediatric, obstetric and vascular surgery for the week beginning May 28. A high-level health care source said patients continued to wait for elective operations at Monash despite beds and doctors being available. "The surgeons are there with nothing to do," the source said. "It happens regularly and usually in the last quarter of the financial year. "It's because they've got their bucket of money for the year and now they're running out and it costs them money to push (patients) through."

Specialists were angered by the blackout. "It was believed to be due to the fact that it was a funding constraint," the source said. "It was implicit and it wasn't well received by the people who were affected."

A spokesman for Southern Health, which manages the Monash Medical Centre, said next week's surgery blackout was necessary due to an anaesthetists' conference. A spokesman for Health Minister Bronwyn Pike said emergency surgery would continue. "It's not related to funding," he said. There were 1767 people waiting for elective surgery at Monash at last count, in December.

The row at Monash came as Ms Pike defended Royal Melbourne Hospital's decision to discharge at least one patient from selected units each day until July. The Herald Sun yesterday revealed the directive, which was contained in an email that also described patients as "system blockages".

One patient who doesn't want an early release is Harry Tsogias, 40, who said yesterday he had been wrongly sent home once before. Rushed to Royal Melbourne's emergency department on April 14, unable to walk and in extreme pain, Mr Tsogias was diagnosed with sciatic pain in his right leg and discharged a few hours later. "I couldn't walk. It was so sore I was in tears," he said. "I was in a lot of pain and I was sent home." On May 10, he returned to the Royal Melbourne and was this time rightly diagnosed with an aggressive infection in his hip -- so advanced he needed surgery. After having parts of his infected hip bone cut out, he now faces the possibility of a hip replacement. "They gave me a very quick examination and sent me home," he said. "This could have been prevented."

Due to go home again this week, Mr Tsogias said he was not ready and accused the hospital of throwing patients on the street to free up needed beds. "I am not going anywhere," he said. "After what happened last time I don't want to go until I am 100 per cent cured."

The Royal Melbourne yesterday denied the Herald Sun access to patients in the transit lounge, where they are forced to wait. "They are kicking people out before they are ready to leave," said Mr Tsogias' sister, Anna Manidis. "Someone is not doing their job properly."

Royal Melbourne's executive director (clinical governance) Christine Kilpatrick said: "No patient is ever discharged prior to them being assessed by the medical staff and (staff) ensuring they are ready and safe." The hospital was under enormous pressure to free up beds, but there was no financial incentive to discharge one patient a day. "We don't have a dollar value on their bed," she said. "It is about making sure patients who are ready to leave prior to 10am have all their needs and services arranged."

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Smoker's court action snuffed out

A CRAIGIEBURN man's $100 million-plus civil action against tobacco giant Philip Morris went up in smoke yesterday when a jury rejected his claim. But smoker David Clemens, 49, said he would appeal the verdict. The County Court jury of six deliberated for almost 3 1/2 hours before rejecting Mr Clemen's claim that he suffered an injury as a result of the negligence of Philip Morris. And Judge Susan Cohen ordered Mr Clemens pay Philip Morris's costs, but stayed payment of them for three months. The costs for Philip Morris's two barristers amount to more than $60,000 for the trial alone. Mr Clemens claimed that early this year costs in the case had amounted to more than $250,000. He represented himself in the nine-day jury trial.

Outside court, Philip Morris counsel Richard Stanley, QC, said the result was an endorsement for juries. "I just think it's a very good result from the jury on the evidence that was led," Mr Stanley said.

Mr Clemens told jurors he began smoking when he was 13 and was diagnosed in 2002 with emphysema, lung disease and bronchitis. He said he had not been able to give up smoking. Mr Clemens claimed to have been seduced by advertising of the image of the Marlboro man and Philip Morris failed in its duty of care to tell him about health risks associated with smoking. He said it was not until late 1987, 15 or 16 years after he took up smoking, that his wife drew his attention to health warnings on cigarette packets. But Philip Morris argued Mr Clemens knew the risk and took it.

The court heard he was an obsessive litigant, having started claims in Federal Magistrates', County, Supreme and High courts, and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. In a rare move, Mr Clemens, formerly David James Lindsey, was declared a vexatious litigant in 1998 after an application to the Supreme Court by the Attorney-General. In 2005, Mr Clemens made an application to the Supreme Court for leave to sue Philip Morris and it was granted. Philip Morris appealed, arguing Mr Clemens had not paid $96,494 in costs owing to Philip Morris from proceedings in the Federal Court. The appeal was dismissed. Mr Clemens, on workers' compensation payments for an unrelated injury, did not put a figure for damages to the jury but his statement of claim put it at $100.1 million.

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Your government will protect you

He was a "ticking timebomb" waiting to go off .. a prisoner who warned authorities he would kill once freed, and carried out his threat just eight days later. The prisoner, with a history of violence and mental health problems, brutally bashed a man to death as he slept in Brisbane's City Botanic Gardens. But he will not be tried for the 2005 murder of Brisbane father John Simpson, 56, because health authorities have deemed him mentally unfit.

The case has sparked calls from the victim's family, mental health support groups and the State Opposition for an inquiry into the release of mentally ill people with violent tendencies. Mr Simpson's daughter has called for an inquiry into the man's release "in the public interest" to prevent similar tragedies. "We believe we are entitled to an explanation as to how someone so dangerous could be released into the public like a ticking timebomb waiting to go off," the daughter, who wanted to be identified only as Jodie, 27, said in a letter to the State Coroner this month. "His release from jail has put the public's safety in jeopardy because it appears that the system does not have a safety net for violent, mentally ill people who have been released."

Jeff Cheverton of the Queensland Alliance, a non-government agency representing mental health groups, said prisoners with mental health problems were not given the follow-up and referral to treatment they needed on their release. Mr Cheverton said there should be graduated release of prisoners with mental health problems. Psychiatrists treating the man charged with Mr Simpson's murder had warned of his psychosis and potential danger for the past decade.

Before Mr Simpson's murder, the man - who cannot be identified under mental health laws - had been serving a three-year jail sentence at the Maryborough Correction Centre after he attacked a Sunshine Coast taxi driver with scissors and a hammer in 2002. Sentencing the man in 2003, Brisbane District Court Judge Garry Forno recommended that Queensland Corrective Services transfer him to a health institution so he could get appropriate care and the public would be protected.

However, Corrective Services decided he did not meet the criteria for an involuntary treatment order. Police and Corrective Services Minister Judy Spence said that while in jail, eight different psychiatrists had decided he was not psychotic, but displaying threatening and disturbed behavior.

Before his release from Maryborough jail in 2005, the man told prison staff he was going to kill people, including a homeless man. Police were warned and put out a statewide computer alert before his release. But it was to no avail. After being arrested for the killing of Mr Simpson, the man told police he had needed to kill to "rejuvenate his brain" and he had caught a bus from Maryborough to Brisbane and gone to the gardens because he "wanted to commit a murder".

State Coroner Michael Barnes said he could "well understand" Mr Simpson's daughter's concerns and would look into them. In March this year, the charges of murdering Mr Simpson and the attempted murder of a fellow patient at a mental health unit in 2002 were dropped after Mental Health Court Justice Anthe Philippides decided the man was of unsound mind. She ordered he be detained in a high security mental health unit.

The Queensland Police Union said the Government needed to build a "modern purpose-built" mental health facility to house violent offenders if they were not going to be jailed. "Murders and suicides are all too common now and compulsory detainment and treatment is the only way to reduce these terrible consequences," union president Gary Wilkinson said.

The man's adoptive mother said public systems had failed her son, who was left for her and her husband to pick up from prison.

The above article appeared in the Brisbane "Sunday Mail" on May 20, 2007




The importance of good teachers

SCHOOL students who have good teachers take half as long to learn their course material as those with poor teachers, new research shows. The report provides the first objective evidence of which teachers are adding value to the academic performance of their students - and which teachers are letting children down. "The top 10 per cent of teachers achieve in half a year what the bottom 10 per cent achieve in a full year," says the author, economist Andrew Leigh, of the Australian National University.

Dr Leigh tracked three years of numeracy and literacy exam scores for 90,000 primary school students and matched them against 10,000 teachers. Good teaching - measured by improvements in exam scores - has almost no relationship with teacher experience, qualifications or any of the criteria currently used by most schools to hire or reward teachers. Instead, the best teachers appear to be good at their jobs because of innate factors like personal drive, curiosity and ability to relate to students. "Most of the differences between teachers are due to factors not captured on the payroll database," said Dr Leigh. The study shows female teachers are more likely to improve student literacy, while males are better at teaching maths.

