Up north, there's another boatpeople issue

Like many Australians who know Melanesians, I have some sympathy for these people. They usually adapt well to Australian life, are good humoured and are not afraid of hard work. PNG is so dysfunctional, however, that we would have millions of low-skilled and poorly educated people flooding in if they were allowed

For the welfare of the people, PNG should have continued under Australian administration. There was no indigenous push for independence but a big-noting Labor government led by Gough Whitlam pushed independence on them

FROM his dingy, overcrowded cell in Port Moresby's Boroko prison, Jonathan Baure is already plotting his next assault on Australia's border.

It has been 10 days since he stood on the shore of Daru Island, along the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea, to see off 16 dinghies, carrying 119 PNG nationals - including 13 children - headed across the Torres Strait to reclaim their "birth right" of Australian citizenship. Baure, a former tile salesman, had planned and openly promoted the voyage for weeks.

There was no shortage of willing passengers. Despite November's cholera outbreak on Daru, which killed 32 people, more than 400 supporters from all over the country flooded the island, paying Baure to join the unwieldy flotilla of banana boats.

Leader of an emerging group of "Australian Papuans", Baure has for a decade waged a losing battle with Canberra to recognise that people from the former Australian territory of Papua were not given the choice to remain Australian when PNG gained independence in 1975.

Two High Court cases have been lost in Australia over the issue, and Baure unsuccessfully launched his own case in PNG, which was thrown out in 2009.

Several months ago, Baure and his group, which claims to have 700 registered members, decided to take the fight to the Australian mainland. "I was born in Papua in 1967, before independence, and like many others, my birth certificate is stamped 'Australian'," Baure tells The Weekend Australian after his arrest on fraud and immigration charges this week. "Nobody has listened to us, so our plan was to go to Australia, get arrested, raise awareness of the issue and have our cases heard in the courts like the asylum-seekers. We knew they couldn't stop us."

He was right. On December 22, as the boats were about to leave, Australian and PNG customs and immigration officials rushed to Daru, alerted by the influx of people who had emptied the local shops of diesel and other supplies.

One Australian official from the high commission in Port Moresby pleaded with Baure and his supporters, warning they would be flown back to Daru without seeing the inside of a courtroom and the boats - the source of income for scores of families - confiscated.

Undeterred, Baure, who stayed behind to "handle the media", and the authorities then watched as the packed boats disappeared over the horizon. Within hours, the vulnerability of Australia's northern borders was exposed again.

Last year, Torres Strait councils told a Senate inquiry PNG nationals were pouring onto the islands to live, flouting immigration laws, running drugs and overwhelming health services in the region.

Despite a customs helicopter and patrol boat shadowing and then intercepting Baure's flotilla, one of the boats seemingly landed undetected on the tip of Cape York. At one stage, the customs vessel came alongside the lead boat, with the commander inviting Baure's offsider Laura Rea onboard to take a phone call from one of Immigration's most senior officials. "It was somewhere near Zagai Island (about 100km south of Daru), and the man on the telephone said we had no claim, that our case had already been lost in the High Court years ago," Rea tells The Weekend Australian. "He said that unless we turned back, we would lose our boats and be sent back immediately, but everyone wanted to go on."

Darkness started to fall and the boats were tied up to the Customs vessel, with the children brought aboard as the rest of the party slept on the dinghies. The next day, they were led to Horn Island, off the northern tip of Cape York, where they were detained before being flown back to Daru last weekend on a chartered plane.

Australian Immigration spokesman Sandi Logan said the incident could end up costing taxpayers $500,000. Logan says many of the passengers were not born before 1975, and could not qualify under even the criteria of the group's claims to citizenship.

"Customs, Queensland police, doctors and immigration were all involved when many of them were preparing for the floods and they had to deal with this prank, this protest."

The voyage has also come at a great cost to the passengers. Rea says the boat owners are devastated their vessels have been confiscated despite being warned before they left that it would happen.

She claims Immigration officials later assured the group on Horn Island their boats would be returned. "But Australia has confiscated their banana boats, and that is devastating to them and the families they support," she said.

Baure is facing up to three years' in jail, after being arrested in Daru as the passengers were being flown back. PNG police allege the 400 people who travelled to Daru had paid a minimum 200 kina ($77) to Baure for membership of his group and a document that purported to prove each of their claims for Australian citizenship.

Baure has been charged under section 96 of PNG's criminal code, relating to "false assumption of authority", as well as offences under the Migration Act.

He denies duping anybody into believing they were guaranteed citizenship with the documents. "The documents that the police are calling a fake visa was actually just a pass so that the boat owners knew who was legitimately entitled to be on the boat," he says. "I wanted to raise money for the group but also make sure that drug runners and other people didn't slip onto the boats."

Baure says his arrest is an attempt to destroy his group and put an end to the simmering issue. "We are already making plans, there will be other boats.

"There are many people still on Daru wanting to make the voyage. They can confiscate our dinghies but we will come back with canoes and if they take them we will make more and return. This is a fight about our civil rights being denied, not all of us want to move to Australia and people shouldn't think there are going to be hordes of Papuans arriving to live off welfare. "I have the information that will win the case. Why is Australia so fearful of facing a bunch of uneducated Papuans in court?"

SOURCE





They did something

NEW national consumer protection laws and paid parental leave are among the Gillard Government reforms that will come into effect today.

In what the Government has hailed as "one of the most significant reforms in the history of consumer protection" the Australian Consumer Law will today take the place of about 20 Commonwealth, state and territory consumer protection laws, The Weekend Australian said.

The ACL - which the Productivity Commission estimates will provide up to $4.5 billion in benefits to the economy - will include terms to cover standard form contracts, a national law guaranteeing consumer rights when buying goods and services, national product safety rules and unified penalties and enforcement powers.

From today, parents will be able to claim 18 weeks government-funded paid parental leave, at the national minimum wage of $570 a week before tax, The Weekend Australian said.

But Julia Gillard is yet to respond to the concerns of unions and business groups, who are urging the Government to address a loophole that leaves some parents eligible for the payments but not for leave under the Fair Work Act.

New government-funded mental health services will also come online today, with a $21million boost to internet-based mental health services and extra training for frontline community workers.

Trade apprentices in areas where there are known skills shortages will get an extra $1700 over the course of their training to cover the cost of tools and other work expenses.

The age of independence to qualify for Youth Allowance and Abstudy payments will drop from 24 years to 23 years. More generous Youth Allowance eligibility criteria will also apply to "outer regional" and "remote" students but the government is now under pressure to extend those arrangements to inner regional students.

In other changes, workers whose employers go into liquidation will get extra protection. Cabinet records will become available after 20 years instead of the current 30 years.

Publicly listed companies will come under more pressure to redress gender inequalities at a board level, with the introduction of the ASX Corporate Governance Council's Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations.

In NSW, pioneering political campaign finance reforms become state law, with limits on both donations and campaign spending ahead of the March 26 state election. Individuals and organisations are permitted to donate a maximum of $5000 to any political party in any year. During elections the parties are now limited to spending $100,000 in any electorate. Payroll tax relief for businesses comes into effect, while there will be more leniency on driving infractions, with motorists able to accrue 13 demerit points, instead of the current 12.

In Victoria, cigarette displays are now banned except in specialist tobacconists. The "Underbelly" state is also making it illegal to sell a minor a controlled weapon, including knives, and will introduce new bail arrangements, which give the courts more responsibility for setting bail.

In Queensland, mining companies now have to comply with new energy efficiency standards and prepare an environmental impact statement for any new project undertaken.

South Australian householders will be slugged with electricity price rises after the state's energy regulator allowed a 12 per cent increase in the amount AGL can charge its customers. The average householder will pay an extra $140 on power bills this year as a result.

In Western Australia, the Chicken Meat Industry Act 1977 expires. The act was established to promote stability in the struggling chicken industry as it rapidly expanded.

In Tasmania, midwives will be able to prescribe stronger pain relief for their patients, under new laws.

SOURCE






Climate policy still hottest topic for government

Climate change policy has already played a critical role in the demise of four political leaders.

John Howard's failure to ratify the Kyoto protocol was used to characterise him as yesterday's man. Brendan Nelson's instinct to tighten the rein on climate policy was a pivotal reason the Liberals switched to Malcolm Turnbull. Paradoxically, little more than a year later, the same party room narrowly toppled Turnbull to overturn his climate policy.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd lost his confidence when Copenhagen failed, and then lost the confidence of the public and finally his party when he abandoned his emissions trading crusade.

It is clear climate change looms large, it's a known unknown, and it's on track to claim a fifth Australian political scalp. But whose?

For Gillard the issue offers an opportunity to salvage her almost stillborn government. On the other hand, it could deliver Tony Abbott the keys to the lodge.

At one level there is more policy common ground here than either side of politics likes to pretend.

Both main parties are committed to the same 10-year target they took to the election, reaffirmed recently at Cancun; a reduction of 5 per cent on 2001 emissions levels by 2020. What differs is how they'll get there, and the rhetoric and emphasis employed along the way.

It suits Labor to argue it is crusading to save the planet and protect the economy while the conservatives are sitting on their hands and jeopardising our children's future.

It suits the Liberals to argue that Labor is rushing headlong with the tide of political fashion, imposing a heavy cost on the economy when the science is, at best, uncertain.

Neither of these rhetorical lines sits very well with the fact that both sides have plausible plans to reduce emissions by the same amount over the next decade.

Business, especially big business, craves certainty and leans towards an emissions trading system, mainly because it considers a market mechanism inevitable. In short it has been saying we might as well get the system in place so investment decisions can be made.

The Liberals' direct-action alternative might be immediately attractive to industry except that it would worry a change of government or a breakthrough in international talks could suddenly see a market mechanism re-emerge.

Yet Labor no longer has any certainty about what it proposes. Its carbon pollution reduction scheme remains on the shelf; a trading scheme endorsed for a week by the Turnbull Coalition and rejected, in the end, by the Greens for not going far enough.

