An article of mine was published in the Festschrift for Rachel Elior, the John and Golda Cohen Professor of Jewish Philosophy and Jewish Mystical Thought at the Hebrew University, who was one of the advisers on my dissertation.
The Festschrift is entitled With Letters of Light (אותיות של אור): Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls, Early Jewish Apocalypticism, Magic, and Mysticism in Honor of Rachel Elior. My article is "'They Revealed Secrets to Their Wives': The Transmission of Magical Knowledge in 1 Enoch."
Monday, January 31, 2011
Another tired old Leftist sneer at national pride
Australians have got a lot to be proud about and the surveys reveal that national pride is widespread in Australia. But the pseudo-humorous writer below has nothing but contempt for people who display the Australian flag on their cars. Flags on cars are mainly flown on Australia day, anyway, which is surely an appropriate day to fly them.
His comment on people who want immigration reduced is particularly odious. He implies that they are gun-carrying racists. Since about two thirds of Australians want immigration restraint he must think that he is a very superior person.
The whole piece drips contempt for all sorts of Australians. His fellow haters on the Left will laugh, however
I quite like the Australian flag, and indeed the nation it represents. Certainly it could be improved a bit by the removal of the Union Jack from the corner (though that is an argument for another column), but generally the old girl does a pretty good job of whatever it is that flags are supposed to do.
There is, however, a considerable gulf between a dash of patriotism and national pride, and naked jingoism.
And here we're talking about those bloody plastic flags that flutter feebly from car windows at this time of year, screaming "Look at moi, look at moi!" which (in the world of Kath and Kim at least) rhymes with the equally boorish chant of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, oi, oi!"
The funny part of this is you're more likely to see the little plastic flags adorning a Hyundai than a Holden ute. This does tend to beg the question of why, if you are so fervently patriotic that you feel the need to advertise the fact, do you drive a Korean-made tin can powered by two rubber bands and an overworked hamster?
Actually, the way motorists choose to decorate their cars can be quite informative, telling you a lot about what sort of driver you are sharing a particular stretch of road with.
Pair up the Aussie car flag with a bumper sticker that sports the slogan "F--- off, we're full", for example, and you have enough character-profiling to deduce that the driver is road-rage incarnate and definitely not the sort of bloke to greet with a single-fingered salute when he cuts in front of you at high speed. In fact there's every chance he keeps his One Nation membership card in the glovebox next to his handgun.
Then there's the shiny new four-wheel-drives with stickers advertising which elite private school the owner's progeny attend and whether said children are rugby or hockey brats.
This just screams out rich Ascot mummy with total disdain for the great unwashed around her, who will tend to wield her vehicle like a German Panzer tank crushing all before it.
Often this species of driver is also sighted with those increasingly ubiquitous "My Family" montages on the back . . . OK, so you've got a partner, you've procreated more often than is probably healthy for the national gene pool and you have two dogs. What do you want, some sort of medal?
This is an "It's all about me" driver who thinks nothing of trundling along at 30km/h below the speed limit in the fast lane and assumes handicapped parking spaces are just that handy.
Baby on board? Another breeder. Bully for you. Line up for your medal behind the My Family brigade.
Another one to watch for are larger vehicles festooned with stickers from exotic destinations like Winton, Birdsville and Broken Hill. If there's a tow bar attached to the vehicle you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to assume it's probably an elderly caravan owner which, by definition, means automotive sociopath: "I've paid my taxes, so it's my bloody road."
More HERE
Should Italian and Chinese lead the new curriculum?
Foreign languages are an enthusiasm of mine and I have some qualifications in three of them -- but I cannot for the life of me see why everybody should study them. Learning a foreign language is a huge task (and really huge if the language is Asian) and that diverts energies from the large range of other important subjects. And for what? I doubt that 1% will become translators as we have plenty of naturally bilingual people in Australia anyway (children of immigrants)
Should all students have to study a second language before year 7 as planned under the new national curriculum? The curriculum will cover 11 foreign languages with Italian and Chinese the first to be developed.
Latin and other classical languages have been left out, raising concern. Language teachers say this is a major omission because a knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek underpins understanding of literature, art and the English language. The sign language Auslan has also been left out, also raising concern.
Italian and Chinese have been given first priority because the national curriculum authority says they "represent languages that cater for the greatest range of learners". "Chinese is a national priority, and Italian is learnt by the largest number of students in the primary years and the second largest number of students enrolments over all." Indonesian, Japanese and Korean are also deemed national priorities as part of the second stage of the language curriculum development.
Traditional European languages including French and German and Spanish will also be included because they are among the most commonly taught languages in Australian schools. The national curriculum authority has included Spanish as a "language of global importance".
Parents are hotly debating these priorities, with some saying the options are too narrow and locking their children into choices too early. Some say they want their children to have wider language choices until at least year 10.
Parents have been telling talk-back radio this morning that they disagree with the national priorities given to some languages over others.
SOURCE
Three years jail for speech??
Prosecutions for speech are mercifully rare in Australia and this one is troubling. Everybody gets abused at some stage. Conservative bloggers get it almost daily. So people have to learn to get used to it. The fact that the abused person was Jewish is of course unpleasant but the abuser was an obvious nut anyway.
A substantial part of the student body at the University of California would have to be locked up under the criteria adopted in this case
The High Court of Australia has found a right to free speech in the constitution so this verdict could be overturned if it is appealed
The Jewish victim of a verbal racial attack that was posted in a video online says a three-year prison term given to the man who called him a "racist, homicidal maniac" outside a Perth supermarket is not enough.
Brendan Lee O'Connell, 40, was sentenced in the District Court in Perth yesterday after being found guilty on Friday of six racial hatred charges.
Chuckling and smiling as the counts were read out to him, O'Connell appeared unaffected by the sentence handed down by Judge Henry Wisbey. O'Connell represented himself before a jury after firing the lawyer who had been defending him against an accusation that he posted an anti-semitic video online.
He faced seven charges related to the posting of a verbal altercation he had with Stanley Keyser and Timothy Peach, who are Jewish, and was found guilty on six.
An argument broke out between the three men at an IGA supermarket in South Perth on May 2, 2009, where a Friends of Palestine group was holding a protest against Israeli oranges. O'Connell was using a video camera at the event and in a video he later posted online, he labelled Mr Keyser a "racist, homicidal maniac". "You have a religion of racism, hate, homicide and ethnic cleansing," he said in the video.
During the trial, O'Connell refused to acknowledge Judge Wisbey when he entered the court and, instead, rose to bow to the jury.
Judge Wisbey said O'Connell showed no remorse and his behaviour "was that of a bully".
About a dozen supporters in the court cheered when O'Connell labelled the proceedings "a kangaroo court" and gave a long, repetitive rant about the King James Bible and the Constitution. As he was led out of court, O'Connell shouted: "Don't forget about the Gazans!"
Outside court, Mr Keyser said O'Connell had forced him to "suffer" for 18 months. "I wish he was in [prison] for longer," he said as he rushed passed reporters.
Family friend Steve Lieblich told reporters it was a "very distressing" time for the Keyser family who were happy to have it over. "I think it was a victory for decency and against bigotry and prejudice," he said. "On this occasion it was the Jewish people who were the target of this bigotry but on future occasions it could be Muslims or Asians or any group, so we we should all be happy about this result."
Mr Lieblich said he hoped O'Connell would have time to reflect on his views during his prison term. He said the internet made it easy to "spread hatred" and it was important to address the issue. "This has got nothing to do with free speech," Mr Lieblich said. "There's clearly a limit to free speech, there's a limit to all freedoms we have in society because we have to consider others. "Words can hurt and cause a lot of damage and people need to recognise that they have to watch their words."
O'Connell's sentence has been backdated to January 24 and he will be eligible for parole, but a date for that period was not specified in court.
SOURCE
Two mental patients killed by Victorian hospital staff
A PATIENT suffocated after security guards restrained him face down on the floor in Frankston Hospital’s psychiatric ward, a coroner has heard.
A hospital analysis of Justin Fraser’s death found two security guards and four orderlies who restrained Mr Fraser, 37, were in a "heightened fight response" and "focused on prevention of further aggression in the heat of the situation". "The wellbeing of the patient was a secondary priority," clinicians found in a report provided to the Health Department.
The clinicians said the staff who restrained Mr Fraser on October 26, 2007, had not been properly trained in the risk of maintaining a patient in a prone position. They therefore could not assess his condition, resulting in "delayed recognition that he had become clinically compromised and acutely unwell".
The court heard that Mr Fraser, a voluntary patient who had schizophrenia, had threatened to harm himself and staff. The security team responded to a nurse’s "code grey" call — used when staff face violence.
After the team restrained Mr Fraser in the ward, he was moved to a seclusion room, where he was found to have stopped breathing. He is thought to have died of positional asphyxia, a form of suffocation that can occur when someone is restrained in a position that stops them breathing properly.
Mr Fraser’s death followed the asphyxiation death of another psychiatric patient - Adam White, 31 - at Maroondah Hospital six months earlier. Coroner Peter White will investigate both deaths because of their similarities.
Senior Sergeant Jenny Brumby, counsel assisting the coroner, said Adam White was an involuntary patient at the time of his death on April 20, 2007. "Mr White … exhibited an episode of violent physical behaviour towards security staff members, which resulted in a struggle and staff restraining him in the prone position on the floor," she said in an opening address. "Mr White stopped breathing while being held in this position and an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt was undertaken."
Mr Fraser's wife, Sharon, said she had dinner with her husband and left him in good spirits in the ward about 8.30 the night before his death. She was stunned when a doctor phoned at 3am to say he had died. "It was a pretty blunt call. I thought it was a prank," she said. "I went in and had my time with Justin and said goodbye to him. I remember the room was bare and he was on two vinyl mattresses. I saw blood on the floor, and his T-shirt was cut."
Senior Sergeant Brumby said the adequacy of hospital policies on restraining aggressive patients and whether staff response to the situation was justified were among issues to be explored during the inquest.
Peninsula Health executive director of mental health, Jan Child, said specific training on the dangers of prone restraint and positional asphyxia were now provided to staff called on to act as "aggression management teams" at the hospital. Policies and training had been strengthened so it was "very, very clear that at all times a clinician should be in charge of the whole response and code grey".
SOURCE
Australians have got a lot to be proud about and the surveys reveal that national pride is widespread in Australia. But the pseudo-humorous writer below has nothing but contempt for people who display the Australian flag on their cars. Flags on cars are mainly flown on Australia day, anyway, which is surely an appropriate day to fly them.
His comment on people who want immigration reduced is particularly odious. He implies that they are gun-carrying racists. Since about two thirds of Australians want immigration restraint he must think that he is a very superior person.