Surprisingly, it shows students in large classes performed better than those in small ones - although it doesn't claim a causative link. It also finds no positive effects of teacher qualifications on test scores, a finding which challenges the Federal Opposition's policy of paying teachers more for better academic qualifications rather than for observed ability.

The study is likely to receive a frosty reception from teacher unions and state education bureaucracies which say exam scores cannot be used to measure teacher quality. But it has been seized upon by private schools and the Federal Government. The executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of NSW, Geoff Newcombe, said Dr Leigh's "groundbreaking" findings paved the way for teachers to be partly rewarded by the exam score improvements of their students. "It's complex but we can't stick our head in the sand and say it's too hard," he said.

The Federal Education Minister, Julie Bishop, said the report supports her policy of introducing performance pay for teachers next year. "This makes a mockery of education union and Labor Party claims that teacher performance cannot be measured," she said.

The schools data for Dr Leigh's study, which includes year 3 and 5 numeracy and literacy exam scores and information about individual teachers, was provided by the Queensland Education Department after NSW and Victoria had refused to make their information available. As well as being used to identify, reward and retain the best teachers, Dr Leigh says his methodology could be used to send the best teachers where they could contribute most. If indigenous students had teachers from the top quarter rather than the bottom, then the findings imply the two-year black-white test score gap could be closed within seven years. [A very simple-minded extrapolation]

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Teachers reject payment by results

Predictably. Businesses get payment by results but teachers are high-minded noble idealists, of course

NSW school principals are designing their own plan to reward quality teaching in defiance of the Federal Government's push to link performance pay to student results. The body representing 460 high school heads has rejected the Government's "ideologically driven" model. They are wary of Labor's alternative, saying it is still too thin on detail.

The president of the NSW Secondary Principals Council, Jim McAlpine, said the council's plan would be "based on merit rather than performance". "[The federal Minister for Education] Julie Bishop's performance pay is going to be based on results of students in tests and that is a very narrow performance measure," he said. "But teachers who take on additional responsibilities, who undertake additional professional learning, who contribute to the further development of other teachers, merit extra pay."

From January 2008, first-year teachers in NSW Government schools will earn an annual salary of $50,250 and receive an increase each year for the following nine years up to $75,000. They will then receive no further increase unless they take up a position as a head teacher, deputy principal or principal. Top principals earn $119,000. In all there are 21 pay points in teaching, based on merit, years of experience and school size. The principals suggest creating extra salary steps for teachers who, for example, complete master's degrees and use them to help their colleagues. This would recognise the collegiality of the profession, where a number of teachers may contribute to a pupil's development.

The state Minister for Education, John Della Bosca, has also said he is open to a system of merit pay not based on student results. Mr Della Bosca and his state and territory colleagues last month rejected Ms Bishop's proposal to pilot performance pay in schools from next year, saying they would develop their own plans. Since then, Ms Bishop has said schools will be rewarded with up to $50,000 for outstanding results in numeracy and literacy. Schools could divide the money among their best teachers.

Federal Labor has said it would reward quality teaching using a merit-based system that took into account extra qualifications, professional development and working in rural and remote areas.

The Prime Minister, John Howard, has said that from 2009 he would tie Commonwealth funding to the states and territories to the introduction of performance pay for teachers, giving principals more autonomy to hire and fire and providing parents with more detailed information on school performance. That information should also include cases of bullying and violence. The principals' plan is separate to another being devised by the national teacher union, the Australian Education Union.

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Some attack on bloated hospital bureaucracies at last

QUEENSLAND Health does not have enough money to fund over-budget hospitals requiring key staff. Director-general Uschi Schreiber has imposed a staff freeze on districts that have blown their budgets, despite admitting the personnel were needed for "effective health service delivery". A cap has been placed on theatre-booking clerks, radiology/medical imaging clerks, ward receptionists, human resources officers and indigenous liaison officers.

Ms Schreiber has told her district health managers that the freeze would remain until the end of the financial year. In a memo obtained by The Courier-Mail, Ms Schreiber said: "I would like to bring to your attention consistently strong growth in administrative staff numbers, most notably at district level. "Whilst appropriate staffing levels for both clinical and administrative employees is a key component of effective health service delivery, this must continue to be balanced with the need for budget integrity."

The correspondence said districts, area health services and divisions would be banned from hiring any more administrators if they were above "affordable levels". She said if the extra staff was for essential, day-to-day activity, approval would have to be sought from an area general manager or an executive director.

Peter Forster's Queensland Health Systems Review, which evaluated the department in the wake of the Jayant Patel scandal, found that the department was putting budgets in front of patient care. It also revealed that the department was overburdened with bureaucrats, and recommended central office be cut to 644 positions. More than 160 had been identified as surplus.

In a statement to The Courier-Mail, Ms Schreiber's office said the 644 cap was an "annualised figure and the actual number fluctuates slightly throughout the year". There were 657.65 positions in February this year. Eleven positions were child and youth health positions "transferred to corporate office pending machinery of Government changes" and 31 were special project positions with a "set life span". "Queensland Health is actively managing administrative staff numbers and maintaining a lean corporate office," the statement said. "Administrative staff positions are established only where a strong and compelling need can be demonstrated and at the district level such positions must support clinical services. "The director-general has issued a memorandum to ensure active management of administrative staff numbers continues and appointments are linked directly in the districts to the support of clinical services, rather than an increase in bureaucratic positions."

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Granny suffers 82 hours of agony in public hospital



AN 81-year-old great-grandmother endured 82 hours of agony in a Perth hospital. She lay immobilised on trolleys and in "holding pens'' before finally getting urgently-needed hip surgery in Royal Perth Hospital yesterday. Rita Robins' son Peter wants WA's besieged Health Minister Jim McGinty to explain why his fragile, elderly mum experienced days of fasting and constant surgery cancellations before she could get the operation for her seriously fractured left hip. "These are the people that public hospitals should be helping,'' an angry Mr Robins told The Sunday Times, while his mum was getting the surgery. "What do these old people do? "There are more than her going through this at the moment -- this would be just a drop in the ocean. "(Mr McGinty) says there's no health crisis, but what about this?''

Mr Robins' wife Dianne said it broke her heart to see the suffering of her kind-hearted mother-in-law -- who is a great-grandmother of five, grandmother of nine and a mother of four. "I don't think you would do this to an animal,'' Mrs Robins said. She said the elderly woman fell about 7pm on Tuesday at her Northam home and had been taken to Royal Perth Hospital by 11.45pm. Her mother-in-law then spent the next 39 hours on her back -- to stop her moving her hip -- on a trolley, being wheeled to ``empty spots'', while promises of surgery on Wednesday morning fell through.

"About 1.30pm on Wednesday, they took her to what they called a `holding pen','' Mrs Robins said. "This was just stretchers again with curtains between them in just one big open room. "And because she's on her back, they had to put a catheter in for her because she can't get up to go to the toilet or anything. "I requested that if the operation wasn't going to happen, could they feed her because she had been fasting from the night before, and could they give her some of the medication she usually takes. "But the nurse just straight out said to me, `I can't find anybody to come and do what we need to do'.''

Her mother-in-law, already suffering dementia, started to stress. "She was really tired, she didn't sleep all night, she was scared and with all this stress, it made her mind wander because she also hadn't eaten,'' Mrs Robins said. But she was left in the "holding pen'' until 2.30pm on Thursday, before getting a bed. She was made to fast again for hours on Thursday and Friday only to have the surgery again cancelled. Finally, at 9.30am yesterday, she was wheeled into surgery at RPH.

"She's not got private cover because she's a pensioner. She lives in a housing commission home,'' Mrs Robins said. "She's been a widow for seven years and she's had a real tough life. So what do these people do when they need health care?''

Mrs Robins said up to a 24-hour wait might have been acceptable. "But from the time she got to the hospital, until the operation, that's about 82 hours of her lying on her back, not being able to move,'' Mrs Robins said. "So when Mr McGinty says `There's no health crisis', I'd love to phone him up and say `Come visit now', but he's too far away from what the people are doing. "She's a wonderful lady, she's done so much for so many people _ even though she never had much. "And because she's had such a tough life she's always got out of things with a smile. So when I see her like this it just breaks my heart.''