Gillard must be tempted to dust it off and run it by the parliament again, invite a Liberal or two to cross the floor, and dare the Greens to reject progress on a carbon price agenda for a second time. Surely this would call Brown's bluff.

But Gillard has now outsourced her climate policy, at least to some degree, to a multi-sided (Labor, Greens, independents) parliamentary committee, a Productivity Commission inquiry, a new Ross Garnaut review and two non-government round tables.

Imagine if Labor were confronted with research or recommendations that bolster Abbott's argument that a direct-action approach is advisable in the short term before international commitments become clearer.

Nonetheless, Labor is committed to deliver some kind of price on carbon and it must. To retreat again on climate change would be suicide. This won't be easy. Labor's scheme will be shaped in a tug'o'war between the lower house independents and the Greens. Anything could happen, up to a parliamentary stand-off that would be fatal for Gillard.

But from this distance out, let's assume the stakes are so high that Gillard can carry the day and get her carbon price in place.

She could then claim a victory of sorts and, importantly, show Labor has made good on a pledge that has been pivotal to its agenda for at least five years.

But where the climate alarmists from Al Gore to Tim Flannery once had an unchallenged run, there is now a more realistic and multi-faceted debate. Labor's crusade to save the planet is no longer the political sure bet. The situation is much more nuanced.

Polls tell us most Australians are worried about climate change and believe human activity is a contributing factor. But when asked if they are prepared to pay for a solution through a tax or trading scheme, opinion is more divided.

There is a greater awareness of the international developments that put our actions in the shade. For instance, Chinese coal-fired generation will double in the next decade. Increasingly, the public is also aware of other ways to skin the cat, such as the Coalition's abatement purchasing plan.

For all the debates about models, schemes and costs, the public messages are pretty clear. Labor is promising fervent, enthusiastic and passionate action, while the Coalition is promising prudent, reluctant and cautious action. This is a fascinating contrast when they are both committed to the same target.

In fact one of the greatest ironies in all of this has been pointed out by the Liberals' climate spokesman Greg Hunt. He says if the Coalition had won government, it would already be negotiating with large polluters to purchase carbon abatement. Abbott can also attack Labor's carbon price as a step too far, a case of ideological overreach imperilling the economy, especially given the lack of carbon price progress in the US, China and Japan.

He will, however, be presented with a difficult dilemma himself. Will he go to the next election pledging to repeal whatever scheme Labor puts in place?

Clearly Labor will make life difficult for the Coalition if it can establish a scheme and have it operational before the election. If business leaders accept the new regime and argue for it to remain in place in the interests of certainty, Abbott will rankle them by campaigning to repeal it.

But if he has characterised it as a dangerous and unnecessary "great big new tax", he will have no option. Make no mistake. This decision will create some consternation inside the Liberal Party.

All sides of politics have trying times ahead. Gillard is caught between the need to shield voters from higher costs and the extreme demands of the Greens, all fuelled by the high expectations Labor has set itself on climate change action.

Abbott is torn between the election campaign gift of running against a new tax and the challenge of pledging to overturn a scheme agreed to by business to tackle a problem worrying most Australians.

Gillard has the much tougher challenge. Cobbling a carbon price together will go close to tearing her rainbow coalition apart. The country independents will be asked to turn their back on rural abatement schemes that would be lucrative for their constituents and endorse higher power prices at the same time. The Greens will be asked to climb down from their extreme targets and agree to a pragmatic compromise that is perhaps inferior, in their eyes, to the scheme they rejected last year.

If the Gillard can pass through the eye of that needle, she'll have to sell a deliberate cost-of-living increase to all Australians. For Abbott, running a campaign against that shouldn't be too taxing.

SOURCE







Don't get ill in Victoria

Victoria's ambulance crisis set to worsen

The state's ambulance crisis is set to worsen with Ambulance Victoria slashing its graduate program. The 10 per cent graduate recruitment cut means 25 fewer paramedics on our roads - caused by a lack of money.

It comes after a horror year for the service plagued by vehicle shortages, a shortage of paramedics and fatal delays caused by increasingly poor response times.

In November, the Herald Sun revealed emergency ambulances had been unable to respond to thousands of calls during the year, because Ambulance Victoria could not find staff to crew them.

Despite the desperate shortage, only 201 graduates were recruited by the organisation last year compared with 226 in 2009 and 274 in 2008. Ambulance Victoria has also wound back its undergraduate program in which second-year university students completed their studies part-time while gaining on-road experience. While 90 students took part in the program last year, students were told this week the program had been withdrawn.

Ambulance Employees Association spokesman Steve McGhie said it was a blow. "The ambulance service is desperately short of staff, and instead of hiring people, it's knocking them back," he said.

Ambulance Victoria's acting manager of regional services, Garry Cook, said the organisation didn't have the money to take on more graduates. "We are recruiting as many paramedics as we can manage and need to meet our service demands," Mr Cook said.

Shadow health spokesman Gavin Jennings savaged the cuts. "Ted Baillieu was good at criticising our ambulance service, but it's time he explains to Victorians how he will improve the system. He has no excuses, he must deliver his ambulance commitments in full and on time," Mr Jennings said.

A spokesman for Health Minister David Davis said yesterday the Government was committed to its $151 million pledge to deliver 340 new paramedics. "The minister is seeking an urgent briefing from Ambulance Victoria on the impact of the previous government's policies on Ambulance Victoria's recruitment and graduate program," he said.

SOURCE

Up north, there's another boatpeople issue

Like many Australians who know Melanesians, I have some sympathy for these people. They usually adapt well to Australian life, are good humoured and are not afraid of hard work. PNG is so dysfunctional, however, that we would have millions of low-skilled and poorly educated people flooding in if they were allowed

For the welfare of the people, PNG should have continued under Australian administration. There was no indigenous push for independence but a big-noting Labor government led by Gough Whitlam pushed independence on them

FROM his dingy, overcrowded cell in Port Moresby's Boroko prison, Jonathan Baure is already plotting his next assault on Australia's border.

It has been 10 days since he stood on the shore of Daru Island, along the southeastern tip of Papua New Guinea, to see off 16 dinghies, carrying 119 PNG nationals - including 13 children - headed across the Torres Strait to reclaim their "birth right" of Australian citizenship. Baure, a former tile salesman, had planned and openly promoted the voyage for weeks.

There was no shortage of willing passengers. Despite November's cholera outbreak on Daru, which killed 32 people, more than 400 supporters from all over the country flooded the island, paying Baure to join the unwieldy flotilla of banana boats.

Leader of an emerging group of "Australian Papuans", Baure has for a decade waged a losing battle with Canberra to recognise that people from the former Australian territory of Papua were not given the choice to remain Australian when PNG gained independence in 1975.

Two High Court cases have been lost in Australia over the issue, and Baure unsuccessfully launched his own case in PNG, which was thrown out in 2009.

Several months ago, Baure and his group, which claims to have 700 registered members, decided to take the fight to the Australian mainland. "I was born in Papua in 1967, before independence, and like many others, my birth certificate is stamped 'Australian'," Baure tells The Weekend Australian after his arrest on fraud and immigration charges this week. "Nobody has listened to us, so our plan was to go to Australia, get arrested, raise awareness of the issue and have our cases heard in the courts like the asylum-seekers. We knew they couldn't stop us."

He was right. On December 22, as the boats were about to leave, Australian and PNG customs and immigration officials rushed to Daru, alerted by the influx of people who had emptied the local shops of diesel and other supplies.

One Australian official from the high commission in Port Moresby pleaded with Baure and his supporters, warning they would be flown back to Daru without seeing the inside of a courtroom and the boats - the source of income for scores of families - confiscated.

Undeterred, Baure, who stayed behind to "handle the media", and the authorities then watched as the packed boats disappeared over the horizon. Within hours, the vulnerability of Australia's northern borders was exposed again.

Last year, Torres Strait councils told a Senate inquiry PNG nationals were pouring onto the islands to live, flouting immigration laws, running drugs and overwhelming health services in the region.

Despite a customs helicopter and patrol boat shadowing and then intercepting Baure's flotilla, one of the boats seemingly landed undetected on the tip of Cape York. At one stage, the customs vessel came alongside the lead boat, with the commander inviting Baure's offsider Laura Rea onboard to take a phone call from one of Immigration's most senior officials. "It was somewhere near Zagai Island (about 100km south of Daru), and the man on the telephone said we had no claim, that our case had already been lost in the High Court years ago," Rea tells The Weekend Australian. "He said that unless we turned back, we would lose our boats and be sent back immediately, but everyone wanted to go on."

Darkness started to fall and the boats were tied up to the Customs vessel, with the children brought aboard as the rest of the party slept on the dinghies. The next day, they were led to Horn Island, off the northern tip of Cape York, where they were detained before being flown back to Daru last weekend on a chartered plane.

Australian Immigration spokesman Sandi Logan said the incident could end up costing taxpayers $500,000. Logan says many of the passengers were not born before 1975, and could not qualify under even the criteria of the group's claims to citizenship.

"Customs, Queensland police, doctors and immigration were all involved when many of them were preparing for the floods and they had to deal with this prank, this protest."

The voyage has also come at a great cost to the passengers. Rea says the boat owners are devastated their vessels have been confiscated despite being warned before they left that it would happen.

She claims Immigration officials later assured the group on Horn Island their boats would be returned. "But Australia has confiscated their banana boats, and that is devastating to them and the families they support," she said.

Baure is facing up to three years' in jail, after being arrested in Daru as the passengers were being flown back. PNG police allege the 400 people who travelled to Daru had paid a minimum 200 kina ($77) to Baure for membership of his group and a document that purported to prove each of their claims for Australian citizenship.

Baure has been charged under section 96 of PNG's criminal code, relating to "false assumption of authority", as well as offences under the Migration Act.

He denies duping anybody into believing they were guaranteed citizenship with the documents. "The documents that the police are calling a fake visa was actually just a pass so that the boat owners knew who was legitimately entitled to be on the boat," he says. "I wanted to raise money for the group but also make sure that drug runners and other people didn't slip onto the boats."