The whole piece drips contempt for all sorts of Australians. His fellow haters on the Left will laugh, however
I quite like the Australian flag, and indeed the nation it represents. Certainly it could be improved a bit by the removal of the Union Jack from the corner (though that is an argument for another column), but generally the old girl does a pretty good job of whatever it is that flags are supposed to do.
There is, however, a considerable gulf between a dash of patriotism and national pride, and naked jingoism.
And here we're talking about those bloody plastic flags that flutter feebly from car windows at this time of year, screaming "Look at moi, look at moi!" which (in the world of Kath and Kim at least) rhymes with the equally boorish chant of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, oi, oi!"
The funny part of this is you're more likely to see the little plastic flags adorning a Hyundai than a Holden ute. This does tend to beg the question of why, if you are so fervently patriotic that you feel the need to advertise the fact, do you drive a Korean-made tin can powered by two rubber bands and an overworked hamster?
Actually, the way motorists choose to decorate their cars can be quite informative, telling you a lot about what sort of driver you are sharing a particular stretch of road with.
Pair up the Aussie car flag with a bumper sticker that sports the slogan "F--- off, we're full", for example, and you have enough character-profiling to deduce that the driver is road-rage incarnate and definitely not the sort of bloke to greet with a single-fingered salute when he cuts in front of you at high speed. In fact there's every chance he keeps his One Nation membership card in the glovebox next to his handgun.
Then there's the shiny new four-wheel-drives with stickers advertising which elite private school the owner's progeny attend and whether said children are rugby or hockey brats.
This just screams out rich Ascot mummy with total disdain for the great unwashed around her, who will tend to wield her vehicle like a German Panzer tank crushing all before it.
Often this species of driver is also sighted with those increasingly ubiquitous "My Family" montages on the back . . . OK, so you've got a partner, you've procreated more often than is probably healthy for the national gene pool and you have two dogs. What do you want, some sort of medal?
This is an "It's all about me" driver who thinks nothing of trundling along at 30km/h below the speed limit in the fast lane and assumes handicapped parking spaces are just that handy.
Baby on board? Another breeder. Bully for you. Line up for your medal behind the My Family brigade.
Another one to watch for are larger vehicles festooned with stickers from exotic destinations like Winton, Birdsville and Broken Hill. If there's a tow bar attached to the vehicle you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to assume it's probably an elderly caravan owner which, by definition, means automotive sociopath: "I've paid my taxes, so it's my bloody road."
More HERE
Should Italian and Chinese lead the new curriculum?
Foreign languages are an enthusiasm of mine and I have some qualifications in three of them -- but I cannot for the life of me see why everybody should study them. Learning a foreign language is a huge task (and really huge if the language is Asian) and that diverts energies from the large range of other important subjects. And for what? I doubt that 1% will become translators as we have plenty of naturally bilingual people in Australia anyway (children of immigrants)
Should all students have to study a second language before year 7 as planned under the new national curriculum? The curriculum will cover 11 foreign languages with Italian and Chinese the first to be developed.
Latin and other classical languages have been left out, raising concern. Language teachers say this is a major omission because a knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek underpins understanding of literature, art and the English language. The sign language Auslan has also been left out, also raising concern.
Italian and Chinese have been given first priority because the national curriculum authority says they "represent languages that cater for the greatest range of learners". "Chinese is a national priority, and Italian is learnt by the largest number of students in the primary years and the second largest number of students enrolments over all." Indonesian, Japanese and Korean are also deemed national priorities as part of the second stage of the language curriculum development.
Traditional European languages including French and German and Spanish will also be included because they are among the most commonly taught languages in Australian schools. The national curriculum authority has included Spanish as a "language of global importance".
Parents are hotly debating these priorities, with some saying the options are too narrow and locking their children into choices too early. Some say they want their children to have wider language choices until at least year 10.
Parents have been telling talk-back radio this morning that they disagree with the national priorities given to some languages over others.
SOURCE
Three years jail for speech??
Prosecutions for speech are mercifully rare in Australia and this one is troubling. Everybody gets abused at some stage. Conservative bloggers get it almost daily. So people have to learn to get used to it. The fact that the abused person was Jewish is of course unpleasant but the abuser was an obvious nut anyway.
A substantial part of the student body at the University of California would have to be locked up under the criteria adopted in this case
The High Court of Australia has found a right to free speech in the constitution so this verdict could be overturned if it is appealed
The Jewish victim of a verbal racial attack that was posted in a video online says a three-year prison term given to the man who called him a "racist, homicidal maniac" outside a Perth supermarket is not enough.
Brendan Lee O'Connell, 40, was sentenced in the District Court in Perth yesterday after being found guilty on Friday of six racial hatred charges.
Chuckling and smiling as the counts were read out to him, O'Connell appeared unaffected by the sentence handed down by Judge Henry Wisbey. O'Connell represented himself before a jury after firing the lawyer who had been defending him against an accusation that he posted an anti-semitic video online.
He faced seven charges related to the posting of a verbal altercation he had with Stanley Keyser and Timothy Peach, who are Jewish, and was found guilty on six.
An argument broke out between the three men at an IGA supermarket in South Perth on May 2, 2009, where a Friends of Palestine group was holding a protest against Israeli oranges. O'Connell was using a video camera at the event and in a video he later posted online, he labelled Mr Keyser a "racist, homicidal maniac". "You have a religion of racism, hate, homicide and ethnic cleansing," he said in the video.
During the trial, O'Connell refused to acknowledge Judge Wisbey when he entered the court and, instead, rose to bow to the jury.
Judge Wisbey said O'Connell showed no remorse and his behaviour "was that of a bully".
About a dozen supporters in the court cheered when O'Connell labelled the proceedings "a kangaroo court" and gave a long, repetitive rant about the King James Bible and the Constitution. As he was led out of court, O'Connell shouted: "Don't forget about the Gazans!"
Outside court, Mr Keyser said O'Connell had forced him to "suffer" for 18 months. "I wish he was in [prison] for longer," he said as he rushed passed reporters.
Family friend Steve Lieblich told reporters it was a "very distressing" time for the Keyser family who were happy to have it over. "I think it was a victory for decency and against bigotry and prejudice," he said. "On this occasion it was the Jewish people who were the target of this bigotry but on future occasions it could be Muslims or Asians or any group, so we we should all be happy about this result."
Mr Lieblich said he hoped O'Connell would have time to reflect on his views during his prison term. He said the internet made it easy to "spread hatred" and it was important to address the issue. "This has got nothing to do with free speech," Mr Lieblich said. "There's clearly a limit to free speech, there's a limit to all freedoms we have in society because we have to consider others. "Words can hurt and cause a lot of damage and people need to recognise that they have to watch their words."
O'Connell's sentence has been backdated to January 24 and he will be eligible for parole, but a date for that period was not specified in court.
SOURCE
Two mental patients killed by Victorian hospital staff
A PATIENT suffocated after security guards restrained him face down on the floor in Frankston Hospital’s psychiatric ward, a coroner has heard.
A hospital analysis of Justin Fraser’s death found two security guards and four orderlies who restrained Mr Fraser, 37, were in a "heightened fight response" and "focused on prevention of further aggression in the heat of the situation". "The wellbeing of the patient was a secondary priority," clinicians found in a report provided to the Health Department.
The clinicians said the staff who restrained Mr Fraser on October 26, 2007, had not been properly trained in the risk of maintaining a patient in a prone position. They therefore could not assess his condition, resulting in "delayed recognition that he had become clinically compromised and acutely unwell".
The court heard that Mr Fraser, a voluntary patient who had schizophrenia, had threatened to harm himself and staff. The security team responded to a nurse’s "code grey" call — used when staff face violence.
After the team restrained Mr Fraser in the ward, he was moved to a seclusion room, where he was found to have stopped breathing. He is thought to have died of positional asphyxia, a form of suffocation that can occur when someone is restrained in a position that stops them breathing properly.
Mr Fraser’s death followed the asphyxiation death of another psychiatric patient - Adam White, 31 - at Maroondah Hospital six months earlier. Coroner Peter White will investigate both deaths because of their similarities.
Senior Sergeant Jenny Brumby, counsel assisting the coroner, said Adam White was an involuntary patient at the time of his death on April 20, 2007. "Mr White … exhibited an episode of violent physical behaviour towards security staff members, which resulted in a struggle and staff restraining him in the prone position on the floor," she said in an opening address. "Mr White stopped breathing while being held in this position and an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt was undertaken."
Mr Fraser's wife, Sharon, said she had dinner with her husband and left him in good spirits in the ward about 8.30 the night before his death. She was stunned when a doctor phoned at 3am to say he had died. "It was a pretty blunt call. I thought it was a prank," she said. "I went in and had my time with Justin and said goodbye to him. I remember the room was bare and he was on two vinyl mattresses. I saw blood on the floor, and his T-shirt was cut."
Senior Sergeant Brumby said the adequacy of hospital policies on restraining aggressive patients and whether staff response to the situation was justified were among issues to be explored during the inquest.
Peninsula Health executive director of mental health, Jan Child, said specific training on the dangers of prone restraint and positional asphyxia were now provided to staff called on to act as "aggression management teams" at the hospital. Policies and training had been strengthened so it was "very, very clear that at all times a clinician should be in charge of the whole response and code grey".
SOURCE
Another tired old Leftist sneer at national pride
Australians have got a lot to be proud about and the surveys reveal that national pride is widespread in Australia. But the pseudo-humorous writer below has nothing but contempt for people who display the Australian flag on their cars. Flags on cars are mainly flown on Australia day, anyway, which is surely an appropriate day to fly them.
His comment on people who want immigration reduced is particularly odious. He implies that they are gun-carrying racists. Since about two thirds of Australians want immigration restraint he must think that he is a very superior person.
The whole piece drips contempt for all sorts of Australians. His fellow haters on the Left will laugh, however
I quite like the Australian flag, and indeed the nation it represents. Certainly it could be improved a bit by the removal of the Union Jack from the corner (though that is an argument for another column), but generally the old girl does a pretty good job of whatever it is that flags are supposed to do.
There is, however, a considerable gulf between a dash of patriotism and national pride, and naked jingoism.
And here we're talking about those bloody plastic flags that flutter feebly from car windows at this time of year, screaming "Look at moi, look at moi!" which (in the world of Kath and Kim at least) rhymes with the equally boorish chant of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, oi, oi!"
The funny part of this is you're more likely to see the little plastic flags adorning a Hyundai than a Holden ute. This does tend to beg the question of why, if you are so fervently patriotic that you feel the need to advertise the fact, do you drive a Korean-made tin can powered by two rubber bands and an overworked hamster?
Actually, the way motorists choose to decorate their cars can be quite informative, telling you a lot about what sort of driver you are sharing a particular stretch of road with.