Opposition health spokesman Kim Hames said: "If Jim McGinty cannot ensure timely medical help for people like Mrs Robins and the hundreds of others who are subjected to the same lack of treatment because of his mismanagement, perhaps it is time he does the decent thing and stands down as health minister.'' Mr McGinty refused to comment. An RPH spokeswoman said the Mrs Robins had had surgery postponed on Thursday because of pre-existing conditions, which the family denied.

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'Exhausted' driver in ambulance crash

FATIGUE has been blamed for a crash involving two Queensland ambulances. The vehicles were involved in a minor nose-to-tail accident attending the same job at Kilcoy, northwest of Brisbane, about 2am on Wednesday - with no injuries to paramedics or patients. But sources said the accident investigation report revealed both ambulance crews were exhausted from over-working and this had contributed to the crash. "The paramedics had been without sleep for some 20 hours," a Queensland Ambulance Service insider told The Sunday Mail.

An exclusive Sunday Mail report this month revealed how the service was in crisis, with paramedics pleading for more staff and vehicles before it was too late. Ambulance officers expressed their anger at the new roster system, which had resulted in them working more shifts every week. Many said they were physically and mentally spent.

The accident happened only hours after the ambulance employees union threatened the State Government with industrial action if it did not address rostering and recruitment. "Fatigue was a huge part of the incident . . . the crews were extremely tired . . . although I am sure the QAS will say it is something else," the insider said. The Emergency Medical Service Protection Association, a group representing paramedics unhappy with their union, said there must be further investigation into the crash. "This raises serious concerns. It is a workplace health and safety issue which needs to be looked into," association president Prebs Sathiaseelan said. Mr Sathiaseelan said management used "emotional blackmail" on employees about to go off duty, asking them to respond to an emergency case.

State Opposition emergency services spokesman Ted Malone said the incident highlighted how the Government was prepared to risk the lives of ambulance officers and the public. "Peter Beattie has had his hands in our pockets grabbing his ambulance tax, which he promised would give us the world's best service," Mr Malone said. "All he's done is waste our money and run the service down to the point where ambos are forced to work 20 hours without sleep. How dangerous is that? "Bullying, harassing, running staff into the ground to the point where they're exhausted."

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IMPERSONAL PUBLIC HOSPITALS CAN KILL

And a substandard solution is being tried

On Christmas day a few years back, Mary Webber was the doctor on duty in a short-staffed Sydney emergency department. The elderly man in the bed before her was clearly unwell: high fever, racing pulse, heavy breathing, confused and complaining of persistent pain all over his body. Webber and her colleagues checked for the usual causes, but ruled them all out. No one could figure out why the man was so ill. He'd been in a minor car accident a week earlier, but X-rays following the incident had shown no signs of fractures.

Webber tried to transfer him to a bigger tertiary hospital better equipped to handle his case, but three declined before a district hospital finally admitted him. Doctors then had to play "catch up'' trying to access various test results and information being held by at least three different hospitals. One registrar noted in the man's file that it wasn't clear who was even in charge of his case. The delays added up, probably to about four days, Webber says. Eventually the man was diagnosed with a rare infection concealed in his spine - but by then it was too late. He died shortly afterwards.

Whether or not that outcome could have been avoided is impossible to say, but Webber says if things had been handled differently he certainly would have stood a better chance. "The doctors were following the normal processes, but if there had been a doctor whose job it was to check up on the tricky patients, someone who was senior enough to crash through some of the barriers and push some of the walls down, then this might not have happened,'' she says. "Or at least it might have been picked up earlier. Everyone was working very hard, but the system itself had inherent flaws when it came to patients like him - the system works very well for `in-the-box' patients who come down established pathways, but not so well for the out-of-the-box patients.''

Now a new brand of doctor designed to help manage and co-ordinate the care of those "out of the box'' patients is being piloted by NSW Health at five public hospitals, in an effort to improve safety and quality of care, and reduce errors and adverse events in a hospital system plagued by doctor shortages. Webber, along with two of her colleagues at Ryde Hospital, doctors Michael Boyd and Ross White, have been among the first to take on this new role of "hospitalist'' - a doctor who will work in hospitals in a generalist role that crosses the divisions between medical departments and specialties. NSW Health has allocated $1.4 million over two years for the Hospitalist Pilot Project, and plans to recruit about 20 more doctors to the position in July.

Exactly what such doctors will do has some degree of flexibility. They will liaise between specialists and junior doctors, as well as with GPs in the wider community. Some will create mentoring programs for junior doctors that review difficult cases and discuss what could be improved; some will develop new systems to deal with longstanding problems, such as a database to improve the lines of communication with GPs. The goal is to provide better continuity of care in a system that has become increasingly fragmented - ideally improving quality of care for patients who are chronically ill or have complex needs, such as the elderly or people with multiple health problems that don't fit neatly into one area.

But not everyone is enthused with the idea. In January the Internal Medicine Society of Australia and New Zealand released a position statement calling the plan a "short-sighted and inappropriate response to the workforce crisis'', that may ultimately result in substandard care as lesser-trained doctors are given the responsibility traditionally charged to general physicians who have to pass the same boards and standards as sub-specialists. "We're very much in favour of someone taking a holistic view, but we think the ideal hospitalist already exists in the form of general physicians,'' says society vice-president Alasdair MacDonald, who wrote the group's position statement. "Rather than creating a whole new class of doctors who don't have the same qualifications, we should be putting our money into recruiting and training general physicians, and improving remuneration for them to restore the balance of generalists compared to sub-specialists.''

Hospitalists first emerged in the US in the 1990s, and there are now more than 10,000 there. The NSW project marks the first time the role has been formally trialled in metropolitan areas in Australia. Victoria, Queensland and WA have all informally expressed interest in the program, says Professor Katherine McGrath, the deputy director-general of health system performance, who sponsored the program at NSW Health. In rural and regional areas - where doctor shortages are more acute - hospitalist-type roles are more common, though they often happen by default. In Queensland, however, the "rural generalist program'' has taken the idea to next level, developing a specific training module for rural doctors working in hospitals, and last year had that qualification recognised.

Such formalisation is not on the cards in NSW. NSW based the new position partly on the American model, which has had some promising results. A review of hospitalist programs published in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that patients' average length of hospital stay was decreased by almost 17 per cent, hospital costs dropped by more than 13 per cent and most patients were satisfied with the care they received (2002;287:487-494).

But there are inherent differences in the way the US and Australian models are set up. Under the US model, hospitalists have considerably more power than those being piloted in NSW. For example, in the US hospitalists can admit their own patients, while here the specialist is ultimately in charge of the patient and just delegates responsibility to the hospitalist. There are also differences in training and qualifications. In the US hospitalists are internal medicine specialists; about half are general physicians and the rest tend to be specialists in intensive care. Several academic centres have now developed hospitalist-focused postgraduate training.

By contrast, NSW Health is targeting doctors who have experience working in hospitals but have chosen not to undergo further specialty training - such as a senior career medical officer, or a GP who would like to work part-time in hospital. There is no separate qualification required to become a hospitalist, and it's being seen as a pathway for career medical officers to progress in their careers rather than a specialty in its own right. Training will be in short bursts in the form of one-day workshops, much like the way continuing professional development works, as opposed to any formal course, McGrath says.

The hospitalists will be working on contracts that range from two to five years - eons compared to most junior medical officers, who rotate as frequently as every 10 weeks and registrars who rotate every six months to a year. "They know how the hospital system works and they can build a long-term relationship with the specialists," McGrath says. "The whole point is to ensure there is no slippage in standards of care - the patient remains under the care of the specialist, and the hospitalist works under the delegation of the specialist - that's where we differ from America. We've made it deliberately different to protect against any risks."

But MacDonald says that itself may be part of the problem. He claims that if anything, hospitalists should be under the supervision of general physicians because hospitalists recruited here are unlikely to have the expertise and training to take responsibility for complex patients. If that's the case specialists may not trust them to hand over responsibility to begin with. Instead they'll seek assistance from another specialist, increasing cross-referrals and further complicating matters. "The optimum hospitalists already exists and what effectively we're doing is saying, well we can't train enough of them, so let's create somebody that's not trained to the same extent, hasn't had to stand up to the same scrutiny and hasn't had to do the same exams - and employ them to do that work," he says. "And let's supervise them by people who don't necessarily have the breadth of specialist's knowledge across lots of disciplines, and by administrators who are often not from a clinical background."