Baure says his arrest is an attempt to destroy his group and put an end to the simmering issue. "We are already making plans, there will be other boats.

"There are many people still on Daru wanting to make the voyage. They can confiscate our dinghies but we will come back with canoes and if they take them we will make more and return. This is a fight about our civil rights being denied, not all of us want to move to Australia and people shouldn't think there are going to be hordes of Papuans arriving to live off welfare. "I have the information that will win the case. Why is Australia so fearful of facing a bunch of uneducated Papuans in court?"

SOURCE





They did something

NEW national consumer protection laws and paid parental leave are among the Gillard Government reforms that will come into effect today.

In what the Government has hailed as "one of the most significant reforms in the history of consumer protection" the Australian Consumer Law will today take the place of about 20 Commonwealth, state and territory consumer protection laws, The Weekend Australian said.

The ACL - which the Productivity Commission estimates will provide up to $4.5 billion in benefits to the economy - will include terms to cover standard form contracts, a national law guaranteeing consumer rights when buying goods and services, national product safety rules and unified penalties and enforcement powers.

From today, parents will be able to claim 18 weeks government-funded paid parental leave, at the national minimum wage of $570 a week before tax, The Weekend Australian said.

But Julia Gillard is yet to respond to the concerns of unions and business groups, who are urging the Government to address a loophole that leaves some parents eligible for the payments but not for leave under the Fair Work Act.

New government-funded mental health services will also come online today, with a $21million boost to internet-based mental health services and extra training for frontline community workers.

Trade apprentices in areas where there are known skills shortages will get an extra $1700 over the course of their training to cover the cost of tools and other work expenses.

The age of independence to qualify for Youth Allowance and Abstudy payments will drop from 24 years to 23 years. More generous Youth Allowance eligibility criteria will also apply to "outer regional" and "remote" students but the government is now under pressure to extend those arrangements to inner regional students.

In other changes, workers whose employers go into liquidation will get extra protection. Cabinet records will become available after 20 years instead of the current 30 years.

Publicly listed companies will come under more pressure to redress gender inequalities at a board level, with the introduction of the ASX Corporate Governance Council's Corporate Governance Principles and Recommendations.

In NSW, pioneering political campaign finance reforms become state law, with limits on both donations and campaign spending ahead of the March 26 state election. Individuals and organisations are permitted to donate a maximum of $5000 to any political party in any year. During elections the parties are now limited to spending $100,000 in any electorate. Payroll tax relief for businesses comes into effect, while there will be more leniency on driving infractions, with motorists able to accrue 13 demerit points, instead of the current 12.

In Victoria, cigarette displays are now banned except in specialist tobacconists. The "Underbelly" state is also making it illegal to sell a minor a controlled weapon, including knives, and will introduce new bail arrangements, which give the courts more responsibility for setting bail.

In Queensland, mining companies now have to comply with new energy efficiency standards and prepare an environmental impact statement for any new project undertaken.

South Australian householders will be slugged with electricity price rises after the state's energy regulator allowed a 12 per cent increase in the amount AGL can charge its customers. The average householder will pay an extra $140 on power bills this year as a result.

In Western Australia, the Chicken Meat Industry Act 1977 expires. The act was established to promote stability in the struggling chicken industry as it rapidly expanded.

In Tasmania, midwives will be able to prescribe stronger pain relief for their patients, under new laws.

SOURCE






Climate policy still hottest topic for government

Climate change policy has already played a critical role in the demise of four political leaders.

John Howard's failure to ratify the Kyoto protocol was used to characterise him as yesterday's man. Brendan Nelson's instinct to tighten the rein on climate policy was a pivotal reason the Liberals switched to Malcolm Turnbull. Paradoxically, little more than a year later, the same party room narrowly toppled Turnbull to overturn his climate policy.

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd lost his confidence when Copenhagen failed, and then lost the confidence of the public and finally his party when he abandoned his emissions trading crusade.

It is clear climate change looms large, it's a known unknown, and it's on track to claim a fifth Australian political scalp. But whose?

For Gillard the issue offers an opportunity to salvage her almost stillborn government. On the other hand, it could deliver Tony Abbott the keys to the lodge.

At one level there is more policy common ground here than either side of politics likes to pretend.

Both main parties are committed to the same 10-year target they took to the election, reaffirmed recently at Cancun; a reduction of 5 per cent on 2001 emissions levels by 2020. What differs is how they'll get there, and the rhetoric and emphasis employed along the way.

It suits Labor to argue it is crusading to save the planet and protect the economy while the conservatives are sitting on their hands and jeopardising our children's future.

It suits the Liberals to argue that Labor is rushing headlong with the tide of political fashion, imposing a heavy cost on the economy when the science is, at best, uncertain.

Neither of these rhetorical lines sits very well with the fact that both sides have plausible plans to reduce emissions by the same amount over the next decade.

Business, especially big business, craves certainty and leans towards an emissions trading system, mainly because it considers a market mechanism inevitable. In short it has been saying we might as well get the system in place so investment decisions can be made.

The Liberals' direct-action alternative might be immediately attractive to industry except that it would worry a change of government or a breakthrough in international talks could suddenly see a market mechanism re-emerge.

Yet Labor no longer has any certainty about what it proposes. Its carbon pollution reduction scheme remains on the shelf; a trading scheme endorsed for a week by the Turnbull Coalition and rejected, in the end, by the Greens for not going far enough.

Gillard must be tempted to dust it off and run it by the parliament again, invite a Liberal or two to cross the floor, and dare the Greens to reject progress on a carbon price agenda for a second time. Surely this would call Brown's bluff.

But Gillard has now outsourced her climate policy, at least to some degree, to a multi-sided (Labor, Greens, independents) parliamentary committee, a Productivity Commission inquiry, a new Ross Garnaut review and two non-government round tables.

Imagine if Labor were confronted with research or recommendations that bolster Abbott's argument that a direct-action approach is advisable in the short term before international commitments become clearer.

Nonetheless, Labor is committed to deliver some kind of price on carbon and it must. To retreat again on climate change would be suicide. This won't be easy. Labor's scheme will be shaped in a tug'o'war between the lower house independents and the Greens. Anything could happen, up to a parliamentary stand-off that would be fatal for Gillard.

But from this distance out, let's assume the stakes are so high that Gillard can carry the day and get her carbon price in place.

She could then claim a victory of sorts and, importantly, show Labor has made good on a pledge that has been pivotal to its agenda for at least five years.

But where the climate alarmists from Al Gore to Tim Flannery once had an unchallenged run, there is now a more realistic and multi-faceted debate. Labor's crusade to save the planet is no longer the political sure bet. The situation is much more nuanced.

Polls tell us most Australians are worried about climate change and believe human activity is a contributing factor. But when asked if they are prepared to pay for a solution through a tax or trading scheme, opinion is more divided.

There is a greater awareness of the international developments that put our actions in the shade. For instance, Chinese coal-fired generation will double in the next decade. Increasingly, the public is also aware of other ways to skin the cat, such as the Coalition's abatement purchasing plan.

For all the debates about models, schemes and costs, the public messages are pretty clear. Labor is promising fervent, enthusiastic and passionate action, while the Coalition is promising prudent, reluctant and cautious action. This is a fascinating contrast when they are both committed to the same target.

In fact one of the greatest ironies in all of this has been pointed out by the Liberals' climate spokesman Greg Hunt. He says if the Coalition had won government, it would already be negotiating with large polluters to purchase carbon abatement. Abbott can also attack Labor's carbon price as a step too far, a case of ideological overreach imperilling the economy, especially given the lack of carbon price progress in the US, China and Japan.

He will, however, be presented with a difficult dilemma himself. Will he go to the next election pledging to repeal whatever scheme Labor puts in place?

Clearly Labor will make life difficult for the Coalition if it can establish a scheme and have it operational before the election. If business leaders accept the new regime and argue for it to remain in place in the interests of certainty, Abbott will rankle them by campaigning to repeal it.

But if he has characterised it as a dangerous and unnecessary "great big new tax", he will have no option. Make no mistake. This decision will create some consternation inside the Liberal Party.

All sides of politics have trying times ahead. Gillard is caught between the need to shield voters from higher costs and the extreme demands of the Greens, all fuelled by the high expectations Labor has set itself on climate change action.

Abbott is torn between the election campaign gift of running against a new tax and the challenge of pledging to overturn a scheme agreed to by business to tackle a problem worrying most Australians.

Gillard has the much tougher challenge. Cobbling a carbon price together will go close to tearing her rainbow coalition apart. The country independents will be asked to turn their back on rural abatement schemes that would be lucrative for their constituents and endorse higher power prices at the same time. The Greens will be asked to climb down from their extreme targets and agree to a pragmatic compromise that is perhaps inferior, in their eyes, to the scheme they rejected last year.

If the Gillard can pass through the eye of that needle, she'll have to sell a deliberate cost-of-living increase to all Australians. For Abbott, running a campaign against that shouldn't be too taxing.

SOURCE







Don't get ill in Victoria

Victoria's ambulance crisis set to worsen

The state's ambulance crisis is set to worsen with Ambulance Victoria slashing its graduate program. The 10 per cent graduate recruitment cut means 25 fewer paramedics on our roads - caused by a lack of money.

It comes after a horror year for the service plagued by vehicle shortages, a shortage of paramedics and fatal delays caused by increasingly poor response times.

In November, the Herald Sun revealed emergency ambulances had been unable to respond to thousands of calls during the year, because Ambulance Victoria could not find staff to crew them.

Despite the desperate shortage, only 201 graduates were recruited by the organisation last year compared with 226 in 2009 and 274 in 2008. Ambulance Victoria has also wound back its undergraduate program in which second-year university students completed their studies part-time while gaining on-road experience. While 90 students took part in the program last year, students were told this week the program had been withdrawn.

Ambulance Employees Association spokesman Steve McGhie said it was a blow. "The ambulance service is desperately short of staff, and instead of hiring people, it's knocking them back," he said.