Pair up the Aussie car flag with a bumper sticker that sports the slogan "F--- off, we're full", for example, and you have enough character-profiling to deduce that the driver is road-rage incarnate and definitely not the sort of bloke to greet with a single-fingered salute when he cuts in front of you at high speed. In fact there's every chance he keeps his One Nation membership card in the glovebox next to his handgun.
Then there's the shiny new four-wheel-drives with stickers advertising which elite private school the owner's progeny attend and whether said children are rugby or hockey brats.
This just screams out rich Ascot mummy with total disdain for the great unwashed around her, who will tend to wield her vehicle like a German Panzer tank crushing all before it.
Often this species of driver is also sighted with those increasingly ubiquitous "My Family" montages on the back . . . OK, so you've got a partner, you've procreated more often than is probably healthy for the national gene pool and you have two dogs. What do you want, some sort of medal?
This is an "It's all about me" driver who thinks nothing of trundling along at 30km/h below the speed limit in the fast lane and assumes handicapped parking spaces are just that handy.
Baby on board? Another breeder. Bully for you. Line up for your medal behind the My Family brigade.
Another one to watch for are larger vehicles festooned with stickers from exotic destinations like Winton, Birdsville and Broken Hill. If there's a tow bar attached to the vehicle you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to assume it's probably an elderly caravan owner which, by definition, means automotive sociopath: "I've paid my taxes, so it's my bloody road."
More HERE
Should Italian and Chinese lead the new curriculum?
Foreign languages are an enthusiasm of mine and I have some qualifications in three of them -- but I cannot for the life of me see why everybody should study them. Learning a foreign language is a huge task (and really huge if the language is Asian) and that diverts energies from the large range of other important subjects. And for what? I doubt that 1% will become translators as we have plenty of naturally bilingual people in Australia anyway (children of immigrants)
Should all students have to study a second language before year 7 as planned under the new national curriculum? The curriculum will cover 11 foreign languages with Italian and Chinese the first to be developed.
Latin and other classical languages have been left out, raising concern. Language teachers say this is a major omission because a knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek underpins understanding of literature, art and the English language. The sign language Auslan has also been left out, also raising concern.
Italian and Chinese have been given first priority because the national curriculum authority says they "represent languages that cater for the greatest range of learners". "Chinese is a national priority, and Italian is learnt by the largest number of students in the primary years and the second largest number of students enrolments over all." Indonesian, Japanese and Korean are also deemed national priorities as part of the second stage of the language curriculum development.
Traditional European languages including French and German and Spanish will also be included because they are among the most commonly taught languages in Australian schools. The national curriculum authority has included Spanish as a "language of global importance".
Parents are hotly debating these priorities, with some saying the options are too narrow and locking their children into choices too early. Some say they want their children to have wider language choices until at least year 10.
Parents have been telling talk-back radio this morning that they disagree with the national priorities given to some languages over others.
SOURCE
Three years jail for speech??
Prosecutions for speech are mercifully rare in Australia and this one is troubling. Everybody gets abused at some stage. Conservative bloggers get it almost daily. So people have to learn to get used to it. The fact that the abused person was Jewish is of course unpleasant but the abuser was an obvious nut anyway.
A substantial part of the student body at the University of California would have to be locked up under the criteria adopted in this case
The High Court of Australia has found a right to free speech in the constitution so this verdict could be overturned if it is appealed
The Jewish victim of a verbal racial attack that was posted in a video online says a three-year prison term given to the man who called him a "racist, homicidal maniac" outside a Perth supermarket is not enough.
Brendan Lee O'Connell, 40, was sentenced in the District Court in Perth yesterday after being found guilty on Friday of six racial hatred charges.
Chuckling and smiling as the counts were read out to him, O'Connell appeared unaffected by the sentence handed down by Judge Henry Wisbey. O'Connell represented himself before a jury after firing the lawyer who had been defending him against an accusation that he posted an anti-semitic video online.
He faced seven charges related to the posting of a verbal altercation he had with Stanley Keyser and Timothy Peach, who are Jewish, and was found guilty on six.
An argument broke out between the three men at an IGA supermarket in South Perth on May 2, 2009, where a Friends of Palestine group was holding a protest against Israeli oranges. O'Connell was using a video camera at the event and in a video he later posted online, he labelled Mr Keyser a "racist, homicidal maniac". "You have a religion of racism, hate, homicide and ethnic cleansing," he said in the video.
During the trial, O'Connell refused to acknowledge Judge Wisbey when he entered the court and, instead, rose to bow to the jury.
Judge Wisbey said O'Connell showed no remorse and his behaviour "was that of a bully".
About a dozen supporters in the court cheered when O'Connell labelled the proceedings "a kangaroo court" and gave a long, repetitive rant about the King James Bible and the Constitution. As he was led out of court, O'Connell shouted: "Don't forget about the Gazans!"
Outside court, Mr Keyser said O'Connell had forced him to "suffer" for 18 months. "I wish he was in [prison] for longer," he said as he rushed passed reporters.
Family friend Steve Lieblich told reporters it was a "very distressing" time for the Keyser family who were happy to have it over. "I think it was a victory for decency and against bigotry and prejudice," he said. "On this occasion it was the Jewish people who were the target of this bigotry but on future occasions it could be Muslims or Asians or any group, so we we should all be happy about this result."
Mr Lieblich said he hoped O'Connell would have time to reflect on his views during his prison term. He said the internet made it easy to "spread hatred" and it was important to address the issue. "This has got nothing to do with free speech," Mr Lieblich said. "There's clearly a limit to free speech, there's a limit to all freedoms we have in society because we have to consider others. "Words can hurt and cause a lot of damage and people need to recognise that they have to watch their words."
O'Connell's sentence has been backdated to January 24 and he will be eligible for parole, but a date for that period was not specified in court.
SOURCE
Two mental patients killed by Victorian hospital staff
A PATIENT suffocated after security guards restrained him face down on the floor in Frankston Hospital’s psychiatric ward, a coroner has heard.
A hospital analysis of Justin Fraser’s death found two security guards and four orderlies who restrained Mr Fraser, 37, were in a "heightened fight response" and "focused on prevention of further aggression in the heat of the situation". "The wellbeing of the patient was a secondary priority," clinicians found in a report provided to the Health Department.
The clinicians said the staff who restrained Mr Fraser on October 26, 2007, had not been properly trained in the risk of maintaining a patient in a prone position. They therefore could not assess his condition, resulting in "delayed recognition that he had become clinically compromised and acutely unwell".
The court heard that Mr Fraser, a voluntary patient who had schizophrenia, had threatened to harm himself and staff. The security team responded to a nurse’s "code grey" call — used when staff face violence.
After the team restrained Mr Fraser in the ward, he was moved to a seclusion room, where he was found to have stopped breathing. He is thought to have died of positional asphyxia, a form of suffocation that can occur when someone is restrained in a position that stops them breathing properly.
Mr Fraser’s death followed the asphyxiation death of another psychiatric patient - Adam White, 31 - at Maroondah Hospital six months earlier. Coroner Peter White will investigate both deaths because of their similarities.
Senior Sergeant Jenny Brumby, counsel assisting the coroner, said Adam White was an involuntary patient at the time of his death on April 20, 2007. "Mr White … exhibited an episode of violent physical behaviour towards security staff members, which resulted in a struggle and staff restraining him in the prone position on the floor," she said in an opening address. "Mr White stopped breathing while being held in this position and an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt was undertaken."
Mr Fraser's wife, Sharon, said she had dinner with her husband and left him in good spirits in the ward about 8.30 the night before his death. She was stunned when a doctor phoned at 3am to say he had died. "It was a pretty blunt call. I thought it was a prank," she said. "I went in and had my time with Justin and said goodbye to him. I remember the room was bare and he was on two vinyl mattresses. I saw blood on the floor, and his T-shirt was cut."
Senior Sergeant Brumby said the adequacy of hospital policies on restraining aggressive patients and whether staff response to the situation was justified were among issues to be explored during the inquest.
Peninsula Health executive director of mental health, Jan Child, said specific training on the dangers of prone restraint and positional asphyxia were now provided to staff called on to act as "aggression management teams" at the hospital. Policies and training had been strengthened so it was "very, very clear that at all times a clinician should be in charge of the whole response and code grey".
SOURCE
Australians have got a lot to be proud about and the surveys reveal that national pride is widespread in Australia. But the pseudo-humorous writer below has nothing but contempt for people who display the Australian flag on their cars. Flags on cars are mainly flown on Australia day, anyway, which is surely an appropriate day to fly them.
His comment on people who want immigration reduced is particularly odious. He implies that they are gun-carrying racists. Since about two thirds of Australians want immigration restraint he must think that he is a very superior person.
The whole piece drips contempt for all sorts of Australians. His fellow haters on the Left will laugh, however
I quite like the Australian flag, and indeed the nation it represents. Certainly it could be improved a bit by the removal of the Union Jack from the corner (though that is an argument for another column), but generally the old girl does a pretty good job of whatever it is that flags are supposed to do.
There is, however, a considerable gulf between a dash of patriotism and national pride, and naked jingoism.
And here we're talking about those bloody plastic flags that flutter feebly from car windows at this time of year, screaming "Look at moi, look at moi!" which (in the world of Kath and Kim at least) rhymes with the equally boorish chant of "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie! Oi, oi, oi!"
The funny part of this is you're more likely to see the little plastic flags adorning a Hyundai than a Holden ute. This does tend to beg the question of why, if you are so fervently patriotic that you feel the need to advertise the fact, do you drive a Korean-made tin can powered by two rubber bands and an overworked hamster?
Actually, the way motorists choose to decorate their cars can be quite informative, telling you a lot about what sort of driver you are sharing a particular stretch of road with.
Pair up the Aussie car flag with a bumper sticker that sports the slogan "F--- off, we're full", for example, and you have enough character-profiling to deduce that the driver is road-rage incarnate and definitely not the sort of bloke to greet with a single-fingered salute when he cuts in front of you at high speed. In fact there's every chance he keeps his One Nation membership card in the glovebox next to his handgun.
Then there's the shiny new four-wheel-drives with stickers advertising which elite private school the owner's progeny attend and whether said children are rugby or hockey brats.
This just screams out rich Ascot mummy with total disdain for the great unwashed around her, who will tend to wield her vehicle like a German Panzer tank crushing all before it.
Often this species of driver is also sighted with those increasingly ubiquitous "My Family" montages on the back . . . OK, so you've got a partner, you've procreated more often than is probably healthy for the national gene pool and you have two dogs. What do you want, some sort of medal?
This is an "It's all about me" driver who thinks nothing of trundling along at 30km/h below the speed limit in the fast lane and assumes handicapped parking spaces are just that handy.