Even among proponents of hospitalists, there is some concern that the goals of the NSW pilot project may not reflect the achievements hospitalists have made overseas. Bill Lancashire is a senior lecturer at the University of NSW Rural Clinical School and a critical care doctor at Port Macquarie Base Hospital. He is actively pushing to have hospitalists introduced there, and says they can help reduce demands on overburdened specialists by taking over management of some of the less complicated patients, as has occurred in the Canadian system. But as to whether it can actually diminish hospital errors, he is not so sure. "I think we need to think more about why we're doing it and what we hope to achieve. Across Australia there is a real concern about adverse events in hospitals, but this shouldn't just be a reflex response to that," Lancashire says. "We need the evidence to show that adverse events will be reduced, because overseas that hasn't been the impetus; it's been specialists being overwhelmed by patient numbers."

The review published in JAMA in 2002 found that while several studies showed hospitalists improved measures such as inpatient mortality and readmission rates, the results were inconsistent. Whether they will make a difference to safety and efficiency in Australia remains to be seen. The NSW pilot project ends in December next year.

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Water everywhere, but not a drop to drink

The editorial from "The Australian" below says that competition, not rationing, is the water-shortage solution. Given the parlous state of education these days, I guess I should point out that the heading above is a reference to "The rime of the ancient mariner" by Coleridge

AS urban Australians go about their daily lives they seem to be burdened by the plight of the ancient mariner. It continues to rain in capital cities around Australia's coastline but benighted residents are subjected to ever-tighter restrictions. Yet the parlous water shortages around Australia are less a failure of the climate than they are a failure of the market. And as National Water Commission chief executive Ken Matthews pointed out, restrictions have no place in long-term water management.

Water is undeniably a scarce commodity in the driest continent on earth, and while the amount of water on earth is fixed, the population keeps increasing. But rationing of necessities is a primitive mechanism, and in a sophisticated economy price signals are a preferable means of allocating resources. Yet from the collection of water through to its distribution and consumption, the market is not being allowed to operate.

During the 1980s, in line with the prevailing zeitgeist, state governments created corporations to manage vital utilities. This, it was argued, would deliver the efficiencies of the private sector without depriving state governments of a revenue stream. Predictably, state governments have been unable to resist milking the cash cows they have created. They received nearly $1billion in dividends from utility companies in 2005-06, up 12 per cent on the year before, while spending on water infrastructure has dropped in most capital cities. Only Melbourne and Perth have increased their spending.

At the same time, good-hearted Australians have been persuaded to make water savings that are nothing more than feel-good gestures. Urban dwellers may catch the water from their showers and develop "bucket back" as they carry it to their gardens, but that is about as useful as babushkas standing in queues in the former Soviet Union to buy potatoes and vodka, or Chinese peasants smelting iron in their back yards to meet industrial shortfalls in the Great Leap Forward.

The first step to delivering a market solution is introducing price signals. Irrigated agriculture uses about 75 per cent of water in Australia, and industry a further 20 per cent, while domestic water use accounts for not much more than 5 per cent. Until pricing signals are directed at agricultural and industrial users, they will have no incentive to seek greater efficiencies in their usage and shortages will continue. Meanwhile, domestic users refraining from washing their cars, filling their swimming pools or watering their lawns save just a drop in the bucket. Misguided state government water policies have only further exacerbated the problem. Objections to waste-water recycling have been allowed toprevail and desalination plants have been favoured, regardless of relative cost.

The real solution is for state governments to introduce competition into the business of providing water. Private companies have a bottom-line incentive to plough profits back into infrastructure and invest in the most cost-effective means of sourcing water. As with telecommunications, it might prove necessary to separate the distribution network, or piping, from water collection -- dams or recovery plants such as recycling or desalination. It is extraordinary that companies such as Macquarie Bank have been able to invest in water infrastructure in Britain but are barred from doing so in Australia.

As with other environmental issues, the backyard initiatives of well-meaning do-gooders are not the solution. Carrying buckets of water is notarational response to the water needs of a sophisticated society in the 21st century.

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Muslim outrage at citizen test

MUSLIMS are outraged that prospective citizens will have to acknowledge the Judeo-Christian tradition as the basis of Australia's values system. Australia's peak Muslim body said the proposed citizenship question - revealed in the Herald Sun - was disturbing and potentially divisive. Australian Federation of Islamic Councils president Dr Ameer Ali said the "Abrahamic tradition" or "universal values" would be less divisive ways of describing the nation's moral base. Dr Ali said use of the term Judeo-Christian was the result of "WWII guilt", and before 1945 Australia would have been called only Christian. "That question must be rephrased," he said.

Dr Ali was backed by Democrats senator Lyn Allison, who said the answer to the question was highly debatable. But Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews stood firm on the merit of the question. Mr Andrews said Australia's Judeo-Christian heritage was indisputable historical fact. "We are not asking people to subscribe to the Judeo-Christian ethic," he said. "We are simply stating a fact that this is part of the heritage of Australia in terms of its foundation. "This is not an exercise in political correctness. It is trying to state what has been the case and still is the case."

But Health Minister Tony Abbott confused the issue, saying the modern Australian values system was secular, or of no particular religion. The Herald Sun yesterday revealed 20 key questions, developed in consultation with Mr Andrews, that are likely to be asked of would-be citizens. Mr Andrews said the test, to begin by September, would help immigrants integrate into society better. "We celebrate diversity and people are free to continue their own traditions, but we are also very insistent that we have to build and maintain social cohesion," he said.

Dr Ali said he would request a meeting with Mr Andrews to discuss the question. "It is the wrong message we are sending," he said. Senator Allison said the test was pointless. "I don't see what it's going to achieve," she said. "It doesn't say anything about people's character, whether they are going to be good citizens." Opposition immigration spokesman Tony Burke said Labor agreed in principle with the test, but wanted details.

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QLD: A LEGAL SAFEGUARD AGAINST HOSPITAL NEGLIGENCE TO BE REMOVED

As part of the "solution" to public hospital capacity shortfalls

PUBLIC patients whose operations are botched will lose their right to sue the State Government under a plan to reduce hospital elective surgery waiting lists. Thousands of people who will have their operations outsourced to private hospitals will also be unable to access their case notes under the Freedom of Information Act if things go wrong. Under the plan, called Surgery Connect, a broker will be paid a one-off, $8.5 million fee to find private hospitals to treat the state's long-wait public patients.

Many of the operations will be complex, including shoulder surgery, hip and knee-replacements, prostatectomies and treatment of aortic aneurisms (swelling and weakness in the wall of the aorta). But, under the Surgery Connect model, the broker will be liable if an operation goes wrong. The tender closed on May 9.

The Queensland branch of the Australian Medical Association said it did not tender because the cost of insurance was too high. Queensland Health last night rejected claims it had washed its hands of public patients, saying they could sue the broker if problems arose. A department spokeswoman said patient notes would remain the property of private providers, but patients could access records under the Federal Privacy Act. However, legal advice obtained by The Courier-Mail said that, in regard to some matters, it could be harder to obtain information under the Federal Act.

AMAQ spokeswoman president Zelle Hodge said she was unsure who would be willing to take on the inherent risk associated with the model. "I think patients should be extremely worried not only as an individual but the bigger picture is this is just another way to run down the public hospital system," Dr Hodge said.

In a statement, Queensland Health said the rights of public patients would not be eroded: "The broker is required to indemnify Queensland Health and to maintain appropriate levels of insurance in respect of medical negligence claims," the statement said. "The broker is then responsible for ensuring the health providers it engages are appropriately credentialled and insured for such claims. "These measures are designed to provide a safety net for patients who may have suffered adverse consequences of medical treatment they have received from the private provider. "It would be remiss of Queensland Health if it did not ensure that such contractual requirements were imposed on private providers. It is also important to keep in mind that the broker and private providers are providing health services to these patients so it is expected that, legally, they would bear the risk."

The AMAQ last year held talks with the Government about outsourcing some public elective surgery but, under its plan, patients would be treated in public hospitals and, where possible, public doctors would operate in private hospitals. President-elect Dr Ross Cartmill said the arrangement included Queensland Health providing indemnity insurance.