Ambulance Victoria's acting manager of regional services, Garry Cook, said the organisation didn't have the money to take on more graduates. "We are recruiting as many paramedics as we can manage and need to meet our service demands," Mr Cook said.

Shadow health spokesman Gavin Jennings savaged the cuts. "Ted Baillieu was good at criticising our ambulance service, but it's time he explains to Victorians how he will improve the system. He has no excuses, he must deliver his ambulance commitments in full and on time," Mr Jennings said.

A spokesman for Health Minister David Davis said yesterday the Government was committed to its $151 million pledge to deliver 340 new paramedics. "The minister is seeking an urgent briefing from Ambulance Victoria on the impact of the previous government's policies on Ambulance Victoria's recruitment and graduate program," he said.

SOURCE

ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG has repeated his New Year cartoon from last year -- on the grounds that we still have all the same problems






Julia Gillard faces backlash on "clean" power

THE government's push to mandate clean power stations could backfire as electricity generators threaten to delay upgrades to dirty coal-fired plants.

In a submission to the government obtained by The Australian, the power generators say tough new carbon pollution standards could apply to expansions to old power stations.

This is despite Julia Gillard's vow during this year's federal election that the standards would not apply to existing projects and were aimed at ensuring a dirty power station was never again built in Australia.

The electricity generators have joined Australia's big miners and banks in warning that the government is raising sovereign risk concerns that could spook investors. "Owners could be deterred from improving the performance of existing plant if an expansion could trigger new and costly regulatory requirements," the National Generators Forum states in the submission.

The forum - whose members produce 95 per cent of Australia's electricity - warns that the plan for cleaner power stations repeats mistakes made in the US, where a crackdown on emissions from new power stations has deterred investors from building them and led to greater use of coal-fired plants that are, on average, 44 years old.

They also complain that the plan is based on technologies that are highly uncertain and say it is probably doomed to fail in Western Australia.

The backlash from the generators adds to the government's woes over its handling of climate change policy. The government wants to put a price on carbon next year and has maintained this is a crucial economic reform to encourage cuts to pollution and provide greater certainty for business investment.

A multi-party climate change committee is expected to make recommendations on a carbon price by the end of next year.

But the National Generators Forum warns that policies such as an emissions standard for coal generators are redundant when the government has promised to a carbon price.

The group says it is "alarmed by the proliferation of ad hoc policies, at all levels of government, which distort otherwise efficient electricity markets for what are often ill-defined or marginal environmental aims". "These policies are rarely complementary to a future carbon price and are usually token policies announced by governments in order to be seen as 'doing something' to address climate change," it says.

The Prime Minister promised the draft emissions standards for new power stations during the election in a bid to restore Labor's climate change credibility, which had been damaged after Kevin Rudd shelved his plans for an emissions trading scheme earlier in the year.

The plan also includes requirements to prepare new power stations to capture and store the pollution caused by burning coal. At the time, business warned that the plan could inflate power prices and would do little to address a lack of certainty that has delayed power generation investment.

Since then, a discussion paper on the plan for cleaner power stations has angered the energy sector as it contains options that appear not to have been foreshadowed by the Prime Minister. Specifically, the industry is upset by suggestions the standards could apply to future expansions and upgrades and wants a clear exemption to this.

Submissions on the discussion paper, produced by a high-level interdepartmental committee, closed on Christmas Eve.

Power generators will need to invest up to $120 billion in new electricity assets over the next 20 years to cope with increased demand and a carbon price, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator. Queensland is expected to be the first state to require new investment, and could need it in 2013-14.

The generators say the plans for cleaner power stations will need to take account of Western Australia's special power needs. While WA uses natural gas to produce two-thirds of its electricity, contracts between generators and gas suppliers start expiring in 2015. With gas producers pursuing lucrative exports, generators are finding it difficult to lock in long-term gas supply contracts. Compounding the situation in WA is the fact that new coal-fired technologies often require a minimum size of operation, which the WA market is too small to support.

The generators are also critical of the plan to require new coal-fired power stations to be "ready" for carbon capture and storage as this is still an unproven technology, saddling investors with a significant but unpredictable cost.

SOURCE






S. Aust. public hospital doctors 'too slow to operate' -- woman dies

A WOMAN who died on the operating table could have survived if potentially life-saving surgery had not been "pointlessly and undesirably" delayed, a coroner has found.

Deputy State Coroner Anthony Schapel today handed down his findings into the death of Antonia D'Agostino, 59. She died on the operating table at Western Hospital, Henley Beach, on Sunday, March 25, 2007, as doctors attempted to repair her bowel which had been perforated during earlier keyhole surgery to remove an ovarian cyst.

She had been re-admitted on Saturday, March 24, nine days after the original operation, feeling bloated and in pain. During surgery the next morning to repair her bowel, Mrs Agostino suffered two heart attacks and died.

In his findings, Mr Schapel said doctors had "failed to appreciate fully and adequately take into account the risks that might be posed to Mrs D'Agostino as a result of delaying her surgery".

He said the need for further surgery could have been identified immediately after she returned to hospital about 6pm on Saturday, March 24. Instead, she waited 14 hours until 8am the following morning.

He said her "acute deterioration" about 6am on the Sunday "may have been avoided if Mrs D'Agostino had been operated on at a time prior to that". "The delay in conducting Mrs D'Agostino's surgery exposed Mrs D'Agostino to the risk of further deterioration to a point where surgery was not only immediately urgent but was very likely to jeopardise her life in and of itself.

"By the time Mrs D'Agostino underwent the further surgical procedure her condition had descended to a point where her life was being placed in jeopardy by that very procedure."

Mr Schapel said that delay was "pointless and undesirable" and she should have been operated on "before midnight on the Saturday night or in the early hours of the Sunday morning at the latest", before her condition had acutely deteriorated. "It is difficult to escape the conclusion that her chances of surviving the operation would have been significantly better if she had been operated upon in a much more favourable clinical state."

He said Mrs D'Agostino could have been operated on sooner and had better care at a hospital with an intensive care unit - which Western Hospital did not have.

In his findings, Mr Schapel made three recommendations, including advising members of the medical profession and Department of Health about the need to avoid or minimise delay in surgery.

SOURCE






Bosses attack populist agenda

LEADING company directors have called on big business to ramp up a public campaign in the new year. Their calls are against populist new laws that unnecessarily increase the regulatory burden on companies.

In the wake of Greens leader Bob Brown's push to toughen the government's proposed mining tax legislation and moves to give shareholders new powers to challenge executive pay and claw back bonuses, big business fears that worse is to come.

Australian Institute of Company Directors chief executive John Colvin said business no longer had a choice but to speak out on ill-conceived public policy because "the world has changed". "It is no good just indicating you have done a good job for shareholders and consumers because there are vested interests that will want to change the way businesses are working and they will want legislation," Mr Colvin said.

"We have a situation now with a hung parliament that could be dangerous for business if it is not handled properly. "Businesses have taken a view that governments in this country have traditionally been rather benign and positive. I don't think that assumption can be made going forward. There is a far more interventionist role by government and some of that is done either naively or without going through the proper consultation procedures."

Mr Colvin said many of his members believed that governments were now far more intrusive and interfering in the workings of businesses. A recent AICD survey found five of the eight states and territories failed its annual score card for business friendliness.

The annual report of the Office of Best Practice Regulation in the Department of Finance also revealed that a growing number of regulations were avoiding the government's mandatory screening process, which was introduced to cut unnecessary red tape.

The Business Council of Australia wants the government to review the regulatory impact statement process to ensure that new laws are not pushed through without review.

"One of the issues facing us in Australia at the moment is that business cannot afford not to be part of the debate, and when you have such a low number of politicians coming from business, it is a big problem," Mr Colvin said. "That is an important issue for business and I think business is just going to have to get more involved. Business can no longer stay away and say they are apolitical and don't want to get involved in the political process."

Business leaders are also concerned that the Greens are due to take the balance of power in the Senate from July, making them critical to the passing of government legislation that is opposed by the Coalition.

But NAB and Woodside chairman Michael Chaney said the real challenge in the new year would be for the federal opposition to maintain its commitment to reform. "This should not be a difficult parliament to get reforms through, because if the opposition votes with the government they'll swamp any minorities," Mr Chaney said. "The question is whether the opposition will be prepared to do that, in the interest of the nation, or whether they'll take the easier, populist route. "This assumes, of course, that the government is genuine about effecting real reforms -- and the jury is out on that."

Over the past month, the government has released a raft of reforms relating to superannuation, executive remuneration, the National Broadband Network and the mining tax. However, Senator Brown has already vowed to oppose the mining tax reforms, reiterating his support for the original version of the tax, which was tougher on the miners than the government's latest compromise.

A new national consumer protection and product safety framework is also set to begin tomorrow.

Commonwealth Bank chief executive Ralph Norris has said the bank spent $100 million complying with the new laws and has warned about the impact on smaller players in the sector. The major banks have also warned that the government's banking reform package, designed to increase competition in the sector, will force banks to recover their costs by imposing higher establishment fees or charging customers higher interest rates.

Company directors are also concerned about the slow pace of reform of more than 700 state and territory laws that impose personal liability on individual directors for corporate misconduct. The planned harmonisation of workplace safety laws is designed to simplify a complex system in which companies operating across borders face time and expense in dealing with different systems in each state. But the NSW government is holding out on the reforms.

"There is nowhere the view among politicians and bureaucrats that companies, owned by their shareholders, just need to get on with the game of making profits with as few impediments as possible," Westfield director Judith Sloan said. "And all this stuff plays into the hands of private equity that doesn't need to worry about all this box-ticking and legal advice just to operate."

KPMG chairman Michael Andrew said a number of pending government decisions would affect the investment decisions of companies, including the resource tax and a potential carbon tax or emissions trading scheme. "With a hung parliament, it is going to be very difficult to get policy decisions and you are increasingly going to see people looking for populist issues that are not in the national interest." Mr Andrew said.