Baby on board? Another breeder. Bully for you. Line up for your medal behind the My Family brigade.
Another one to watch for are larger vehicles festooned with stickers from exotic destinations like Winton, Birdsville and Broken Hill. If there's a tow bar attached to the vehicle you don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to assume it's probably an elderly caravan owner which, by definition, means automotive sociopath: "I've paid my taxes, so it's my bloody road."
More HERE
Should Italian and Chinese lead the new curriculum?
Foreign languages are an enthusiasm of mine and I have some qualifications in three of them -- but I cannot for the life of me see why everybody should study them. Learning a foreign language is a huge task (and really huge if the language is Asian) and that diverts energies from the large range of other important subjects. And for what? I doubt that 1% will become translators as we have plenty of naturally bilingual people in Australia anyway (children of immigrants)
Should all students have to study a second language before year 7 as planned under the new national curriculum? The curriculum will cover 11 foreign languages with Italian and Chinese the first to be developed.
Latin and other classical languages have been left out, raising concern. Language teachers say this is a major omission because a knowledge of Latin and Ancient Greek underpins understanding of literature, art and the English language. The sign language Auslan has also been left out, also raising concern.
Italian and Chinese have been given first priority because the national curriculum authority says they "represent languages that cater for the greatest range of learners". "Chinese is a national priority, and Italian is learnt by the largest number of students in the primary years and the second largest number of students enrolments over all." Indonesian, Japanese and Korean are also deemed national priorities as part of the second stage of the language curriculum development.
Traditional European languages including French and German and Spanish will also be included because they are among the most commonly taught languages in Australian schools. The national curriculum authority has included Spanish as a "language of global importance".
Parents are hotly debating these priorities, with some saying the options are too narrow and locking their children into choices too early. Some say they want their children to have wider language choices until at least year 10.
Parents have been telling talk-back radio this morning that they disagree with the national priorities given to some languages over others.
SOURCE
Three years jail for speech??
Prosecutions for speech are mercifully rare in Australia and this one is troubling. Everybody gets abused at some stage. Conservative bloggers get it almost daily. So people have to learn to get used to it. The fact that the abused person was Jewish is of course unpleasant but the abuser was an obvious nut anyway.
A substantial part of the student body at the University of California would have to be locked up under the criteria adopted in this case
The High Court of Australia has found a right to free speech in the constitution so this verdict could be overturned if it is appealed
The Jewish victim of a verbal racial attack that was posted in a video online says a three-year prison term given to the man who called him a "racist, homicidal maniac" outside a Perth supermarket is not enough.
Brendan Lee O'Connell, 40, was sentenced in the District Court in Perth yesterday after being found guilty on Friday of six racial hatred charges.
Chuckling and smiling as the counts were read out to him, O'Connell appeared unaffected by the sentence handed down by Judge Henry Wisbey. O'Connell represented himself before a jury after firing the lawyer who had been defending him against an accusation that he posted an anti-semitic video online.
He faced seven charges related to the posting of a verbal altercation he had with Stanley Keyser and Timothy Peach, who are Jewish, and was found guilty on six.
An argument broke out between the three men at an IGA supermarket in South Perth on May 2, 2009, where a Friends of Palestine group was holding a protest against Israeli oranges. O'Connell was using a video camera at the event and in a video he later posted online, he labelled Mr Keyser a "racist, homicidal maniac". "You have a religion of racism, hate, homicide and ethnic cleansing," he said in the video.
During the trial, O'Connell refused to acknowledge Judge Wisbey when he entered the court and, instead, rose to bow to the jury.
Judge Wisbey said O'Connell showed no remorse and his behaviour "was that of a bully".
About a dozen supporters in the court cheered when O'Connell labelled the proceedings "a kangaroo court" and gave a long, repetitive rant about the King James Bible and the Constitution. As he was led out of court, O'Connell shouted: "Don't forget about the Gazans!"
Outside court, Mr Keyser said O'Connell had forced him to "suffer" for 18 months. "I wish he was in [prison] for longer," he said as he rushed passed reporters.
Family friend Steve Lieblich told reporters it was a "very distressing" time for the Keyser family who were happy to have it over. "I think it was a victory for decency and against bigotry and prejudice," he said. "On this occasion it was the Jewish people who were the target of this bigotry but on future occasions it could be Muslims or Asians or any group, so we we should all be happy about this result."
Mr Lieblich said he hoped O'Connell would have time to reflect on his views during his prison term. He said the internet made it easy to "spread hatred" and it was important to address the issue. "This has got nothing to do with free speech," Mr Lieblich said. "There's clearly a limit to free speech, there's a limit to all freedoms we have in society because we have to consider others. "Words can hurt and cause a lot of damage and people need to recognise that they have to watch their words."
O'Connell's sentence has been backdated to January 24 and he will be eligible for parole, but a date for that period was not specified in court.
SOURCE
Two mental patients killed by Victorian hospital staff
A PATIENT suffocated after security guards restrained him face down on the floor in Frankston Hospital’s psychiatric ward, a coroner has heard.
A hospital analysis of Justin Fraser’s death found two security guards and four orderlies who restrained Mr Fraser, 37, were in a "heightened fight response" and "focused on prevention of further aggression in the heat of the situation". "The wellbeing of the patient was a secondary priority," clinicians found in a report provided to the Health Department.
The clinicians said the staff who restrained Mr Fraser on October 26, 2007, had not been properly trained in the risk of maintaining a patient in a prone position. They therefore could not assess his condition, resulting in "delayed recognition that he had become clinically compromised and acutely unwell".
The court heard that Mr Fraser, a voluntary patient who had schizophrenia, had threatened to harm himself and staff. The security team responded to a nurse’s "code grey" call — used when staff face violence.
After the team restrained Mr Fraser in the ward, he was moved to a seclusion room, where he was found to have stopped breathing. He is thought to have died of positional asphyxia, a form of suffocation that can occur when someone is restrained in a position that stops them breathing properly.
Mr Fraser’s death followed the asphyxiation death of another psychiatric patient - Adam White, 31 - at Maroondah Hospital six months earlier. Coroner Peter White will investigate both deaths because of their similarities.
Senior Sergeant Jenny Brumby, counsel assisting the coroner, said Adam White was an involuntary patient at the time of his death on April 20, 2007. "Mr White … exhibited an episode of violent physical behaviour towards security staff members, which resulted in a struggle and staff restraining him in the prone position on the floor," she said in an opening address. "Mr White stopped breathing while being held in this position and an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt was undertaken."
Mr Fraser's wife, Sharon, said she had dinner with her husband and left him in good spirits in the ward about 8.30 the night before his death. She was stunned when a doctor phoned at 3am to say he had died. "It was a pretty blunt call. I thought it was a prank," she said. "I went in and had my time with Justin and said goodbye to him. I remember the room was bare and he was on two vinyl mattresses. I saw blood on the floor, and his T-shirt was cut."
Senior Sergeant Brumby said the adequacy of hospital policies on restraining aggressive patients and whether staff response to the situation was justified were among issues to be explored during the inquest.
Peninsula Health executive director of mental health, Jan Child, said specific training on the dangers of prone restraint and positional asphyxia were now provided to staff called on to act as "aggression management teams" at the hospital. Policies and training had been strengthened so it was "very, very clear that at all times a clinician should be in charge of the whole response and code grey".
SOURCE
Congressman Gary Ackerman - Mubarak should step down
Congressman Gary Ackerman, who is a strong supporter of Israel, has come out with a statement urging Mubarak to step down.
"Like all Americans I have been watching events in Egypt and it has become clear that it's time for America to step off of the rhetorical tightrope and stand clearly with the people of Egypt in their struggle for freedom. The Egyptian people are in the midst of a crisis, and like anyone in crisis, they need to know who their friends are.
"While initially it may have been prudent for the Obama Administration to walk that rhetorical tight rope to keep the confidence of regional leaders, that moment has surely passed. By their passion, courage and sacrifice in the streets, Egyptians have proven beyond question that they are taking their government back and that the Mubarak-era of rule is ending.
"President Mubarak has been a valuable partner for the United States, but he has, by his own decisions and successive phony elections, shorn his rule of any mandate or legitimacy beyond that provided by force and arms. His last act of service to Egypt should be to facilitate a fast transfer of power to a transitional government that can prepare for free and fair elections.
"Accordingly, I believe the United States must suspend its assistance to Egypt until this transition is underway.
"The Egyptian people have made their wishes very clear: it is time for President Mubarak to step down and allow Egypt to move forward into a new era of democracy, human rights and the rule of law."
Big news from Egypt
The New York Times is reporting that the Egyptian Army has announced that it will not fire on the protesters, as long as they use peaceful means.
The report I'm hearing tonight described members of the Muslim Brotherhood involved in the demonstration in Tahrir Square in Cairo. I hope that any government that's formed after Mubarak falls (if that happens) will not be dominated by the MB. My main apprehension about them would be what would they do with the peace treaty with Israel. Also, of course, if they get into power, would democracy continue in Egypt? Would they be willing to leave power if they lost an election? Questions that I don't think anyone has the final answers to.
The political forces aligned against President Hosni Mubarak seemed to strengthen on Monday, when the Army said for the first time that it would not fire on the protesters who have convulsed Egypt for the last week. The announcement was followed shortly by the government’s first offer to talk to the protest leaders....Although I'm apprehensive for Israel about what could happen if Mubarak does finally resign and a new government is established, it is very exciting to see thousands and thousands of people demonstrating for freedom and democracy.
The Army’s announcement — delivered on state TV with no elaboration by its official spokesman — declared that “freedom of expression through peaceful means is guaranteed to everybody,” and promised to recognize the “legitimate demands” of the protesters.
While the carefully worded statement was seen by some as a veiled threat to use force against those who do not use peaceful means, an associate of Mr. Mubarak’s said it should be taken at face value.
“The Army is not a puppet in the hands of anybody,” including Mr. Mubarak, said Mahmoud Shokry, a retired diplomat and a friend of Mr. Suleiman. “The Army does not want to make any confrontation with the youth.” He said the generals would “ask Mr. Mubarak to leave” before they would accept orders they think could lead to civil war or risk their credibility with the public.
Still, opposition leaders said they were not prepared to celebrate the announcement as the turning point it proved in Tunisia, where the government collapsed after the military refused to shoot at its own people.
The report I'm hearing tonight described members of the Muslim Brotherhood involved in the demonstration in Tahrir Square in Cairo. I hope that any government that's formed after Mubarak falls (if that happens) will not be dominated by the MB. My main apprehension about them would be what would they do with the peace treaty with Israel. Also, of course, if they get into power, would democracy continue in Egypt? Would they be willing to leave power if they lost an election? Questions that I don't think anyone has the final answers to.