Federal Health Minister Tony Abbott said contracts entered into by the Queensland Government and Queensland Health were issues for those bodies. "The outsourcing of elective surgery is an admission of defeat and an admission by Labor that the private health sector is an essential part of our health system."

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School geography has lost its way, say teachers

GEOGRAPHY is taught in schools as a series of issues pushing a particular opinion rather than giving students a grounding in basic facts about natural processes and human interaction with the environment. The Australian Geography Teachers Association and the Institute of Australian Geographers told a Senate inquiry into the academic standards of school education that geography, under the umbrella of Studies of Society and the Environment, had lost its disciplinary rigour.

AGTA director Grant Kleeman told the hearing in Sydney that students studied global warming but not the atmospheric processes required to understand climate change and its impact. "The traditional discipline encouraged students to look at issues from a variety of perspectives with the expectation students then formulate their own opinions rather than inculcate them with a particular perspective," Mr Kleeman said.

IAG president Jim Walmsley said the teaching of SOSE into schools resulted in geography students being "issue-led rather than being rigorous in their understanding of these issues".

Mr Kleeman said the notion of issue-based learning was introduced in the 1970s and 80s when everything taught in schools had to be immediately relevant to the lives of students. "We're advocating a return to a more systematic study of geography and history, where you look at processes as the entry point of study rather than the issue," he said.

AGTA chairman Nick Hutchinson said the perspectives pushed in school geography included radical green opinions and neo-liberal views school, when it should have a robust core as the base. "In geography, we've taken on board everything from extreme environmental perspectives through to peace perspectives," Mr Hutchinson said. "But all the time we come back to this core of the discipline, so we can deal with an issue like deep ecology, which might be as controversial as black-armband history, but we can do it within the discipline because we have tools of dissection," he said. Deep ecology is a philosophy that says animals and plants have the right to as much ethical consideration as humans. "The automatic reaction of most kids is they want to protect nature, the environment, animals and cuddly things," he said. "The job of the teacher is to show them other sides, to facilitate class discussion so they can work out their values towards issues." Understanding the processes at work in areas such as the Great Barrier Reef or cyclones destroying rainforests showed students that destruction was part of the natural growth cycle, he said.

The AGTA says geography should be compulsory for all students in years 7 to 10 as a stand-alone subject.

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Navy to protect whales: Rudd

Since I share the usual human feelings of affinity for the marine mammals, I applaud this



GUNBOATS will be sent out to protect whales in Southern Ocean sanctuaries under a Kevin Rudd federal government. The navy would be deployed to enforce laws banning whale slaughter in Australian sanctuary areas. It would be the most aggressive attempt to save the sea giants in the 200-year history of whaling in Australian waters. Under a Labor Government, whalers found operating illegally could be intercepted and boarded at sea.

Australia's whale sanctuaries were established in 1999 but since then an estimated 400 of the giant mammals have been processed by Japanese factory ships. There have been no prosecutions. The ocean monitoring would be backed up by legal action. Bids to halt whale catching would be made in the International Court of Justice or the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea. And direct appeals would be made to the biggest predator Japan, which would be told it was damaging a prime Australian tourism resource.

Labor will release its policy as Japanese whalers prepare to again enter southern waters for so-called "scientific" kills. Its fleet is expected to haul in 850 Antarctic minke whales, 50 fin whales, and, for the first time, 50 humpback whales.

The Labor policy also comes on the eve of the 59th International Whaling Commission meeting in Alaska from May 28 to 31. Australia's anti-whaling measures were strongly sponsored by former Environment Minister Ian Campbell, but his successor Malcolm Turnbull has been tied up with climate change and water policies.

Labor leader Kevin Rudd believes the Government has taken no real action over 11 years to oppose whaling. Since 2005, Mr Rudd and Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese have been pressing the Government to get the International Court of Justice to intervene. Monitoring of whalers in Antarctica has been left to New Zealand and non-government organisations. Mr Rudd would argue it was up to Australia to enforce its own laws, and that the option of boarding whaling ships would be available. And Labor would also expand the network of whale sanctuaries in conjunction with state governments.

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Astronaut and friends

Australia's Federal Treaurer, Peter Costello, once wanted to be an astronaut. Hence the cartoon below. The hard looking female on the right is undoubtedly the thuggish Julia Gillard, who wants to deliver Australia back into the hands of the unions.



For more Australian cartoons, see ZEG.







The State of Corruption has Learned Nothing

Yesterday, the government of Western Australia was trying to get a newspaper editor fired who has been critical of them. Now they are trying to nobble the local anti-corruption body

A PARLIAMENTARY committee wants a watchdog put on the state body that exposed corruption at the Carpenter Government, to "protect" the public interest. In a move certain to spark debate, the committee of two Labor and two Liberal MPs - who report to parliament on the activities of the powerful Corruption and Crime Commission - yesterday recommended that an independent officer be appointed to monitor the use of surveillance devices and covert search warrants by the CCC and police. The committee said the role of the monitor would be to ensure the public interest was always considered in applications to use the devices.

But as a string of politicians have been caught acting improperly as a direct result of CCC phone taps and video surveillance, there was little overt support yesterday from either side of politics. Attorney-General Jim McGinty said he had no concerns about the use of phone taps and surveillance by the CCC although he was prepared to listen to arguments on the issue.

Opposition Leader Paul Omodei went further, saying another layer of bureaucracy was the last thing that was needed, although he added the Government would appreciate any attempt to limit the CCC's powers after so many of its members were caught out. "The CCC should be allowed to get on with their job," he said. "We passed legislation in the parliament that allows them to do these things (but) I think the Government's smarting because it's uncovered a whole lot of corruption in Government in Western Australia."

Sacked ministers Norm Marlborough, John Bowler and Tony McRae were all brought down by evidence obtained from phone taps and video surveillance. Labor MP Shelley Archer and Liberal MP Anthony Fels were also exposed for questionable conduct, while in a separate CCC investigation, former minister John D'Orazio was forced out of the ALP after video surveillance showed him meeting a CCC corruption target.

Committee chairman and Labor MP John Hyde said the committee's position was not an indictment on the professional conduct of the judiciary (which approves applications), the CCC or the police. The CCC yesterday refused to comment, but it has previously rejected the idea. In March, former CCC commissioner Kevin Hammond told the committee there was already enough oversight and monitoring of the CCC and there was no pressing need for a public interest monitor.

In its report to parliament, the committee said the recent spate of hearings by the CCC and its use of telephone intercepts and surveillance had resulted in greater public focus on procedural accountability. The nature of covert devices being used in accordance with the public interest was a significant consideration, it said.

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Students resent 'guilt' in Leftist history teaching

HIGH school students resent being made to feel guilty during their study of Australia's indigenous past and dislike studying national history in general. The History Teachers Association called yesterday for a rethink of the type of Australian history being taught in schools and the way in which it is taught.

History Teachers Association of NSW executive officer Louise Zarmati said her experience teaching in western Sydney was that students were resistant to learning about Australian politics and, in particular, indigenous history. "This is a somewhat delicate subject but they don't like the indigenous part of Australian history," she told a hearing of the Senate inquiry into the academic standards of school education in Sydney yesterday. "The feedback I get is they're not prepared to wear the guilt. They find it's something that's too personal, too much of a personal confrontation for them. "I think it sparks a lot of racism; it certainly did in my classroom. It makes it an unpleasant learning experience."

Australia's indigenous history has been a contentious issue in the ongoing "history wars" over the interpretation of European colonisation. Historian Geoffrey Blainey brought the phrase "black armband view of history" to prominence in 1993 to describe the portrayal of European colonisation as shameful. The description was picked up in 1996 by John Howard, who later launched an offensive on the teaching of Australian history in schools. The Government is now in the process of developing a national curriculum for Australian history.

Until this year, NSW was the only state in which Australian history was a compulsory stand-alone subject for students in years 7 to 10. In years 9 and 10, students study 20th century Australian history focusing on the workings of government and the history of politics, and the subject is examined in the Higher School Certificate.

Ms Zarmati said more than 20,000 students studied history for the HSC last year, of whom more than 11,000 studied ancient history, making it the most popular history course in the English-speaking world.

Ms Zarmati said history teachers constantly struggled with the unpopularity of Australian history in years 9 and 10. "They don't really enjoy it and feel forced to do it; they don't like the politics all that much," she said. "My personal opinion is that it's the nature of the beast. "Teenagers at that stage aren't mature enough to understand the concepts but when they get to years 11 and 12, they really enjoy Australian history because they're looking at problems and issues and debates."