But he expected business would have a greater voice in the year ahead. "I think you will see something of a seachange, though," he said. "I think everybody is so disillusioned with the last federal election and the lack of policy debate that people are now firm that it won't happen again, and that you will have to dictate an agenda for issues going forward."

However, one director of a major bank said the group had a good behind-the-scenes working relationship with the government, highlighted by the move to introduce covered bonds to help stimulate a corporate bond market in Australia. "We have been pushing for that for a long time," the director said.

Pacific Brands and Mirvac chairman James MacKenzie said business should be involved in public policy debates and that the key to sound reform was good consultation. "It is clear business wasn't properly involved in the first round of the resources super profits tax, but it is easy to see that business is involved in the latest round of the resources tax discussions," Mr MacKenzie said. "Good public policy and therefore good government comes from good consultation."

SOURCE





Victoria: Revolt looms over health shake-up

THE Baillieu Government says it will fight Julia Gillard over her health reform plan if Victorians oppose it. And it is demanding the Prime Minister explain how the reforms are in the state's interests. Health Minister David Davis said the public had so far been ignored, and the State Government would open the issue for debate.

Maps of the 46 primary care networks - down from former PM Kevin Rudd's original 150 - would be released, and Mr Davis said Victorians should examine them. "They look far too big to me," Mr Davis said.

Gisborne is classed in the same region as Deniliquin; Nhill is bundled with Bacchus Marsh; and Wonthaggi and Mallacoota are grouped despite being 455km apart.

"The Commonwealth needs to explain to Victorians exactly what these Medicare Locals will do," Mr Davis said. "It is hard to see any genuine community of interest between Gisborne and Deniliquin. "Valuable Victorian health services need to be protected in any change, and my job is to stand up to make sure that happens."

Medicare Locals and Local Hospital Networks are central to the nationalised plan. They would allow providers of primary, GP and community healthcare to be administered locally and paid directly from Canberra for services. All other states, except Western Australia, have agreed to the boundaries.

Former premier John Brumby signed a deal for the Commonwealth to provide 60 per cent of financing for the state's health system, in return for 30 per cent of Victoria's GST revenue.

But Victoria's deadline was extended until the end of January after the Coalition's election victory. The State Government is organising community forums from January 4-21 to gather feedback, before giving Canberra its answer.

Mr Davis said he was "very willing" to work with Canberra on health reform, but he was determined to stand up to Canberra if the community believed the deal was not in Victoria's interests. "There is a risk that Victorians will lose many of our unique health and social services, built up over many decades, through the wholesale reorganisation of primary care by the Commonwealth," he said. "Local communities should look at these maps and see if they meet their aspirations. "Will services improve when administered at such a distance and over such massive populations?"

SOURCE

ZEG

In his latest offering, conservative Australian cartoonist ZEG has repeated his New Year cartoon from last year -- on the grounds that we still have all the same problems






Julia Gillard faces backlash on "clean" power

THE government's push to mandate clean power stations could backfire as electricity generators threaten to delay upgrades to dirty coal-fired plants.

In a submission to the government obtained by The Australian, the power generators say tough new carbon pollution standards could apply to expansions to old power stations.

This is despite Julia Gillard's vow during this year's federal election that the standards would not apply to existing projects and were aimed at ensuring a dirty power station was never again built in Australia.

The electricity generators have joined Australia's big miners and banks in warning that the government is raising sovereign risk concerns that could spook investors. "Owners could be deterred from improving the performance of existing plant if an expansion could trigger new and costly regulatory requirements," the National Generators Forum states in the submission.

The forum - whose members produce 95 per cent of Australia's electricity - warns that the plan for cleaner power stations repeats mistakes made in the US, where a crackdown on emissions from new power stations has deterred investors from building them and led to greater use of coal-fired plants that are, on average, 44 years old.

They also complain that the plan is based on technologies that are highly uncertain and say it is probably doomed to fail in Western Australia.

The backlash from the generators adds to the government's woes over its handling of climate change policy. The government wants to put a price on carbon next year and has maintained this is a crucial economic reform to encourage cuts to pollution and provide greater certainty for business investment.

A multi-party climate change committee is expected to make recommendations on a carbon price by the end of next year.

But the National Generators Forum warns that policies such as an emissions standard for coal generators are redundant when the government has promised to a carbon price.

The group says it is "alarmed by the proliferation of ad hoc policies, at all levels of government, which distort otherwise efficient electricity markets for what are often ill-defined or marginal environmental aims". "These policies are rarely complementary to a future carbon price and are usually token policies announced by governments in order to be seen as 'doing something' to address climate change," it says.

The Prime Minister promised the draft emissions standards for new power stations during the election in a bid to restore Labor's climate change credibility, which had been damaged after Kevin Rudd shelved his plans for an emissions trading scheme earlier in the year.

The plan also includes requirements to prepare new power stations to capture and store the pollution caused by burning coal. At the time, business warned that the plan could inflate power prices and would do little to address a lack of certainty that has delayed power generation investment.

Since then, a discussion paper on the plan for cleaner power stations has angered the energy sector as it contains options that appear not to have been foreshadowed by the Prime Minister. Specifically, the industry is upset by suggestions the standards could apply to future expansions and upgrades and wants a clear exemption to this.

Submissions on the discussion paper, produced by a high-level interdepartmental committee, closed on Christmas Eve.

Power generators will need to invest up to $120 billion in new electricity assets over the next 20 years to cope with increased demand and a carbon price, according to the Australian Energy Market Operator. Queensland is expected to be the first state to require new investment, and could need it in 2013-14.

The generators say the plans for cleaner power stations will need to take account of Western Australia's special power needs. While WA uses natural gas to produce two-thirds of its electricity, contracts between generators and gas suppliers start expiring in 2015. With gas producers pursuing lucrative exports, generators are finding it difficult to lock in long-term gas supply contracts. Compounding the situation in WA is the fact that new coal-fired technologies often require a minimum size of operation, which the WA market is too small to support.

The generators are also critical of the plan to require new coal-fired power stations to be "ready" for carbon capture and storage as this is still an unproven technology, saddling investors with a significant but unpredictable cost.

SOURCE






S. Aust. public hospital doctors 'too slow to operate' -- woman dies

A WOMAN who died on the operating table could have survived if potentially life-saving surgery had not been "pointlessly and undesirably" delayed, a coroner has found.

Deputy State Coroner Anthony Schapel today handed down his findings into the death of Antonia D'Agostino, 59. She died on the operating table at Western Hospital, Henley Beach, on Sunday, March 25, 2007, as doctors attempted to repair her bowel which had been perforated during earlier keyhole surgery to remove an ovarian cyst.

She had been re-admitted on Saturday, March 24, nine days after the original operation, feeling bloated and in pain. During surgery the next morning to repair her bowel, Mrs Agostino suffered two heart attacks and died.

In his findings, Mr Schapel said doctors had "failed to appreciate fully and adequately take into account the risks that might be posed to Mrs D'Agostino as a result of delaying her surgery".

He said the need for further surgery could have been identified immediately after she returned to hospital about 6pm on Saturday, March 24. Instead, she waited 14 hours until 8am the following morning.

He said her "acute deterioration" about 6am on the Sunday "may have been avoided if Mrs D'Agostino had been operated on at a time prior to that". "The delay in conducting Mrs D'Agostino's surgery exposed Mrs D'Agostino to the risk of further deterioration to a point where surgery was not only immediately urgent but was very likely to jeopardise her life in and of itself.

"By the time Mrs D'Agostino underwent the further surgical procedure her condition had descended to a point where her life was being placed in jeopardy by that very procedure."

Mr Schapel said that delay was "pointless and undesirable" and she should have been operated on "before midnight on the Saturday night or in the early hours of the Sunday morning at the latest", before her condition had acutely deteriorated. "It is difficult to escape the conclusion that her chances of surviving the operation would have been significantly better if she had been operated upon in a much more favourable clinical state."

He said Mrs D'Agostino could have been operated on sooner and had better care at a hospital with an intensive care unit - which Western Hospital did not have.

In his findings, Mr Schapel made three recommendations, including advising members of the medical profession and Department of Health about the need to avoid or minimise delay in surgery.

SOURCE






Bosses attack populist agenda

LEADING company directors have called on big business to ramp up a public campaign in the new year. Their calls are against populist new laws that unnecessarily increase the regulatory burden on companies.

In the wake of Greens leader Bob Brown's push to toughen the government's proposed mining tax legislation and moves to give shareholders new powers to challenge executive pay and claw back bonuses, big business fears that worse is to come.

Australian Institute of Company Directors chief executive John Colvin said business no longer had a choice but to speak out on ill-conceived public policy because "the world has changed". "It is no good just indicating you have done a good job for shareholders and consumers because there are vested interests that will want to change the way businesses are working and they will want legislation," Mr Colvin said.

"We have a situation now with a hung parliament that could be dangerous for business if it is not handled properly. "Businesses have taken a view that governments in this country have traditionally been rather benign and positive. I don't think that assumption can be made going forward. There is a far more interventionist role by government and some of that is done either naively or without going through the proper consultation procedures."

Mr Colvin said many of his members believed that governments were now far more intrusive and interfering in the workings of businesses. A recent AICD survey found five of the eight states and territories failed its annual score card for business friendliness.

The annual report of the Office of Best Practice Regulation in the Department of Finance also revealed that a growing number of regulations were avoiding the government's mandatory screening process, which was introduced to cut unnecessary red tape.

The Business Council of Australia wants the government to review the regulatory impact statement process to ensure that new laws are not pushed through without review.

"One of the issues facing us in Australia at the moment is that business cannot afford not to be part of the debate, and when you have such a low number of politicians coming from business, it is a big problem," Mr Colvin said. "That is an important issue for business and I think business is just going to have to get more involved. Business can no longer stay away and say they are apolitical and don't want to get involved in the political process."

Business leaders are also concerned that the Greens are due to take the balance of power in the Senate from July, making them critical to the passing of government legislation that is opposed by the Coalition.