Sunday, January 30, 2011
Floods' economic pain is greatly exaggerated
Ross Gittins
Most of us are back at work, but the silly season won't be over until we get the Queensland floods into perspective. They are a great human tragedy, but they're not such a big deal for the economy.
It's not surprising the public has been so excited about such amazing scenes and so much loss of life and property. Nor is it surprising the media devoted so much coverage to the floods when, with most of us at the beach, there's been so little other news.
It's not even surprising the Gillard government has been beating up the story, making it out to be the biggest thing since the global financial crisis. At one level this is just the pollies doing their instinctive I-feel-your-pain routine. They could seem heartless if they tried telling people things weren't as bad as they seemed.
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At another level it's easy to see Julia Gillard trying to gain the same boost to her popularity as Anna Bligh. She'd be well aware of all the seats Labor lost in Queensland at the election in August. It's an almost inevitable assumption by the punters and the media that if an event is huge in human and media terms it must be just as big in its effect on the economy. When the punters tire of seeing footage of people on roofs, you "take the story forward" by finding some expert who'll agree it also spells disaster for the economy.
The wise and much-loved econocrat Austin Holmes used to say that one of the most important skills an economist needed was "a sense of the relative magnitudes" - the ability to see whether something was big enough to be worth worrying about.
That sense has been absent from the comments of those business and academic economists on duty over the silly season, happily supplying the media's demand for comments confirming the immensity of the floods' economic and budgetary implications.
With the revelation last week of the econocrats' estimates of the likely magnitudes, it's clear the figures supplied by business economists were way too high. And the economists' furious debate over how the budgetary cost of the rebuilding effort should be financed is now revealed as utterly out of proportion to the modest sums involved.
Of course, you still wouldn't have twigged to this had you focused on the government's rhetoric rather than its figures. In Gillard's speech on the budgetary costs and Wayne Swan's speech on the economic impact both were busily exaggerating the size of the crisis, even while revealing how small it really was.
Gillard said it was "the most expensive disaster in Australia's history" and that the "cost to the economy is enormous". The government's task, she kept repeating, was to "rebuild Queensland".
Swan repeated that "this is likely to end up being the most costly disaster in Australian history", which was "going to cost Australia dearly" and involves a "massive reconstruction effort". The closest he got to the truth was his observation that "the economic questions pale into insignificance next to the human cost of what we've seen".
If this is the most expensive natural disaster in Australian history, all it proves is the cost of earlier disasters was negligible. If you can "rebuild Queensland" for just $5.6 billion, it must be a pretty tin-pot place.
If $5.6 billion seems a lot, consider some "relative magnitudes": the economy's annual production of goods and services (gross domestic product) totals $1400 billion, and the budget's annual revenue collections total $314 billion.
Note that, though no one's thought it worthy of mention, the $5.6 billion in spending will be spread over at least three financial years, making it that much easier to fund.
We know that more than a third of the $5.6 billion will be paid out in the present financial year with, presumably, most of the rest paid in 2011-12. So just how the flood reconstruction spending could threaten the budget's promised return to surplus in 2012-13 is something no one has explained.
And if $5.6 billion isn't all that significant in the scheme of things, how much less significant is the $1.8 billion to be raised from the tax levy? The fuss economists have been making about it tells us more about their hang-ups over taxation than their powers of economic analysis.
And how they can keep a straight face while claiming it could have a significant effect on consumer spending (well over $700 billion a year) is beyond me.
Turning from the budget to the economy, Treasury's estimate is that the floods will reduce gross domestic product by about 0.5 percentage points, with the effect concentrated in the March quarter.
Thereafter, however, the rebuilding effort - private as well as public - will add to GDP and probably largely offset the initial dip. So the floods will do more to change the profile of growth over the next year or two than to reduce the level it reaches.
Most of the temporary loss of production will be incurred by the Bowen Basin coal miners. But, though it won't show up directly in GDP, their revenue losses will be offset to some extent by the higher prices they'll be getting as a consequence of the global market's reaction to the disruption to supply.
And despite all the fuss the media have been making over higher fruit and vegetable prices, Treasury's best guess is that this will cause a spike of just 0.25 percentage points in the consumer price index for the March quarter, with prices falling back in subsequent quarters.
So the floods do precious little to change the previous reality that, with unemployment down to 5 per cent and a mining investment boom on the way, the economy is close to its capacity constraint and will soon need to be restrained by higher interest rates.
SOURCE
Floods levy may help rich and hurt poor
Gillard wants to help the most needy but her new tax is hardly foolproof.
ONE criticism made about the flood levy is that "taxation" is the wrong sort of instrument to provide disaster relief, that there is something unseemly about forcing people to give charity, especially when the recipients are our compatriots. "Mates," Tony Abbott tells us, "help each other; they don't tax each other."
In a world where we could rely on people freely dipping into their pockets to solve the world's problems, there might be something to this criticism. But people don't dip into their pockets nearly often - or deep - enough.
According to the Giving Australia report, published in October 2005, voluntary giving in Australia amounts to only 0.68 per cent of GDP (less than half of what Americans give). Of this, only about an eighth goes to people overseas.
This might explain why we resort to taxes to provide much of our foreign aid. But even the foreign aid we give through taxes - about 0.35 per cent of gross national income - is far from enough. When Haiti was rocked by an earthquake last year - a disaster far more costly in monetary and humanitarian terms - Australia provided only $15 million in aid (less than 1 per cent of the $1.8 billion that the government plans to raise through the flood levy).
This is not to criticise or belittle the provision of much-needed support to flood-affected areas. It is only right that we, as fellow citizens, should support those devastated by the recent floods. But do we do enough to help those in need when they are not our "mates"? Are fellow citizens really 100 times more deserving of our support than victims of overseas disasters? We go out of our way to help disaster victims in our own country but we incarcerate people fleeing disasters overseas.
There is nothing fundamentally unjust or unfair about the idea of using taxation to raise aid. The federal government has imposed similar levies before, often for less urgent needs. Nonetheless, the government must ensure that the levy does not exacerbate existing disadvantage.
The purpose of redistributing wealth through taxation should be to alleviate the hardship of those who are worse off, to improve the life chances of the disadvantaged so that it is not only the wealthy who have the opportunity to lead a flourishing life. Taxes that take from the worse off and give to the better off aggravate social disadvantage by increasing the inequality in life chances between the rich and the poor.
The government has rightly made the flood levy a progressive tax, charging people according to their ability to pay.
Much has also been made about those affected by the floods not being asked to pay the levy. This means that anyone who has received either a Disaster Recovery Payment or a Disaster Income Recovery Subsidy will be exempt. But these payments are not means tested. People who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year are eligible for these payments. Anyone who was "stranded within their home or unable to gain access to their residence for at least 24 hours, or whose principal place of residence was without electricity, water, gas, sewerage or another essential service for at least 48 hours" is eligible for the payment, while anyone who can demonstrate a direct loss of income from the floods is eligible for the income subsidy.
Even if they don't need these payments, affluent households may still claim them simply to avoid the flood levy, and so many of those living in multimillion-dollar homes along the Brisbane River may well be exempt from paying.
But surely they have a much greater ability to contribute to the costs of rebuilding Queensland than families living on just $55,000 a year in non-flood-affected areas. Since some of the levy will be used to cover the costs of the Disaster Recovery Payment and Income Recovery Subsidy, the levy may well also end up diverting income from the poor to the rich.
There are, of course, a great many people who are very badly off as a result of the floods and in genuine need of assistance, particularly low-income households who thought they were insured against flood damage only to discover that they were not.
The federal government has yet to provide details as to whether part of the levy will be used to help those whose homes are uninsured against flood damage. If it does decide to do so, let us hope that it will distribute this money fairly between flood victims, that claims will be means tested, and that people will not be entitled to more compensation simply because their homes are more valuable.
In the Christchurch earthquake, homes that sustained little damage other than to antique furniture and artwork are nevertheless entitled to compensation (up to $20,000). The mechanics of New Zealand's earthquake fund are very different to the flood levy (it is paid for by pooled insurance premium contributions), but let us hope that no such claims for compensation will be entertained by either the state or federal governments: that aid will be directed to those most in need and that the levy will not penalise the poor to cover the losses of the rich.
SOURCE
The NSW political disaster
The retirement of Bob Carr has exposed how little talent there is in NSW Labor
THE first electoral test of the year will be on March 26 when NSW voters go to the polls. Kristina Keneally must know it is therefore only a matter of months before she is out of the state's top job, which is why some inside the Labor Party are canvassing the possibility of her switching to federal politics, moving into the seat of Kingsford Smith if Peter Garrett chooses to call it quits.
But the fact that Labor has been in office in NSW for 16 long years is not the only reason that it is lurching towards a sizeable defeat. Policy decision making (or sometimes a lack thereof) is at the heart of voter disillusionment with the NSW Labor government.
Just before Christmas that feeling was once again fuelled when Treasurer Eric Roozendaal authorised the sale of the state's electricity services. It was a fire sale, reaping just over $5 billion (but really only $3bn because one of the conditions of the sale was that the government purchase a $2bn coal mine).
Carr tried to sell electricity assets in 1997 for approximately $30bn but was overruled by Labor's state conference and Morris Iemma tried again in 2007 for half that amount but was also overruled (being toppled as leader as a consequence).
The cheap price tag of today is doubly galling for voters, especially considering the opposition is opposed to the sale and would have retained the assets at least until they were able to get a better price once elected.
Keneally is for all intents and purposes presiding over a caretaker administration. She had no business allowing such a controversial sale right before an election, certainly not considering that to make it happen the government had to replace nine directors from the boards of the public electricity companies because they refused to approve the plan, believing it was a dud sale.
Throw in the fact that the man most likely to take over the reins for Labor after the election is John Roberston, the former union official who scuttled Iemma's bid to sell electricity assets at a more reasonable price three years ago - and the political damage this issue has caused Labor may not end on polling day.
But electricity privatisation isn't the only controversial policy area in NSW. The release of land for development has been slow. The alternative policy of creating inner-city density has upset local communities who feel crowded out by too many home units in their suburbs. And the state's infrastructure has been allowed to run down, even with a late injection of funds courtesy of the federal government's Infrastructure Australia fund.
What we will find out when Barry O'Farrell becomes premier after the March election is whether the problems of Sydney are simply big-city issues that are unavoidable when urban sprawl reaches the level it has in Australia's largest city, or whether the problems can be addressed by good management and a rationalisation of government services.
If the former is the case the Labor Party just might recover quickly to become politically competitive in Labor's favourite state. If, however, the latter is the case and O'Farrell repairs Labor's mess, it could be a long wait in the political wilderness for the NSW Labor machine and that would also have federal implications.