In other evidence to the Senate inquiry, literacy expert Max Coltheart said the federal Government's budget initiatives to improve literacy and numeracy standards with programs costing more than $500million over four years was a "waste of money". The budget included a scheme granting up to $50,000 to schools that showed a significant rise in literacy and numeracy standards, and vouchers worth $700 to provide one-on-one tuition for students failing to meet minimum national literacy and numeracy standards. Professor Coltheart, professor of psychology and head of the Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science at Macquarie University, said the commonwealth should stipulate the type of reading tests schools had to use to qualify for the grants. He said children who struggled to learn to read were labelled as having a learning difficulty but they actually suffered a teaching difficulty. The budget funding would be better spent on training primary school teachers how to teach reading properly.

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School science courses 'pre-Newtonian'

SCIENCE in years 8 to 10 in Queensland is essentially descriptive, with courses failing to recognise the scientific revolution triggered by Isaac Newton in 1687, leaving students woefully unprepared for senior study. Submissions to the Senate inquiry into the academic standards of school education argue the calibre of maths and science taught is low by international standards, the quality of teaching is poor and the courses fail to stretch bright students.

A submission from a maths teacher of 40 years' standing, who co-authored a series of textbooks and worked with the Queensland Board of Senior Secondary School Studies, said that maths to the end of Year 10 "fails abjectly" to provide students with the skills to progress to more rigorous maths or the physical sciences. "That this has been allowed to go on for decades is a scandal," John Ridd said. Dr Ridd said the standard of algebra taught in Queensland schools was poor and there was "now no numerical science in years 8/9/10". "It is a sad fact that science in the years up to the end of Year 10 in Queensland is essentially all descriptive. It is non-numerical, pre-Newtonian," he said.

Dr Ridd said the "awful gap" between the standard of maths at the end of Year 10 and the start of Year 11 had required a lowering in the standard of maths taught. "Maths has had to be softened, weakened, by a large amount," Dr Ridd said. "Work that used to be done in years 8/9/10 now appears in the first sections of the Year 11 maths B texts. "Naturally the longer-term effect of that is that the standards reached by the end of Year 12 have declined -- with implications for the next stage -- university maths, physical science and engineering. There is a gap there too."

Dr Ridd's concerns are echoed in a submission by the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute and the International Centre of Excellence for Education in Mathematics, which says the long tail among Australian students "of under-achievement and failure is apparent well before the end of secondary education". The AMSI and ICE-EM submission argues that the OECD maths skills test often quoted as showing Australian 15-year-olds perform highly "is not a valid assessment" of maths knowledge, with some of the questions "effectively general aptitude tests rather than mathematical ones".

The submission says that a better guide to the standard of students is the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study of Year 8 students, which tests curriculum content. Its results show that by the early years of high school, a large proportion of students already lack the background skills necessary for intermediate and advanced level maths courses in years 11 and 12.

The Australian Association of Mathematics Teachers agrees that students are failing to reach their full potential in maths, and attributes this to poor teaching, modelled on methods used in the 1960s that "foster memorisation as opposed to deep learning". But the association says Australian students compare favourably with their international counterparts and the achievement standards in courses compared well to those expected of overseas students. "We believe there is a disproportionate focus on comparisons between the states and territories, particularly through the media, which is not helpful to improving standards," it says.

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Migrants' diseases not followed up

MIGRANTS with serious illnesses - including lepers and more than 100,000 people with tuberculosis - have been allowed into Australia despite authorities' inability to carry out proper medical supervision. An audit of the Immigration Department has found that it knowingly allows migrants to enter Australia with serious contagious diseases but frequently fails to check up on whether they have sought medical attention.

The Australian National Audit Office revealed yesterday that since 2000-01 more than 100,000 immigrants with tuberculosis had entered Australia on the condition that they submit to medical supervision. The damning report said that, despite imposing the conditions, the department was unable to follow up and check whether the medical advice had been sought. The report comes just a month after John Howard questioned whether migrants with HIV-AIDS should be allowed to come to Australia. It said the department admitted its errors and had agreed to overhaul its systems. The audit said the current health screening procedures had "limitations and gaps", which weakened the Department of Immigration and Citizenship's ability to protect Australians from public health threats. The system relied largely on the honesty of visa applicants to disclose whether or not they had a disease that could be a public health risk, the audit said.

Opposition immigration spokesman Tony Burke said he was shocked by the audit and urged the Government to implement the recommendations quickly. Australian Medical Association vice-president Choong-Siew Yong said it was "quite concerning" that visa-holders were not complying with their undertaking and urged the Government to do more to address the situation.

Under the Migration Act, visa applicants must meet health requirements that protect the community from public health risks and safeguard Australians' access to health services. Applicants for permanent visas undergo a medical examination, while short-stay visa applicants - including temporary skilled migrants and holidaymakers - answer a series of questions about their health history and status. "As a result, DIAC cannot be certain of detecting all people who pose health risks," the audit found.

It was also highly critical of the way the department administered and monitored exemptions from the health requirements which have allowed foreigners with diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis B and C and leprosy to enter Australia. Visa applicants who fail to meet the health requirements can secure an exemption if they sign a "health undertaking" to report to a designated health authority in the relevant state or territory for a follow-up health assessment. Up to 20,000 undertakings are issued each year - about 90 per cent for people with tuberculosis. The audit revealed that a quarter of the 5535 health undertakings issued in 2002-03 were non-compliant. There are no formal arrangements between DIAC and state and territory authorities to check whether people have honoured their commitment to undergo further health checks.

The audit also found that, even when visa-holders were caught breaching their health undertaking, they were still allowed to stay in the country. The audit was also critical of the federal health department for failing to provide DIAC with "timely advice" on potential health risks. DIAC figures contained in the audit show that since 2002-03 nine people with leprosy had signed health waivers and secured visas to Australia. Since 2000-01, 101,468 health undertakings had been given to people with tuberculosis.

The Government agreed to adopt all eight recommendations made by the ANAO including a memorandum of understanding between DIAC and the Health Department. A spokeswoman for Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews said the Government would also ensure that co-operation across government agencies improved.

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Arrogant Leftist "planner" wants smaller houses "to limit their impact on the environment"



VICTORIA'S Planning Minister has said McMansion-style homes are water wasters suffering from "housing obesity". Justin Madden, an architect who lives in a two-storey heritage-protected home, has said he wants more small homes on new housing estates. He has said big houses found in suburbs such as Caroline Springs and Tarneit often suffer from "housing obesity". "Melbourne's household growth - and by that I mean dwellings - is twice the population growth," Mr Madden has said. "Our increasing affluence has led to bigger houses, and I'm sure you're familiar with the description McMansions, and one of my favourites, 'housing obesity'."

But residents in Caroline Springs, Mr Madden's electorate, have said he is attacking their Australian dreams. Peter Attard, who lives in the suburb with his wife and three children, has said the chance to have a big home is "what makes Australia the best country in the world".

While the state Government delays ordering stage 4 water restrictions, Mr Madden has branded bigger houses water wasters. "When we need to minimise our consumption of things like energy and water, many of us are living in houses that consume more water and more energy than we need," he has said.

But Mr Attard has said home-owners take environmental responsibilities seriously. "I've got a whole grey water system hooked up through my house. It was designed with energy-saving measures," he has said. "The size of our house is none of the minister's business - we've worked hard, we can afford a big place, and we've got a family that fills it!"

Speaking at a planning summit yesterday, Mr Madden has flagged a competition to design smaller, more energy efficient new housing. He has said large designs and extravagant lifestyles were undermining Victoria's environmental requirements for new homes. "We've put in place five-star energy rating into new housing and that's making housing more efficient," Mr Madden said. "(But) to counter that, what people are doing is building bigger housing . . . four bedrooms, a study, the entertainment room, and as well as that they're filling it with electronic equipment."

But Caroline Springs residents Mick and Jasmina Fazlic have said Mr Madden has got it wrong. With daughter Melissa, 12, the couple say all the space in the house is used, and Mr Fazlic runs his business from home. "If you work hard, you make money. You want to enjoy that," he said.

Neville Rodger, a six-year Caroline Springs resident, has agreed size does not govern the efficiency of the house. "We've got 5000-litre water tanks that take in all the water off the roof," Mr Rodger has said. "We're not wasting water at all."