But NAB and Woodside chairman Michael Chaney said the real challenge in the new year would be for the federal opposition to maintain its commitment to reform. "This should not be a difficult parliament to get reforms through, because if the opposition votes with the government they'll swamp any minorities," Mr Chaney said. "The question is whether the opposition will be prepared to do that, in the interest of the nation, or whether they'll take the easier, populist route. "This assumes, of course, that the government is genuine about effecting real reforms -- and the jury is out on that."

Over the past month, the government has released a raft of reforms relating to superannuation, executive remuneration, the National Broadband Network and the mining tax. However, Senator Brown has already vowed to oppose the mining tax reforms, reiterating his support for the original version of the tax, which was tougher on the miners than the government's latest compromise.

A new national consumer protection and product safety framework is also set to begin tomorrow.

Commonwealth Bank chief executive Ralph Norris has said the bank spent $100 million complying with the new laws and has warned about the impact on smaller players in the sector. The major banks have also warned that the government's banking reform package, designed to increase competition in the sector, will force banks to recover their costs by imposing higher establishment fees or charging customers higher interest rates.

Company directors are also concerned about the slow pace of reform of more than 700 state and territory laws that impose personal liability on individual directors for corporate misconduct. The planned harmonisation of workplace safety laws is designed to simplify a complex system in which companies operating across borders face time and expense in dealing with different systems in each state. But the NSW government is holding out on the reforms.

"There is nowhere the view among politicians and bureaucrats that companies, owned by their shareholders, just need to get on with the game of making profits with as few impediments as possible," Westfield director Judith Sloan said. "And all this stuff plays into the hands of private equity that doesn't need to worry about all this box-ticking and legal advice just to operate."

KPMG chairman Michael Andrew said a number of pending government decisions would affect the investment decisions of companies, including the resource tax and a potential carbon tax or emissions trading scheme. "With a hung parliament, it is going to be very difficult to get policy decisions and you are increasingly going to see people looking for populist issues that are not in the national interest." Mr Andrew said.

But he expected business would have a greater voice in the year ahead. "I think you will see something of a seachange, though," he said. "I think everybody is so disillusioned with the last federal election and the lack of policy debate that people are now firm that it won't happen again, and that you will have to dictate an agenda for issues going forward."

However, one director of a major bank said the group had a good behind-the-scenes working relationship with the government, highlighted by the move to introduce covered bonds to help stimulate a corporate bond market in Australia. "We have been pushing for that for a long time," the director said.

Pacific Brands and Mirvac chairman James MacKenzie said business should be involved in public policy debates and that the key to sound reform was good consultation. "It is clear business wasn't properly involved in the first round of the resources super profits tax, but it is easy to see that business is involved in the latest round of the resources tax discussions," Mr MacKenzie said. "Good public policy and therefore good government comes from good consultation."

SOURCE





Victoria: Revolt looms over health shake-up

THE Baillieu Government says it will fight Julia Gillard over her health reform plan if Victorians oppose it. And it is demanding the Prime Minister explain how the reforms are in the state's interests. Health Minister David Davis said the public had so far been ignored, and the State Government would open the issue for debate.

Maps of the 46 primary care networks - down from former PM Kevin Rudd's original 150 - would be released, and Mr Davis said Victorians should examine them. "They look far too big to me," Mr Davis said.

Gisborne is classed in the same region as Deniliquin; Nhill is bundled with Bacchus Marsh; and Wonthaggi and Mallacoota are grouped despite being 455km apart.

"The Commonwealth needs to explain to Victorians exactly what these Medicare Locals will do," Mr Davis said. "It is hard to see any genuine community of interest between Gisborne and Deniliquin. "Valuable Victorian health services need to be protected in any change, and my job is to stand up to make sure that happens."

Medicare Locals and Local Hospital Networks are central to the nationalised plan. They would allow providers of primary, GP and community healthcare to be administered locally and paid directly from Canberra for services. All other states, except Western Australia, have agreed to the boundaries.

Former premier John Brumby signed a deal for the Commonwealth to provide 60 per cent of financing for the state's health system, in return for 30 per cent of Victoria's GST revenue.

But Victoria's deadline was extended until the end of January after the Coalition's election victory. The State Government is organising community forums from January 4-21 to gather feedback, before giving Canberra its answer.

Mr Davis said he was "very willing" to work with Canberra on health reform, but he was determined to stand up to Canberra if the community believed the deal was not in Victoria's interests. "There is a risk that Victorians will lose many of our unique health and social services, built up over many decades, through the wholesale reorganisation of primary care by the Commonwealth," he said. "Local communities should look at these maps and see if they meet their aspirations. "Will services improve when administered at such a distance and over such massive populations?"

SOURCE

Christianity not mentioned in proposed national history curriculum

The draft national curriculum for history opened an exciting prospect. Here was a chance, I thought, to defend the honour of Christianity amid the cut and thrust of educational theory, pitting myself against the intricate arguments of those who would deny, or at least downplay, the greatness of the influence of Christianity in the unravelling of the great events of the ages.

Yet the compilers of the draft curriculum have chosen the simplest strategy of all: deliberate, pointed, tendentious and outrageous silence. In its 20 pages, the draft ancient history curriculum mentions religion twice. There is no reference to Christianity anywhere in the document.

The draft modern history curriculum is 30 pages long. Christianity is simply never mentioned, at least not explicitly. The word religion appears twice, the first occurrence in the context of Indian history, the second in the context of Asian and African decolonisation. However the precise phrase in which it is found discloses the agenda of the compilers: "The effect of racism, religion and European cultures." This, surely, is an oblique mention of Christianity and a judgment upon it at the same time.

The English philosopher Roger Scruton took the word oikophobia and gave it a new meaning. Oikophobia literally means fear of one's own home, but Scruton nicely adapted it to mean "the repudiation of inheritance and home", the contemptuous rejection of everything that one's parents and grandparents respected, fed by the vanity of a new and supposedly enlightened way of looking at the world.

The name of Christianity is particularly odious to those oikophobes for whom the hope of a multinational and God-free world stands in the place of the dream of a promised land. For such people Christianity has brought more misery than relief, more gloom than joy, more war than peace, more hatred than love.

And - let us be honest - they can produce evidence to support all those opinions. They can point to the massacres of the Crusades, the use of torture and connivance at capital punishment by the Inquisition, the ruthless eradication of the Albigensians, the Thirty Years War, apparent indifference (in some places) to slavery, the treatment of the Jews throughout European history, the fighting in Northern Ireland, the brutish behaviour of certain clergy towards children.

But against that - if they are honest - they will have to acknowledge that all the evil deeds done by men professing themselves Christian have been counterbalanced by all the good things that have been done in the name of Christ.

The systematic care of the poor, the relief of prisoners, the establishment of hospitals, schools and universities, the self-sacrificing saintliness of many clergy, active resistance to the bullying of civil authorities, the amelioration and ultimately the prohibition of slavery, and the improvement of the lot of women (yes, that too) . . . all these things have emerged within a society that has been predominantly Christian.

Even today, in the shadow land of the post-Christian era, there are many who insist on calling themselves Christians still who have abandoned the faith but maintain a firm commitment to what they rightly regard as the "Christian ethic".

Yet the draft curriculum in history avoids all of this. It is almost completely silent on the whole matter of Christianity. It chooses to ignore a worldwide religious movement that has marched with civilisation for 2000 years, infusing it with a morality that has shaped the thinking of the whole of society, including the minds of those who lost the faith but clung to the moral view. This omission is not just careless, it is staggeringly inept and profoundly dishonest.

What would an honest and inclusive curriculum look like? It would recognise the enormous influence of religion in the world since late antiquity.

Moreover, being an Australian curriculum, intended for students in Australian schools, it would not pretend to the possibly laudable but utterly impossible task of giving all the world's cultures and religions equal coverage, but will acknowledge that, like it or loathe it, Christianity has been the dominant faith and moral mentor for our nation since white settlement began, that many indigenous people have embraced it too, and that the more recent waves of settlers - including Muslims and Hindus - have scarcely been unaffected by it. It would be good to see our society honestly facing up to the implications of its own heritage, and mature enough to recognise the good alongside the bad, and wise enough to see that amid the imperfections of any human organisation there is much to take pride in.

For believers, though, the reality is that the incarnation of Christ was and is the greatest event in human history, and that this greatness is not simply a matter of degree, but it is a kind of an absolute and ultimate truth by which alone the significance of all other events must be judged.

Many unbelievers cannot but be angered by such assurance, and we should not be surprised or disappointed by a savage response to such claims.

Many of those most bitterly opposed to Christianity have perhaps sensed that we are on the ropes, utterly nonplussed by this apathy, and are determined to continue to wage that kind of war of attrition in the hope that we shall simply and finally melt away. My suspicion is that some of the framers of the curriculum are driven by such a plan, perhaps consciously, perhaps by instinct.

Many other people of goodwill, non or anti-Christian in their orientation, are willing enough to face us on the field of debate and controversy. Such people may indeed admire and respect aspects of Christianity, while rejecting all or most of its metaphysical tenets.

In many such men and women I think I can see - excuse the presumption - the characteristics of the unconverted St Augustine: all too often they bark against a faith they have not troubled (or have not been able, through the scandal of our failings and our own poor example) to understand.

Clearly it is the best interest of the Christian religion boldly and confidently to face the challenge of those who would with equal confidence contest the veracity and integrity of our claims.

To take the battle vigorously to the critic's gates, to emerge thus from the slough of indifference that now threatens to swallow us, is our best hope.

SOURCE





Federal government plan to liberate schools

Any decentralization of power should be good. A bit surprising from a Leftist government, though

SCHOOLS will become self-governing under a Labor plan that hands responsibility for budgets and hiring teachers to principals and school councils. The plan would also hold them accountable for student performance.

In a move that would comprehensively reshape the nation's education system, the federal government is proposing a model of school governance based on the way independent schools operate, turning government and Catholic schools into "autonomous" institutions.