Julia Gillard will be hoping that with NSW Labor out of power she will be able to rebuild Labor's brand in the commonwealth's largest state. But she might want to think again about that prospect, because with voter angst so strongly opposed to the NSW Labor brand, the federal party will need to be careful, given the number of names in its ranks who built careers in NSW Labor.
SOURCE
Aid goes in too many directions, says report
AUSTRALIA'S overseas aid is often fragmented, poorly directed and difficult to evaluate, according to an annual report on the effectiveness of the government's overseas development program.
The report, by AusAID's internal watchdog, the Office of Development Effectiveness, praised the aid program's "impressive reach … and effectiveness", but said there were significant structural problems.
"AusAID does not have an overarching strategy on implementing the aid effectiveness agenda and has not clarified how to report against aid effectiveness principles," the report says.
"It needs a strategy for reporting that sets out benchmarks and targets for country and regional programs in terms of aid effectiveness principles."
The report, covering 2009 but made public only recently, comes soon after the Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, ordered the first independent review of the aid program in 15 years.
A panel will assess whether Australia's $4.3 billion in annual aid is being spent efficiently and make recommendations to improve its structure and delivery.
Since his appointment as foreign minister after the election in August, Mr Rudd has emphasised that Australia's aid program must be defined by its effectiveness as much as the total spent.
In October the government announced the number of Australian aid advisers in East Timor would be cut by a third, saving an estimated $3 million, which will be redirected to new and existing projects. The cuts followed a similar overhaul of the aid program in Papua New Guinea.
The report says there is a tendency to funnel aid money through the recipient governments, ignoring grassroots organisations.
"Much of the aid program's knowledge of governance and the public sector is at the national level and there is little understanding of the complex system that determines whether services are actually delivered," it says.
It also says there is an increasing tendency for more, smaller projects, noting the number of bilateral aid projects tripled between 1996 and 2006, more than double the increase in aid.
"An increase in the number of small activities increases the burden on partner countries, which have to manage, co-ordinate and monitor aid contributions," it says.
"Australia and its partner countries have made commitments to address proliferation, however, the data suggest that to date there has been a lack of follow-through."
SOURCE
Ross Gittins
Most of us are back at work, but the silly season won't be over until we get the Queensland floods into perspective. They are a great human tragedy, but they're not such a big deal for the economy.
It's not surprising the public has been so excited about such amazing scenes and so much loss of life and property. Nor is it surprising the media devoted so much coverage to the floods when, with most of us at the beach, there's been so little other news.
It's not even surprising the Gillard government has been beating up the story, making it out to be the biggest thing since the global financial crisis. At one level this is just the pollies doing their instinctive I-feel-your-pain routine. They could seem heartless if they tried telling people things weren't as bad as they seemed.
Advertisement: Story continues below
At another level it's easy to see Julia Gillard trying to gain the same boost to her popularity as Anna Bligh. She'd be well aware of all the seats Labor lost in Queensland at the election in August. It's an almost inevitable assumption by the punters and the media that if an event is huge in human and media terms it must be just as big in its effect on the economy. When the punters tire of seeing footage of people on roofs, you "take the story forward" by finding some expert who'll agree it also spells disaster for the economy.
The wise and much-loved econocrat Austin Holmes used to say that one of the most important skills an economist needed was "a sense of the relative magnitudes" - the ability to see whether something was big enough to be worth worrying about.
That sense has been absent from the comments of those business and academic economists on duty over the silly season, happily supplying the media's demand for comments confirming the immensity of the floods' economic and budgetary implications.
With the revelation last week of the econocrats' estimates of the likely magnitudes, it's clear the figures supplied by business economists were way too high. And the economists' furious debate over how the budgetary cost of the rebuilding effort should be financed is now revealed as utterly out of proportion to the modest sums involved.
Of course, you still wouldn't have twigged to this had you focused on the government's rhetoric rather than its figures. In Gillard's speech on the budgetary costs and Wayne Swan's speech on the economic impact both were busily exaggerating the size of the crisis, even while revealing how small it really was.
Gillard said it was "the most expensive disaster in Australia's history" and that the "cost to the economy is enormous". The government's task, she kept repeating, was to "rebuild Queensland".
Swan repeated that "this is likely to end up being the most costly disaster in Australian history", which was "going to cost Australia dearly" and involves a "massive reconstruction effort". The closest he got to the truth was his observation that "the economic questions pale into insignificance next to the human cost of what we've seen".
If this is the most expensive natural disaster in Australian history, all it proves is the cost of earlier disasters was negligible. If you can "rebuild Queensland" for just $5.6 billion, it must be a pretty tin-pot place.
If $5.6 billion seems a lot, consider some "relative magnitudes": the economy's annual production of goods and services (gross domestic product) totals $1400 billion, and the budget's annual revenue collections total $314 billion.
Note that, though no one's thought it worthy of mention, the $5.6 billion in spending will be spread over at least three financial years, making it that much easier to fund.
We know that more than a third of the $5.6 billion will be paid out in the present financial year with, presumably, most of the rest paid in 2011-12. So just how the flood reconstruction spending could threaten the budget's promised return to surplus in 2012-13 is something no one has explained.
And if $5.6 billion isn't all that significant in the scheme of things, how much less significant is the $1.8 billion to be raised from the tax levy? The fuss economists have been making about it tells us more about their hang-ups over taxation than their powers of economic analysis.
And how they can keep a straight face while claiming it could have a significant effect on consumer spending (well over $700 billion a year) is beyond me.
Turning from the budget to the economy, Treasury's estimate is that the floods will reduce gross domestic product by about 0.5 percentage points, with the effect concentrated in the March quarter.
Thereafter, however, the rebuilding effort - private as well as public - will add to GDP and probably largely offset the initial dip. So the floods will do more to change the profile of growth over the next year or two than to reduce the level it reaches.
Most of the temporary loss of production will be incurred by the Bowen Basin coal miners. But, though it won't show up directly in GDP, their revenue losses will be offset to some extent by the higher prices they'll be getting as a consequence of the global market's reaction to the disruption to supply.
And despite all the fuss the media have been making over higher fruit and vegetable prices, Treasury's best guess is that this will cause a spike of just 0.25 percentage points in the consumer price index for the March quarter, with prices falling back in subsequent quarters.
So the floods do precious little to change the previous reality that, with unemployment down to 5 per cent and a mining investment boom on the way, the economy is close to its capacity constraint and will soon need to be restrained by higher interest rates.
SOURCE
Floods levy may help rich and hurt poor
Gillard wants to help the most needy but her new tax is hardly foolproof.
ONE criticism made about the flood levy is that "taxation" is the wrong sort of instrument to provide disaster relief, that there is something unseemly about forcing people to give charity, especially when the recipients are our compatriots. "Mates," Tony Abbott tells us, "help each other; they don't tax each other."
In a world where we could rely on people freely dipping into their pockets to solve the world's problems, there might be something to this criticism. But people don't dip into their pockets nearly often - or deep - enough.
According to the Giving Australia report, published in October 2005, voluntary giving in Australia amounts to only 0.68 per cent of GDP (less than half of what Americans give). Of this, only about an eighth goes to people overseas.
This might explain why we resort to taxes to provide much of our foreign aid. But even the foreign aid we give through taxes - about 0.35 per cent of gross national income - is far from enough. When Haiti was rocked by an earthquake last year - a disaster far more costly in monetary and humanitarian terms - Australia provided only $15 million in aid (less than 1 per cent of the $1.8 billion that the government plans to raise through the flood levy).
This is not to criticise or belittle the provision of much-needed support to flood-affected areas. It is only right that we, as fellow citizens, should support those devastated by the recent floods. But do we do enough to help those in need when they are not our "mates"? Are fellow citizens really 100 times more deserving of our support than victims of overseas disasters? We go out of our way to help disaster victims in our own country but we incarcerate people fleeing disasters overseas.
There is nothing fundamentally unjust or unfair about the idea of using taxation to raise aid. The federal government has imposed similar levies before, often for less urgent needs. Nonetheless, the government must ensure that the levy does not exacerbate existing disadvantage.
The purpose of redistributing wealth through taxation should be to alleviate the hardship of those who are worse off, to improve the life chances of the disadvantaged so that it is not only the wealthy who have the opportunity to lead a flourishing life. Taxes that take from the worse off and give to the better off aggravate social disadvantage by increasing the inequality in life chances between the rich and the poor.
The government has rightly made the flood levy a progressive tax, charging people according to their ability to pay.
Much has also been made about those affected by the floods not being asked to pay the levy. This means that anyone who has received either a Disaster Recovery Payment or a Disaster Income Recovery Subsidy will be exempt. But these payments are not means tested. People who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year are eligible for these payments. Anyone who was "stranded within their home or unable to gain access to their residence for at least 24 hours, or whose principal place of residence was without electricity, water, gas, sewerage or another essential service for at least 48 hours" is eligible for the payment, while anyone who can demonstrate a direct loss of income from the floods is eligible for the income subsidy.
Even if they don't need these payments, affluent households may still claim them simply to avoid the flood levy, and so many of those living in multimillion-dollar homes along the Brisbane River may well be exempt from paying.
But surely they have a much greater ability to contribute to the costs of rebuilding Queensland than families living on just $55,000 a year in non-flood-affected areas. Since some of the levy will be used to cover the costs of the Disaster Recovery Payment and Income Recovery Subsidy, the levy may well also end up diverting income from the poor to the rich.
There are, of course, a great many people who are very badly off as a result of the floods and in genuine need of assistance, particularly low-income households who thought they were insured against flood damage only to discover that they were not.
The federal government has yet to provide details as to whether part of the levy will be used to help those whose homes are uninsured against flood damage. If it does decide to do so, let us hope that it will distribute this money fairly between flood victims, that claims will be means tested, and that people will not be entitled to more compensation simply because their homes are more valuable.
In the Christchurch earthquake, homes that sustained little damage other than to antique furniture and artwork are nevertheless entitled to compensation (up to $20,000). The mechanics of New Zealand's earthquake fund are very different to the flood levy (it is paid for by pooled insurance premium contributions), but let us hope that no such claims for compensation will be entertained by either the state or federal governments: that aid will be directed to those most in need and that the levy will not penalise the poor to cover the losses of the rich.
SOURCE
The NSW political disaster
The retirement of Bob Carr has exposed how little talent there is in NSW Labor
THE first electoral test of the year will be on March 26 when NSW voters go to the polls. Kristina Keneally must know it is therefore only a matter of months before she is out of the state's top job, which is why some inside the Labor Party are canvassing the possibility of her switching to federal politics, moving into the seat of Kingsford Smith if Peter Garrett chooses to call it quits.