Mr Madden has since softened his stance, assuring residents the state did not dictate house size. "We do not want to tell Victorians how big their houses should be. That is up to them," he has said. Mr Madden, who recently applied to Heritage Victoria to add a family room and two bedrooms to the back of his own home, has said housing obesity is defined by the size of the household relative to the house size. "We want to ensure these houses are built as sustainably as possible, both to limit their impact on the environment, and to keep down the costs of running a household."

The size of an average new detached home in Victoria has risen by 50 per cent in the two decades to 2005, reaching 255 square metres.

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It's the ABC who are the real Bastards

ACCORDING to the ABC, its drama Bastard Boys is not a documentary and it's not a docu-drama. It is a drama. And a very average one at that. It purports to tell the true story of the 1998 waterfront dispute, but it does not. It presents a fictionalised account of the Maritime Union of Australia's struggle to maintain its stranglehold on the docks when confronted with the reality that the historically corrupt trade union's practices were actually crippling shippers and exporters and making Australia an uncompetitive laughing stock on the world stage.

Originally planned to be presented in four one-hour episodes over four weeks, the ABC adjusted its programming to present two two-hour episodes in what looked like an attempt to draw attention away from the Federal Government's 12th Budget. The show rated well, for an ABC program, but ABC management should be asking its staff how such an unbalanced polemic found its way on to its airwaves at such a politically sensitive time.

Writer Sue Smith came to the project with relish. As she told ABC radio's Richard Glover on May 10: "I love wharfies." Glover, attempting a modicum of caution about the possibility that such a declaration might smack of bias, quickly chimed in: "I think (Patrick's boss Chris) Corrigan is probably very proud of what was achieved. He believes there were big efficiencies." Hmm. He probably does believe that, Richard. After all, Smith's beloved wharfies were, as they say in maritime circles, swinging the lead. They were moving Patricks containers at 18 lifts per hour, well short of the international best practice standard, and they were doing it with a nationwide workforce of about 1400.

Forget the rorts, which received a peripheral nod in Smith's fiction. The real driving force behind the dispute was the need for real reforms beyond the fiddling at the margins attempted by the Hawke Labor government, which splashed almost $420 million around the waterfront to win 4000 expensive redundancies in the 1980s.

Smith's farce ignored the history of the MUA and the old WWF in its attempts to present a chunky piece of agitprop that might have embarrassed the most ardent supporters of the dead communist system (even though there was a touching reference to one of the MUA's organisers spending romantic Moscow moments with his girlfriend).

Those interested in the true flavour of the MUA, and not merely the Bastard Boys' anodyne references to its stand on apartheid and other middle-class issues of the '70s and '80s, the late Henry (Jo) Gullett's modest memoir Not as a Duty Only - an Infantryman's War (MUP) could shed some light. Gullett, who fought as an infantry sergeant at Bardia, Libya (and was wounded) in 1941, was commissioned in the field in time for the ill-fated Greek campaign, went on to fight in New Guinea and was awarded the Military Cross for his leadership and disregard of danger. He was one of the few Australian soldiers to take part in the D-Day operations, as second in command of an infantry battalion. He was later made a company commander with The Royal Scots, and served with them until again wounded.

This straight shooter wrote of the looting of military supplies by the wharfies as his unit transhipped to New Guinea, noting: "We came to Cairns and our ships were loaded. The watersiders stole our stores in the lading, not only little things, but items like compasses, sights and arms, on which our capacity to fight depended. "This surprised us because these men were no less Australian than we were. Yet they seemed not to be on our side. Anyhow, we put guards on them and they went out on strike. So we loaded the ships ourselves. Our rate of loading was exactly twice theirs. "All of which confirmed two views which we held strongly already ... that the 2/6th infantry could do anything and that there were some very curious types among the civilian population."

Gullett, who went on to a life in politics before being appointed Australian ambassador to Greece, would not have found favour with the politically correct scriptwriters at the ABC. He would have been too straight-shooting for their lop-sided political agenda, but his views should have informed the Bastard Boys polemic.

The program appeared to be no more than a four-hour advertisement to introduce Greg Combet, the Robespierre of the trade union movement, to a wider audience. Those who weren't aware of Combet's role as ACTU boss would be now - and the ABC has glowingly presented him as a sex symbol.

Sex should not perhaps be mentioned in the NSW Central Coast electorate where he is running, not after the smear campaign Combet's supporters mounted against the unfortunate incumbent, Kelly Hoare. After being portrayed so glowingly as a caring, sharing, finch-loving ideologue by the ABC, it is something of a let-down to discover that Combet is a person prepared to campaign against a woman obviously in need of help, not a kick when she is down.

Nor did the ABC, usually so anxious to present the case for affirmative action note that the MUA was a misogynistic pack of old fogeys, and that the work force trained to replace them comprised young women who mastered the skills in a fraction of the time the unionists demanded. But then, perhaps it is not so surprising. After all, Bastard Boys was not a documentary, nor a docu-drama. It was no more than a wet and slippery dream disguised as entertainment.

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Attack on Freedom of the press in Western Australia

THE State Government has refused to introduce laws to protect journalists' sources unless The West Australian newspaper, sacks editor Paul Armstrong. Attorney-General Jim McGinty said The West Australian was the nation's most inaccurate and dishonest newspaper and until it lifted its standards it did not deserve shield laws. "The board of West Australian Newspapers needs to sack the editor. It is personally driven by a particular individual,'' he said.

Mr McGinty said standards were so bad at The West Australian that if a competitor emerged that could break the paper's monopoly, the Government would consider redirecting its advertising to foster competition. "I think it is in the interests of a healthy democracy that we have competition. The public would then have a choice not to buy a crap newspaper,'' he said. Until standards improved at The West Australian, he said there would be no shield laws in his state to protect journalists' sources. "With the shield go responsibilities. And when you get a newspaper that is bigoted, lies, cheats and deceives, my view is that you don't get the shield,'' MrMcGinty said.

Mr Armstrong said yesterday he "could not give a fat rat's arse'' about what Mr McGinty said about him. "Do I care? Not in the slightest. If he hates us it tells me we are probably doing our job and doing it very well, as I know we are,'' he said. "But I would care if McGinty turned around and said that (the) newspaper and editor are excellent. That would tell me, as it would tell Chris Mitchell (editor-in-chief of The Australian), that we are a long way short of the mark,'' Mr Armstrong said.

He said Mr McGinty's remarks on shield laws amounted to blackmail. "He is saying, 'You will sack the editor and comply with government policy or I will not introduce laws that will defend the ability of the media to do its job','' he said.

The row threatens to undermine one of the key goals of the national Right to Know campaign, through which the media industry is calling for effective shield laws and the removal of restrictions on free speech. The campaign is backed by News Limited (publisher of The Sunday Times and The Australian), Fairfax Media, the ABC, the commercial radio and television industries, SBS, Australian Associated Press and Sky News. These organisations have already signalled that effective shield laws are one of their main goals. But WA's rejection of shield laws adds to concerns that the Federal Government's promised shield law might result in an ineffective legislative mishmash.

Chris Warren, federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, has warned that Canberra's planned law needs to be accompanied by equivalent state laws and federal whistleblower protection laws. Without these additions, journalists could still be threatened with prison for refusing to reveal confidential sources, Mr Warren has warned.

Mr McGinty said the combination of "personally vicious reporting and dishonest reporting'' at The West Australian meant he was "not interested in doing anything to help them''. He said newspapers had a critical role in Australian democracy "and I think a case can be made out that The West Australian is betraying that duty at the moment''. "That has not always been the case. It is directly related to the current editor, Paul Armstrong,'' Mr McGinty said. The problems had become so acute that he believed they could only be resolved through Armstrong's dismissal. He said he had taken his concerns about the paper to West Australian Newspapers managing director Ken Steinke and the company's chairman Peter Mansell. Those discussions had been amiable but "I walked out the door and they were up to their old tricks the next day'', Mr McGinty said. "They were not genuine.''

He said the most famous incident involving The West Australian occurred on January 24 and is the subject of a complaint to the Press Council by Mr McGinty in his capacity as Health Minister. The paper had published a front-page photograph of a woman waiting for treatment at a Perth hospital. When MrMcGinty learned that the photograph had been inaccurately described, he contacted Mr Steinke and Mr Mansell. "I rang them and said, 'I know your paper is loose with the truth but this is just beyond the pale. It is just so untrue and prejudicial to public health or the public perception of the hospital system'. "The retaliation was thick and fast: a page one headline the following day condemning me not about ringing them up, but about something else.''