In a briefing paper submitted to a meeting of state education ministers at the beginning of the month, the federal government outlined a plan for autonomous schools to become the standard by 2018 in the government and non-government sectors. "The aim of the initiative is to facilitate systemic national reform to establish autonomous school operation as the norm across all Australian education sectors, with schools predominantly being self-governing," it says.

The paper says increasing school autonomy will "improve student performance by providing principals, parents and school communities a greater input into the management of their local school".

The plan goes further than the model outlined by Julia Gillard in the election campaign that proposed "empowering local schools" by giving principals and parents a greater say over selecting and employing teachers, and identifying funding priorities.

The idea of self-governing schools resembles the charter school movement in the US of publicly funded, but privately run, schools open to all students.

The plan is yet to be considered by education ministers. A spokeswoman for School Education Minister Peter Garrett, who is on leave, said the briefing paper was noted at the ministerial council meeting and a working group would be established in the new year, with members from states and territories, which would consult widely. "The government remains committed to delivering greater autonomy to school communities and won't pre-empt the work to be completed by the working party," she said.

But the Australian Education Union, representing public schools, yesterday accused the government of privatising the public education system.

AEU federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said school autonomy was just a slogan and there was no evidence that increasing the control of principals and school boards improved student achievement. "Why is the government hell bent on taking the word public out of education?" he said.

"Make no mistake, this is a privatisation agenda. "When I hear the words 'local autonomy' uttered by governments, I can't help but think that what they are granting principals and teachers is nothing more than the freedom to obey. "They want to give us the autonomy to do the plumbing and fix faulty powerpoints while dictating that when reporting on student achievement, we can only use five letters of the alphabet, A to E."

The brief provided to the ministers outlines a two-phase implementation process, with 1000 schools to participate in an initial rollout in 2012 and 2013, with the selected schools to come from every state and territory and a third from regional areas.

In the second phase of the proposal, the rest of the nation's schools will be "offered the opportunity to increase their level of local independence" as part of a national rollout by 2018.

The proposal envisages a nationally agreed statement of criteria defining the "essential elements of autonomous school operation" and an assessment process by which schools are selected to participate.

A similar approach has been adopted by the West Australian government, which introduced independent public schools, with 34 starting this year and a further 64 to start next year. Boards are established to govern the schools, with principals having control over the hiring of staff and a one-line budget, allowing them to decide how to spend their money. The ACT is moving to a similar system and Victoria has operated a system of self-managed schools since the late 1990s.

Victoria's reforms, introduced by the Kennett Liberal government, were intended to go further and allow self-governing schools, which would have made them the employer - not just the selector - of teachers and responsible for industrial negotiations. But only 50 of about 1600 schools agreed to the proposal and it was dropped by the Bracks Labor government. Former premier Jeff Kennett said yesterday "the unions got to Bracks" and stopped the rollout of his original scheme.

Mr Kennett said he still believed it was the best way to run schools in the public system, by giving principals and school councils full control.

SOURCE





NSW Premier's shocking abuse of power


The face of a Leftist crook

Public servants have been gagged from giving evidence to the parliamentary inquiry into Labor's power privatisation in Premier Kristina Keneally's latest desperate bid to stymie scrutiny of the sale. The move follows her attempts last week to scuttle the hearings by closing Parliament two months early.

Committee chairman Fred Nile accused Ms Keneally of using "brutal force" to shut the inquiry but vowed he would not be stopped from finding the truth about the $5.3 billion sale.

Ms Keneally said yesterday the Auditor-General had started his investigation into the midnight electricity sell-off. But voters won't see that report until after the March election because the Auditor-General's reports must be tabled in Parliament, which Ms Keneally closed early.

And that is where Mr Nile's inquiry could embarrass the Government - it reports back on January 31, possibly giving the Opposition and Greens ammunition leading into the state election.

Ms Keneally yesterday referred to Crown Solicitor's advice - given in 1994 - that witnesses would not be offered parliamentary privilege if they appeared at Mr Nile's inquiry because it had no legal standing. "That would not be a situation in which we would have public servants attending an inquiry," she said.

But despite relying all week on that legal advice, Ms Keneally has now gone back to the Crown Solicitor's office to ask if it was still relevant and correct. Depending on the response, which won't come until after January 10, the inquiry could be ruled legal.

In the meantime, Ms Keneally said the Auditor-General had broad powers to consider whether the "activities of government are being carried out effectively, economically, efficiently and in compliance with all relevant laws. I am quite confident this transaction stands up to that scrutiny," she said.

Mr Nile, who is determined his committee will meet on January 17, asked what Ms Keneally was "afraid of". "If she has nothing to hide or nothing to fear, then why did she prorogue Parliament early and why is she gagging public servants from giving evidence?" he said. "It's like she is using brutal force to try to stop the inquiry."

Mr Nile said he was aware that the eight directors who quit the boards of Delta and Eraring over the sale were "ready and willing" to speak.

Public Servants Association assistant secretary Steve Turner said he was not happy with the sale. "We would welcome an inquiry to look into it and if a proper inquiry occurs then public servants should legally be able to give evidence," he said.

SOURCE





More proof of global cooling

"Unprecedented" floods in Queensland. Warmists say that warming causes drought so ....

The "unprecedented" floods inundating cities and towns in Queensland may not recede for up to 10 days, evacuated residents have been warned. And with hundreds more evacuations to come today, the focus of concern is turning to the central Queensland city of Rockhampton, where a peaking Fitzroy River could threaten 500 homes.

The flooding has also claimed its first victim, with the body of a 50-year-old man found in a swollen creek at Mareeba in north Queensland. Police say he may have drowned on Christmas Day.

Premier Anna Bligh said today 12 communities were currently isolated by flooding and more water is on the way.

Mass evacuations will be carried out today in Emerald, with 80 per cent of the town affected, while floodwaters have split the coastal city of Bundaberg in two, inundating 120 properties and forcing about 400 evacuations.

Ms Bligh said the damage would cost governments and insurance companies billions of dollars, and appealed to Australians to “dig deep” and donate to an emergency relief fund. “It's an enormous disaster,” Ms Bligh told ABC television, noting that the early forecasts had not predicted the scale of the disaster.

“What we've never seen is so many towns, so many communities, so many regions all affected at once. It is a miserable and heart-breaking event.”

Ms Bligh said the disaster was unprecedented. “It's not isolated to one part of the state. We've got communities, both large cities and very small towns, that are now affected,” she told the Seven Network.

Vast amounts of rain have fallen in catchments that feed into the Fitzroy River, which is expected to reach major flood levels above 8.5 metres in coming days. Levels could remain at about eight metres for up to 10 days, the Bureau of Meteorology says.

In Emerald, flood levels in the Nogoa River today exceeded all previous records, rising beyond the 2008 level of 15.36 metres when almost 3000 people were forced from their homes. It's expected to peak beyond all earlier expectations at 16.2 metres tomorrow, and Central Highlands Mayor Peter Maguire said a dire scenario awaited the town. About 200 people spent the night in evacuation centres in Emerald, with hundreds, possibly thousands, more expected to head to the safe havens today, ahead of the flood peak.

In Bundaberg, the Burnett River peaked at 7.9 metres overnight, it's highest level since 1942 when it reached 8.4 metres. “Bundaberg is now split in two,” acting Mayor Tony Ricciardi said. “This is a one-in-100 year event. We won't see this again in our lifetime. Well, I hope.”

More HERE

Christianity not mentioned in proposed national history curriculum

The draft national curriculum for history opened an exciting prospect. Here was a chance, I thought, to defend the honour of Christianity amid the cut and thrust of educational theory, pitting myself against the intricate arguments of those who would deny, or at least downplay, the greatness of the influence of Christianity in the unravelling of the great events of the ages.

Yet the compilers of the draft curriculum have chosen the simplest strategy of all: deliberate, pointed, tendentious and outrageous silence. In its 20 pages, the draft ancient history curriculum mentions religion twice. There is no reference to Christianity anywhere in the document.

The draft modern history curriculum is 30 pages long. Christianity is simply never mentioned, at least not explicitly. The word religion appears twice, the first occurrence in the context of Indian history, the second in the context of Asian and African decolonisation. However the precise phrase in which it is found discloses the agenda of the compilers: "The effect of racism, religion and European cultures." This, surely, is an oblique mention of Christianity and a judgment upon it at the same time.

The English philosopher Roger Scruton took the word oikophobia and gave it a new meaning. Oikophobia literally means fear of one's own home, but Scruton nicely adapted it to mean "the repudiation of inheritance and home", the contemptuous rejection of everything that one's parents and grandparents respected, fed by the vanity of a new and supposedly enlightened way of looking at the world.

The name of Christianity is particularly odious to those oikophobes for whom the hope of a multinational and God-free world stands in the place of the dream of a promised land. For such people Christianity has brought more misery than relief, more gloom than joy, more war than peace, more hatred than love.

And - let us be honest - they can produce evidence to support all those opinions. They can point to the massacres of the Crusades, the use of torture and connivance at capital punishment by the Inquisition, the ruthless eradication of the Albigensians, the Thirty Years War, apparent indifference (in some places) to slavery, the treatment of the Jews throughout European history, the fighting in Northern Ireland, the brutish behaviour of certain clergy towards children.

But against that - if they are honest - they will have to acknowledge that all the evil deeds done by men professing themselves Christian have been counterbalanced by all the good things that have been done in the name of Christ.

The systematic care of the poor, the relief of prisoners, the establishment of hospitals, schools and universities, the self-sacrificing saintliness of many clergy, active resistance to the bullying of civil authorities, the amelioration and ultimately the prohibition of slavery, and the improvement of the lot of women (yes, that too) . . . all these things have emerged within a society that has been predominantly Christian.

Even today, in the shadow land of the post-Christian era, there are many who insist on calling themselves Christians still who have abandoned the faith but maintain a firm commitment to what they rightly regard as the "Christian ethic".

Yet the draft curriculum in history avoids all of this. It is almost completely silent on the whole matter of Christianity. It chooses to ignore a worldwide religious movement that has marched with civilisation for 2000 years, infusing it with a morality that has shaped the thinking of the whole of society, including the minds of those who lost the faith but clung to the moral view. This omission is not just careless, it is staggeringly inept and profoundly dishonest.