But the fact that Labor has been in office in NSW for 16 long years is not the only reason that it is lurching towards a sizeable defeat. Policy decision making (or sometimes a lack thereof) is at the heart of voter disillusionment with the NSW Labor government.
Just before Christmas that feeling was once again fuelled when Treasurer Eric Roozendaal authorised the sale of the state's electricity services. It was a fire sale, reaping just over $5 billion (but really only $3bn because one of the conditions of the sale was that the government purchase a $2bn coal mine).
Carr tried to sell electricity assets in 1997 for approximately $30bn but was overruled by Labor's state conference and Morris Iemma tried again in 2007 for half that amount but was also overruled (being toppled as leader as a consequence).
The cheap price tag of today is doubly galling for voters, especially considering the opposition is opposed to the sale and would have retained the assets at least until they were able to get a better price once elected.
Keneally is for all intents and purposes presiding over a caretaker administration. She had no business allowing such a controversial sale right before an election, certainly not considering that to make it happen the government had to replace nine directors from the boards of the public electricity companies because they refused to approve the plan, believing it was a dud sale.
Throw in the fact that the man most likely to take over the reins for Labor after the election is John Roberston, the former union official who scuttled Iemma's bid to sell electricity assets at a more reasonable price three years ago - and the political damage this issue has caused Labor may not end on polling day.
But electricity privatisation isn't the only controversial policy area in NSW. The release of land for development has been slow. The alternative policy of creating inner-city density has upset local communities who feel crowded out by too many home units in their suburbs. And the state's infrastructure has been allowed to run down, even with a late injection of funds courtesy of the federal government's Infrastructure Australia fund.
What we will find out when Barry O'Farrell becomes premier after the March election is whether the problems of Sydney are simply big-city issues that are unavoidable when urban sprawl reaches the level it has in Australia's largest city, or whether the problems can be addressed by good management and a rationalisation of government services.
If the former is the case the Labor Party just might recover quickly to become politically competitive in Labor's favourite state. If, however, the latter is the case and O'Farrell repairs Labor's mess, it could be a long wait in the political wilderness for the NSW Labor machine and that would also have federal implications.
Julia Gillard will be hoping that with NSW Labor out of power she will be able to rebuild Labor's brand in the commonwealth's largest state. But she might want to think again about that prospect, because with voter angst so strongly opposed to the NSW Labor brand, the federal party will need to be careful, given the number of names in its ranks who built careers in NSW Labor.
SOURCE
Aid goes in too many directions, says report
AUSTRALIA'S overseas aid is often fragmented, poorly directed and difficult to evaluate, according to an annual report on the effectiveness of the government's overseas development program.
The report, by AusAID's internal watchdog, the Office of Development Effectiveness, praised the aid program's "impressive reach … and effectiveness", but said there were significant structural problems.
"AusAID does not have an overarching strategy on implementing the aid effectiveness agenda and has not clarified how to report against aid effectiveness principles," the report says.
"It needs a strategy for reporting that sets out benchmarks and targets for country and regional programs in terms of aid effectiveness principles."
The report, covering 2009 but made public only recently, comes soon after the Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, ordered the first independent review of the aid program in 15 years.
A panel will assess whether Australia's $4.3 billion in annual aid is being spent efficiently and make recommendations to improve its structure and delivery.
Since his appointment as foreign minister after the election in August, Mr Rudd has emphasised that Australia's aid program must be defined by its effectiveness as much as the total spent.
In October the government announced the number of Australian aid advisers in East Timor would be cut by a third, saving an estimated $3 million, which will be redirected to new and existing projects. The cuts followed a similar overhaul of the aid program in Papua New Guinea.
The report says there is a tendency to funnel aid money through the recipient governments, ignoring grassroots organisations.
"Much of the aid program's knowledge of governance and the public sector is at the national level and there is little understanding of the complex system that determines whether services are actually delivered," it says.
It also says there is an increasing tendency for more, smaller projects, noting the number of bilateral aid projects tripled between 1996 and 2006, more than double the increase in aid.
"An increase in the number of small activities increases the burden on partner countries, which have to manage, co-ordinate and monitor aid contributions," it says.
"Australia and its partner countries have made commitments to address proliferation, however, the data suggest that to date there has been a lack of follow-through."
SOURCE
Floods' economic pain is greatly exaggerated
Ross Gittins
Most of us are back at work, but the silly season won't be over until we get the Queensland floods into perspective. They are a great human tragedy, but they're not such a big deal for the economy.
It's not surprising the public has been so excited about such amazing scenes and so much loss of life and property. Nor is it surprising the media devoted so much coverage to the floods when, with most of us at the beach, there's been so little other news.
It's not even surprising the Gillard government has been beating up the story, making it out to be the biggest thing since the global financial crisis. At one level this is just the pollies doing their instinctive I-feel-your-pain routine. They could seem heartless if they tried telling people things weren't as bad as they seemed.
Advertisement: Story continues below
At another level it's easy to see Julia Gillard trying to gain the same boost to her popularity as Anna Bligh. She'd be well aware of all the seats Labor lost in Queensland at the election in August. It's an almost inevitable assumption by the punters and the media that if an event is huge in human and media terms it must be just as big in its effect on the economy. When the punters tire of seeing footage of people on roofs, you "take the story forward" by finding some expert who'll agree it also spells disaster for the economy.
The wise and much-loved econocrat Austin Holmes used to say that one of the most important skills an economist needed was "a sense of the relative magnitudes" - the ability to see whether something was big enough to be worth worrying about.
That sense has been absent from the comments of those business and academic economists on duty over the silly season, happily supplying the media's demand for comments confirming the immensity of the floods' economic and budgetary implications.
With the revelation last week of the econocrats' estimates of the likely magnitudes, it's clear the figures supplied by business economists were way too high. And the economists' furious debate over how the budgetary cost of the rebuilding effort should be financed is now revealed as utterly out of proportion to the modest sums involved.
Of course, you still wouldn't have twigged to this had you focused on the government's rhetoric rather than its figures. In Gillard's speech on the budgetary costs and Wayne Swan's speech on the economic impact both were busily exaggerating the size of the crisis, even while revealing how small it really was.
Gillard said it was "the most expensive disaster in Australia's history" and that the "cost to the economy is enormous". The government's task, she kept repeating, was to "rebuild Queensland".
Swan repeated that "this is likely to end up being the most costly disaster in Australian history", which was "going to cost Australia dearly" and involves a "massive reconstruction effort". The closest he got to the truth was his observation that "the economic questions pale into insignificance next to the human cost of what we've seen".
If this is the most expensive natural disaster in Australian history, all it proves is the cost of earlier disasters was negligible. If you can "rebuild Queensland" for just $5.6 billion, it must be a pretty tin-pot place.
If $5.6 billion seems a lot, consider some "relative magnitudes": the economy's annual production of goods and services (gross domestic product) totals $1400 billion, and the budget's annual revenue collections total $314 billion.
Note that, though no one's thought it worthy of mention, the $5.6 billion in spending will be spread over at least three financial years, making it that much easier to fund.
We know that more than a third of the $5.6 billion will be paid out in the present financial year with, presumably, most of the rest paid in 2011-12. So just how the flood reconstruction spending could threaten the budget's promised return to surplus in 2012-13 is something no one has explained.
And if $5.6 billion isn't all that significant in the scheme of things, how much less significant is the $1.8 billion to be raised from the tax levy? The fuss economists have been making about it tells us more about their hang-ups over taxation than their powers of economic analysis.
And how they can keep a straight face while claiming it could have a significant effect on consumer spending (well over $700 billion a year) is beyond me.
Turning from the budget to the economy, Treasury's estimate is that the floods will reduce gross domestic product by about 0.5 percentage points, with the effect concentrated in the March quarter.
Thereafter, however, the rebuilding effort - private as well as public - will add to GDP and probably largely offset the initial dip. So the floods will do more to change the profile of growth over the next year or two than to reduce the level it reaches.
Most of the temporary loss of production will be incurred by the Bowen Basin coal miners. But, though it won't show up directly in GDP, their revenue losses will be offset to some extent by the higher prices they'll be getting as a consequence of the global market's reaction to the disruption to supply.
And despite all the fuss the media have been making over higher fruit and vegetable prices, Treasury's best guess is that this will cause a spike of just 0.25 percentage points in the consumer price index for the March quarter, with prices falling back in subsequent quarters.
So the floods do precious little to change the previous reality that, with unemployment down to 5 per cent and a mining investment boom on the way, the economy is close to its capacity constraint and will soon need to be restrained by higher interest rates.
SOURCE
Floods levy may help rich and hurt poor
Gillard wants to help the most needy but her new tax is hardly foolproof.
ONE criticism made about the flood levy is that "taxation" is the wrong sort of instrument to provide disaster relief, that there is something unseemly about forcing people to give charity, especially when the recipients are our compatriots. "Mates," Tony Abbott tells us, "help each other; they don't tax each other."
In a world where we could rely on people freely dipping into their pockets to solve the world's problems, there might be something to this criticism. But people don't dip into their pockets nearly often - or deep - enough.
According to the Giving Australia report, published in October 2005, voluntary giving in Australia amounts to only 0.68 per cent of GDP (less than half of what Americans give). Of this, only about an eighth goes to people overseas.
This might explain why we resort to taxes to provide much of our foreign aid. But even the foreign aid we give through taxes - about 0.35 per cent of gross national income - is far from enough. When Haiti was rocked by an earthquake last year - a disaster far more costly in monetary and humanitarian terms - Australia provided only $15 million in aid (less than 1 per cent of the $1.8 billion that the government plans to raise through the flood levy).
This is not to criticise or belittle the provision of much-needed support to flood-affected areas. It is only right that we, as fellow citizens, should support those devastated by the recent floods. But do we do enough to help those in need when they are not our "mates"? Are fellow citizens really 100 times more deserving of our support than victims of overseas disasters? We go out of our way to help disaster victims in our own country but we incarcerate people fleeing disasters overseas.
There is nothing fundamentally unjust or unfair about the idea of using taxation to raise aid. The federal government has imposed similar levies before, often for less urgent needs. Nonetheless, the government must ensure that the levy does not exacerbate existing disadvantage.
The purpose of redistributing wealth through taxation should be to alleviate the hardship of those who are worse off, to improve the life chances of the disadvantaged so that it is not only the wealthy who have the opportunity to lead a flourishing life. Taxes that take from the worse off and give to the better off aggravate social disadvantage by increasing the inequality in life chances between the rich and the poor.
The government has rightly made the flood levy a progressive tax, charging people according to their ability to pay.
Much has also been made about those affected by the floods not being asked to pay the levy. This means that anyone who has received either a Disaster Recovery Payment or a Disaster Income Recovery Subsidy will be exempt. But these payments are not means tested. People who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year are eligible for these payments. Anyone who was "stranded within their home or unable to gain access to their residence for at least 24 hours, or whose principal place of residence was without electricity, water, gas, sewerage or another essential service for at least 48 hours" is eligible for the payment, while anyone who can demonstrate a direct loss of income from the floods is eligible for the income subsidy.