Mr Armstrong sees the incident very differently. He said the paper had acknowledged that it had made a mistake about the woman's age and had corrected it: "But in the context of the story, so what?'' The woman had been "extremely unwell'' with eczema and had spent several days in hospital. "The real story is that this woman could not get a bed in hospital despite the state experiencing the biggest economic boom ever seen,'' he said. "McGinty has peddled this thing around town. The facts don't support him and because his case has fallen over he is now trying to blackmail the company by using his powers as Attorney-General.''

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Bureaucratic hatred of private education

An accreditation body is accused of hounding the colleges it's meant to be monitoring, writes Elisabeth Wynhausen

THESE days Jo Coffey sleeps in a caravan she has borrowed from her son or stays with friends in Newcastle, in regional NSW. Her house is gone and Coffey, the former owner of a vocational training college in the Newcastle suburb of Broadmeadow, says she has lost everything. By January this year, when she declared bankruptcy and closed down her college, Coffey, 59, had spent two years under siege from the Vocational Education and Training Accreditation Board, the agency that accredits vocational training colleges and courses in NSW.

Its critics suggest that instead of merely monitoring their standards, VETAB is hounding these training organisations until some close down. "VETAB dangles its authority over the industry like the sword of Damocles," says a consultant who helps vocational colleges deal with the regulator.

There are legitimate concerns about the burgeoning industry. Most vocational training colleges cater to international students. There are students who abuse the system as a way to get permanent residency, and so-called visa factories that aid and abet them: teaching "cooking" without ovens, for instance, or faking attendance records. This is precisely the sort of abuse VETAB is supposed to stampout.

Critics claim that the regulator goes about its business in a heavy-handed and obstructionist manner. "They make it as difficult as possible for colleges to open up at all, it's easier than closing them down," says Chris Stephens of Phoenix Compliance Management, one of many people to suggest that VETAB's operations are provoking a crisis in the industry in NSW.

According to National Centre for Vocational Education Research figures for 2005, the most recent available, the operating revenues of the vocational education sector were a fraction under $5 billion that year, when there were 1.64 million students enrolled in the publicly funded VET system, 562,100 of them in NSW.

The growing clamour about the operations of the regulator led the VETAB board to commission a review in NSW, which was announced late last year by the then education minister, Carmel Tebbutt. The operations of any regulator create tensions, but its critics emphasise that the essence of their problem with VETAB results from its culture. "I feel they treat us like criminals," says Darryl Gauld, the principal of Macquarie Institute, a Sydney college for international students.

College administrators met most recently at workshops held in Sydney last month as part of the review into VETAB. Many used the occasion to accuse VETAB of paralysing the industry. Gauld says most seemed to feel the regulator was exceeding its rightful role. "At these meetings, TAFE directors responsible for thousands of students expressed grave concerns about VETAB's (use) of power," he says.

Few were willing to talk to the HES on the record. "They're frightened to speak to the media," Gauld says. He says he isn't scared, because he's doing the right thing. Other educators, acutely aware of how long it can take for VETAB to grant approval for courses, are reluctant to speak out. "People wait for eight or nine months for courses to be approved. One person at the workshop spoke of waiting for 11 months," says the chief executive of a string of training colleges catering to international students. "If they take many months to approve a modification to the course, you can't recruit students, you can't print the brochures that have the courses in them. You're just stuck."

Tim Smith is the chief executive of the Australian Council of Private Education and Training, the organisation that represents private education providers. "It's fair to say there's a strong provider concern about VETAB's delays and strange decision-making processes," he says.

At a breakfast meeting with ACPET members last October, NSW MP Brad Hazzard, then state Opposition spokesman on education, vowed that if elected the Coalition would overhaul VETAB. While education is the nation's fourth-largest export earner, Hazzard said, "private training organisations report extraordinary delays in getting their organisations registered and new courses scoped".

VETAB is part of the NSW Department of Education. A departmental spokesman says such criticism of the body is inconsistent with the fact that "the number of VETAB-registered training organisations has risen 7.1 per cent annually since 2000". Industry insiders disagree, suggesting that VETAB regularly fails to meet the standards it imposes on the industry. VETAB auditors demand that colleges meet standards above and beyond those that have been published, Stephens says. "There's a standard that says you have to have a plan for the business. One of my clients was told he had to have a full business plan, a marketing plan and a strategic plan if he wanted to be accredited. "But the standard is very clear: it says you have to have a plan for your business. "And you know how many (employees) he has in the company? Two: himself and a director."

Vocational colleges are regularly forced to spend thousands of dollars in complying with Australian Quality Training Framework standards that may be inconsistently applied. "The problem is that each of the VETAB auditors has their own interpretation of many of the 133 standards," Stephens says. "Things that are acceptable in one situation aren't in another. The power is with the auditor and there is no one else to go to." The departmental spokesman says colleges wishing to challenge VETAB decisions can go to the NSW Administrative Decisions Tribunal, or approach the Ombudsman or the Independent Commission Against Corruption.

Despite official talk of "procedural fairness and natural justice", providers who attended the workshops complained that VETAB auditors seemed intent on lumbering them with the largest possible number of non-compliances. "Here at this college we're trying to do the right thing," Gauld says. "Yet we are constantly challenged. This is a typical instance. Even though I sent VETAB a letter advising them of the appointment of a compliance manager, they claimed not to have been advised. "They make a mistake like that, then they blame you, then it becomes a compliance issue."

Meanwhile, the so-called visa factories running Clayton's courses somehow continue tooperate. "There's a college ready to graduate 40 students for hairdressing: teachers from that college told me they've never set eyes on those students," says the owner of another hairdressing college.

In contrast, Coffey was driven to the wall while trying to play by the rules. She set up her college in 1999, building up the courses in beauty therapy until there were about 80 students. When she was audited in 2003, she had just five non-compliances. With things going well, Coffey took a second mortgage on her home, invested thousands of dollars in the equipment required to teach hairdressing, and tried setting up a second training school in another town in NSW, with a person she knew. There were some problems and Coffey ended the association.

Later a student from the other town complained that Coffey was supposed to help her get a diploma. Coffey received a phone call from a VETAB auditor. Let's call him Flock. She insists he told her, "You are in so much trouble." "He said, 'You know what's going to happen to you ... you're going to have a complete audit."' Coffey's solicitor showed the auditor documents proving that at the time of the supposed promise to the student there was no longer any connection between the two colleges. "My solicitor said to (the auditor), you can now see Jo Coffey Training is clear on this ... and he agreed," she recalls. Even so, the audit lasted for two days, with the auditors going over everything with a fine-tooth comb while making disparaging comments. At one point, she recalls, Flock "walked in and said there's nothing wrong with the hairdressing department, it's incredibly well stocked, but she could have got that stuff in yesterday, just for the audit". "They got me into a state of complete stress. I was shaking like a leaf," Coffey says. Their report said there were 109 non-compliances. Flock phoned her about it; according to Coffey he suggested she get herself a good compliance officer, and recommended a fellow VETAB auditor.

Some might see a conflict of interest. He identified a bunch of supposed problems ,then recommended a colleague as a consultant. The department says: "Conflicts of interest among VETAB auditors are inappropriate." In the event, Coffey hired someone else. The process of fixing the non-compliances took six months and ate up another $16,000, but months after VETAB had been supplied with the evidence, Flock phoned her again. Coffey recalls him saying that the compliance officer she had hired had sent them so much material, they hadn't looked at it. Instead they proposed to audit her once again. This time they found 56 non-compliances.

Between the two audits, Coffey suffered a breakdown. She went on as long as she could, to ensure her students completed their courses, then declared bankruptcy. "I couldn't go on another day," she says. The HES sent a detailed list of questions to the department, asking that these be sent also to Flock.

A departmental spokesman said: "Complaints about the operation of VETAB are taken seriously. VETAB auditors are required to behave consistently and fairly when dealing with RTOs (registered training organisations), and a claim that this has not occurred would be of concern to the board."

Since the HES asked about Coffey's case, the spokesman says, the board has referred the allegations about its auditors to the employee performance and conduct unit, the internal body that investigates the behaviour of departmental employees. Coffey says: "It's a relief to know they're doing something about it, and I'm not alone."

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