What would an honest and inclusive curriculum look like? It would recognise the enormous influence of religion in the world since late antiquity.

Moreover, being an Australian curriculum, intended for students in Australian schools, it would not pretend to the possibly laudable but utterly impossible task of giving all the world's cultures and religions equal coverage, but will acknowledge that, like it or loathe it, Christianity has been the dominant faith and moral mentor for our nation since white settlement began, that many indigenous people have embraced it too, and that the more recent waves of settlers - including Muslims and Hindus - have scarcely been unaffected by it. It would be good to see our society honestly facing up to the implications of its own heritage, and mature enough to recognise the good alongside the bad, and wise enough to see that amid the imperfections of any human organisation there is much to take pride in.

For believers, though, the reality is that the incarnation of Christ was and is the greatest event in human history, and that this greatness is not simply a matter of degree, but it is a kind of an absolute and ultimate truth by which alone the significance of all other events must be judged.

Many unbelievers cannot but be angered by such assurance, and we should not be surprised or disappointed by a savage response to such claims.

Many of those most bitterly opposed to Christianity have perhaps sensed that we are on the ropes, utterly nonplussed by this apathy, and are determined to continue to wage that kind of war of attrition in the hope that we shall simply and finally melt away. My suspicion is that some of the framers of the curriculum are driven by such a plan, perhaps consciously, perhaps by instinct.

Many other people of goodwill, non or anti-Christian in their orientation, are willing enough to face us on the field of debate and controversy. Such people may indeed admire and respect aspects of Christianity, while rejecting all or most of its metaphysical tenets.

In many such men and women I think I can see - excuse the presumption - the characteristics of the unconverted St Augustine: all too often they bark against a faith they have not troubled (or have not been able, through the scandal of our failings and our own poor example) to understand.

Clearly it is the best interest of the Christian religion boldly and confidently to face the challenge of those who would with equal confidence contest the veracity and integrity of our claims.

To take the battle vigorously to the critic's gates, to emerge thus from the slough of indifference that now threatens to swallow us, is our best hope.

SOURCE





Federal government plan to liberate schools

Any decentralization of power should be good. A bit surprising from a Leftist government, though

SCHOOLS will become self-governing under a Labor plan that hands responsibility for budgets and hiring teachers to principals and school councils. The plan would also hold them accountable for student performance.

In a move that would comprehensively reshape the nation's education system, the federal government is proposing a model of school governance based on the way independent schools operate, turning government and Catholic schools into "autonomous" institutions.

In a briefing paper submitted to a meeting of state education ministers at the beginning of the month, the federal government outlined a plan for autonomous schools to become the standard by 2018 in the government and non-government sectors. "The aim of the initiative is to facilitate systemic national reform to establish autonomous school operation as the norm across all Australian education sectors, with schools predominantly being self-governing," it says.

The paper says increasing school autonomy will "improve student performance by providing principals, parents and school communities a greater input into the management of their local school".

The plan goes further than the model outlined by Julia Gillard in the election campaign that proposed "empowering local schools" by giving principals and parents a greater say over selecting and employing teachers, and identifying funding priorities.

The idea of self-governing schools resembles the charter school movement in the US of publicly funded, but privately run, schools open to all students.

The plan is yet to be considered by education ministers. A spokeswoman for School Education Minister Peter Garrett, who is on leave, said the briefing paper was noted at the ministerial council meeting and a working group would be established in the new year, with members from states and territories, which would consult widely. "The government remains committed to delivering greater autonomy to school communities and won't pre-empt the work to be completed by the working party," she said.

But the Australian Education Union, representing public schools, yesterday accused the government of privatising the public education system.

AEU federal president Angelo Gavrielatos said school autonomy was just a slogan and there was no evidence that increasing the control of principals and school boards improved student achievement. "Why is the government hell bent on taking the word public out of education?" he said.

"Make no mistake, this is a privatisation agenda. "When I hear the words 'local autonomy' uttered by governments, I can't help but think that what they are granting principals and teachers is nothing more than the freedom to obey. "They want to give us the autonomy to do the plumbing and fix faulty powerpoints while dictating that when reporting on student achievement, we can only use five letters of the alphabet, A to E."

The brief provided to the ministers outlines a two-phase implementation process, with 1000 schools to participate in an initial rollout in 2012 and 2013, with the selected schools to come from every state and territory and a third from regional areas.

In the second phase of the proposal, the rest of the nation's schools will be "offered the opportunity to increase their level of local independence" as part of a national rollout by 2018.

The proposal envisages a nationally agreed statement of criteria defining the "essential elements of autonomous school operation" and an assessment process by which schools are selected to participate.

A similar approach has been adopted by the West Australian government, which introduced independent public schools, with 34 starting this year and a further 64 to start next year. Boards are established to govern the schools, with principals having control over the hiring of staff and a one-line budget, allowing them to decide how to spend their money. The ACT is moving to a similar system and Victoria has operated a system of self-managed schools since the late 1990s.

Victoria's reforms, introduced by the Kennett Liberal government, were intended to go further and allow self-governing schools, which would have made them the employer - not just the selector - of teachers and responsible for industrial negotiations. But only 50 of about 1600 schools agreed to the proposal and it was dropped by the Bracks Labor government. Former premier Jeff Kennett said yesterday "the unions got to Bracks" and stopped the rollout of his original scheme.

Mr Kennett said he still believed it was the best way to run schools in the public system, by giving principals and school councils full control.

SOURCE





NSW Premier's shocking abuse of power


The face of a Leftist crook

Public servants have been gagged from giving evidence to the parliamentary inquiry into Labor's power privatisation in Premier Kristina Keneally's latest desperate bid to stymie scrutiny of the sale. The move follows her attempts last week to scuttle the hearings by closing Parliament two months early.

Committee chairman Fred Nile accused Ms Keneally of using "brutal force" to shut the inquiry but vowed he would not be stopped from finding the truth about the $5.3 billion sale.

Ms Keneally said yesterday the Auditor-General had started his investigation into the midnight electricity sell-off. But voters won't see that report until after the March election because the Auditor-General's reports must be tabled in Parliament, which Ms Keneally closed early.

And that is where Mr Nile's inquiry could embarrass the Government - it reports back on January 31, possibly giving the Opposition and Greens ammunition leading into the state election.

Ms Keneally yesterday referred to Crown Solicitor's advice - given in 1994 - that witnesses would not be offered parliamentary privilege if they appeared at Mr Nile's inquiry because it had no legal standing. "That would not be a situation in which we would have public servants attending an inquiry," she said.

But despite relying all week on that legal advice, Ms Keneally has now gone back to the Crown Solicitor's office to ask if it was still relevant and correct. Depending on the response, which won't come until after January 10, the inquiry could be ruled legal.

In the meantime, Ms Keneally said the Auditor-General had broad powers to consider whether the "activities of government are being carried out effectively, economically, efficiently and in compliance with all relevant laws. I am quite confident this transaction stands up to that scrutiny," she said.

Mr Nile, who is determined his committee will meet on January 17, asked what Ms Keneally was "afraid of". "If she has nothing to hide or nothing to fear, then why did she prorogue Parliament early and why is she gagging public servants from giving evidence?" he said. "It's like she is using brutal force to try to stop the inquiry."

Mr Nile said he was aware that the eight directors who quit the boards of Delta and Eraring over the sale were "ready and willing" to speak.

Public Servants Association assistant secretary Steve Turner said he was not happy with the sale. "We would welcome an inquiry to look into it and if a proper inquiry occurs then public servants should legally be able to give evidence," he said.

SOURCE





More proof of global cooling

"Unprecedented" floods in Queensland. Warmists say that warming causes drought so ....

The "unprecedented" floods inundating cities and towns in Queensland may not recede for up to 10 days, evacuated residents have been warned. And with hundreds more evacuations to come today, the focus of concern is turning to the central Queensland city of Rockhampton, where a peaking Fitzroy River could threaten 500 homes.

The flooding has also claimed its first victim, with the body of a 50-year-old man found in a swollen creek at Mareeba in north Queensland. Police say he may have drowned on Christmas Day.

Premier Anna Bligh said today 12 communities were currently isolated by flooding and more water is on the way.

Mass evacuations will be carried out today in Emerald, with 80 per cent of the town affected, while floodwaters have split the coastal city of Bundaberg in two, inundating 120 properties and forcing about 400 evacuations.

Ms Bligh said the damage would cost governments and insurance companies billions of dollars, and appealed to Australians to “dig deep” and donate to an emergency relief fund. “It's an enormous disaster,” Ms Bligh told ABC television, noting that the early forecasts had not predicted the scale of the disaster.

“What we've never seen is so many towns, so many communities, so many regions all affected at once. It is a miserable and heart-breaking event.”

Ms Bligh said the disaster was unprecedented. “It's not isolated to one part of the state. We've got communities, both large cities and very small towns, that are now affected,” she told the Seven Network.

Vast amounts of rain have fallen in catchments that feed into the Fitzroy River, which is expected to reach major flood levels above 8.5 metres in coming days. Levels could remain at about eight metres for up to 10 days, the Bureau of Meteorology says.

In Emerald, flood levels in the Nogoa River today exceeded all previous records, rising beyond the 2008 level of 15.36 metres when almost 3000 people were forced from their homes. It's expected to peak beyond all earlier expectations at 16.2 metres tomorrow, and Central Highlands Mayor Peter Maguire said a dire scenario awaited the town. About 200 people spent the night in evacuation centres in Emerald, with hundreds, possibly thousands, more expected to head to the safe havens today, ahead of the flood peak.

In Bundaberg, the Burnett River peaked at 7.9 metres overnight, it's highest level since 1942 when it reached 8.4 metres. “Bundaberg is now split in two,” acting Mayor Tony Ricciardi said. “This is a one-in-100 year event. We won't see this again in our lifetime. Well, I hope.”

More HERE