Even if they don't need these payments, affluent households may still claim them simply to avoid the flood levy, and so many of those living in multimillion-dollar homes along the Brisbane River may well be exempt from paying.
But surely they have a much greater ability to contribute to the costs of rebuilding Queensland than families living on just $55,000 a year in non-flood-affected areas. Since some of the levy will be used to cover the costs of the Disaster Recovery Payment and Income Recovery Subsidy, the levy may well also end up diverting income from the poor to the rich.
There are, of course, a great many people who are very badly off as a result of the floods and in genuine need of assistance, particularly low-income households who thought they were insured against flood damage only to discover that they were not.
The federal government has yet to provide details as to whether part of the levy will be used to help those whose homes are uninsured against flood damage. If it does decide to do so, let us hope that it will distribute this money fairly between flood victims, that claims will be means tested, and that people will not be entitled to more compensation simply because their homes are more valuable.
In the Christchurch earthquake, homes that sustained little damage other than to antique furniture and artwork are nevertheless entitled to compensation (up to $20,000). The mechanics of New Zealand's earthquake fund are very different to the flood levy (it is paid for by pooled insurance premium contributions), but let us hope that no such claims for compensation will be entertained by either the state or federal governments: that aid will be directed to those most in need and that the levy will not penalise the poor to cover the losses of the rich.
SOURCE
The NSW political disaster
The retirement of Bob Carr has exposed how little talent there is in NSW Labor
THE first electoral test of the year will be on March 26 when NSW voters go to the polls. Kristina Keneally must know it is therefore only a matter of months before she is out of the state's top job, which is why some inside the Labor Party are canvassing the possibility of her switching to federal politics, moving into the seat of Kingsford Smith if Peter Garrett chooses to call it quits.
But the fact that Labor has been in office in NSW for 16 long years is not the only reason that it is lurching towards a sizeable defeat. Policy decision making (or sometimes a lack thereof) is at the heart of voter disillusionment with the NSW Labor government.
Just before Christmas that feeling was once again fuelled when Treasurer Eric Roozendaal authorised the sale of the state's electricity services. It was a fire sale, reaping just over $5 billion (but really only $3bn because one of the conditions of the sale was that the government purchase a $2bn coal mine).
Carr tried to sell electricity assets in 1997 for approximately $30bn but was overruled by Labor's state conference and Morris Iemma tried again in 2007 for half that amount but was also overruled (being toppled as leader as a consequence).
The cheap price tag of today is doubly galling for voters, especially considering the opposition is opposed to the sale and would have retained the assets at least until they were able to get a better price once elected.
Keneally is for all intents and purposes presiding over a caretaker administration. She had no business allowing such a controversial sale right before an election, certainly not considering that to make it happen the government had to replace nine directors from the boards of the public electricity companies because they refused to approve the plan, believing it was a dud sale.
Throw in the fact that the man most likely to take over the reins for Labor after the election is John Roberston, the former union official who scuttled Iemma's bid to sell electricity assets at a more reasonable price three years ago - and the political damage this issue has caused Labor may not end on polling day.
But electricity privatisation isn't the only controversial policy area in NSW. The release of land for development has been slow. The alternative policy of creating inner-city density has upset local communities who feel crowded out by too many home units in their suburbs. And the state's infrastructure has been allowed to run down, even with a late injection of funds courtesy of the federal government's Infrastructure Australia fund.
What we will find out when Barry O'Farrell becomes premier after the March election is whether the problems of Sydney are simply big-city issues that are unavoidable when urban sprawl reaches the level it has in Australia's largest city, or whether the problems can be addressed by good management and a rationalisation of government services.
If the former is the case the Labor Party just might recover quickly to become politically competitive in Labor's favourite state. If, however, the latter is the case and O'Farrell repairs Labor's mess, it could be a long wait in the political wilderness for the NSW Labor machine and that would also have federal implications.
Julia Gillard will be hoping that with NSW Labor out of power she will be able to rebuild Labor's brand in the commonwealth's largest state. But she might want to think again about that prospect, because with voter angst so strongly opposed to the NSW Labor brand, the federal party will need to be careful, given the number of names in its ranks who built careers in NSW Labor.
SOURCE
Aid goes in too many directions, says report
AUSTRALIA'S overseas aid is often fragmented, poorly directed and difficult to evaluate, according to an annual report on the effectiveness of the government's overseas development program.
The report, by AusAID's internal watchdog, the Office of Development Effectiveness, praised the aid program's "impressive reach … and effectiveness", but said there were significant structural problems.
"AusAID does not have an overarching strategy on implementing the aid effectiveness agenda and has not clarified how to report against aid effectiveness principles," the report says.
"It needs a strategy for reporting that sets out benchmarks and targets for country and regional programs in terms of aid effectiveness principles."
The report, covering 2009 but made public only recently, comes soon after the Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, ordered the first independent review of the aid program in 15 years.
A panel will assess whether Australia's $4.3 billion in annual aid is being spent efficiently and make recommendations to improve its structure and delivery.
Since his appointment as foreign minister after the election in August, Mr Rudd has emphasised that Australia's aid program must be defined by its effectiveness as much as the total spent.
In October the government announced the number of Australian aid advisers in East Timor would be cut by a third, saving an estimated $3 million, which will be redirected to new and existing projects. The cuts followed a similar overhaul of the aid program in Papua New Guinea.
The report says there is a tendency to funnel aid money through the recipient governments, ignoring grassroots organisations.
"Much of the aid program's knowledge of governance and the public sector is at the national level and there is little understanding of the complex system that determines whether services are actually delivered," it says.
It also says there is an increasing tendency for more, smaller projects, noting the number of bilateral aid projects tripled between 1996 and 2006, more than double the increase in aid.
"An increase in the number of small activities increases the burden on partner countries, which have to manage, co-ordinate and monitor aid contributions," it says.
"Australia and its partner countries have made commitments to address proliferation, however, the data suggest that to date there has been a lack of follow-through."
SOURCE
Ross Gittins
Most of us are back at work, but the silly season won't be over until we get the Queensland floods into perspective. They are a great human tragedy, but they're not such a big deal for the economy.
It's not surprising the public has been so excited about such amazing scenes and so much loss of life and property. Nor is it surprising the media devoted so much coverage to the floods when, with most of us at the beach, there's been so little other news.
It's not even surprising the Gillard government has been beating up the story, making it out to be the biggest thing since the global financial crisis. At one level this is just the pollies doing their instinctive I-feel-your-pain routine. They could seem heartless if they tried telling people things weren't as bad as they seemed.
Advertisement: Story continues below
At another level it's easy to see Julia Gillard trying to gain the same boost to her popularity as Anna Bligh. She'd be well aware of all the seats Labor lost in Queensland at the election in August. It's an almost inevitable assumption by the punters and the media that if an event is huge in human and media terms it must be just as big in its effect on the economy. When the punters tire of seeing footage of people on roofs, you "take the story forward" by finding some expert who'll agree it also spells disaster for the economy.
The wise and much-loved econocrat Austin Holmes used to say that one of the most important skills an economist needed was "a sense of the relative magnitudes" - the ability to see whether something was big enough to be worth worrying about.
That sense has been absent from the comments of those business and academic economists on duty over the silly season, happily supplying the media's demand for comments confirming the immensity of the floods' economic and budgetary implications.
With the revelation last week of the econocrats' estimates of the likely magnitudes, it's clear the figures supplied by business economists were way too high. And the economists' furious debate over how the budgetary cost of the rebuilding effort should be financed is now revealed as utterly out of proportion to the modest sums involved.
Of course, you still wouldn't have twigged to this had you focused on the government's rhetoric rather than its figures. In Gillard's speech on the budgetary costs and Wayne Swan's speech on the economic impact both were busily exaggerating the size of the crisis, even while revealing how small it really was.
Gillard said it was "the most expensive disaster in Australia's history" and that the "cost to the economy is enormous". The government's task, she kept repeating, was to "rebuild Queensland".
Swan repeated that "this is likely to end up being the most costly disaster in Australian history", which was "going to cost Australia dearly" and involves a "massive reconstruction effort". The closest he got to the truth was his observation that "the economic questions pale into insignificance next to the human cost of what we've seen".
If this is the most expensive natural disaster in Australian history, all it proves is the cost of earlier disasters was negligible. If you can "rebuild Queensland" for just $5.6 billion, it must be a pretty tin-pot place.
If $5.6 billion seems a lot, consider some "relative magnitudes": the economy's annual production of goods and services (gross domestic product) totals $1400 billion, and the budget's annual revenue collections total $314 billion.
Note that, though no one's thought it worthy of mention, the $5.6 billion in spending will be spread over at least three financial years, making it that much easier to fund.
We know that more than a third of the $5.6 billion will be paid out in the present financial year with, presumably, most of the rest paid in 2011-12. So just how the flood reconstruction spending could threaten the budget's promised return to surplus in 2012-13 is something no one has explained.
And if $5.6 billion isn't all that significant in the scheme of things, how much less significant is the $1.8 billion to be raised from the tax levy? The fuss economists have been making about it tells us more about their hang-ups over taxation than their powers of economic analysis.
And how they can keep a straight face while claiming it could have a significant effect on consumer spending (well over $700 billion a year) is beyond me.
Turning from the budget to the economy, Treasury's estimate is that the floods will reduce gross domestic product by about 0.5 percentage points, with the effect concentrated in the March quarter.
Thereafter, however, the rebuilding effort - private as well as public - will add to GDP and probably largely offset the initial dip. So the floods will do more to change the profile of growth over the next year or two than to reduce the level it reaches.
Most of the temporary loss of production will be incurred by the Bowen Basin coal miners. But, though it won't show up directly in GDP, their revenue losses will be offset to some extent by the higher prices they'll be getting as a consequence of the global market's reaction to the disruption to supply.
And despite all the fuss the media have been making over higher fruit and vegetable prices, Treasury's best guess is that this will cause a spike of just 0.25 percentage points in the consumer price index for the March quarter, with prices falling back in subsequent quarters.
So the floods do precious little to change the previous reality that, with unemployment down to 5 per cent and a mining investment boom on the way, the economy is close to its capacity constraint and will soon need to be restrained by higher interest rates.
SOURCE
Floods levy may help rich and hurt poor
Gillard wants to help the most needy but her new tax is hardly foolproof.
ONE criticism made about the flood levy is that "taxation" is the wrong sort of instrument to provide disaster relief, that there is something unseemly about forcing people to give charity, especially when the recipients are our compatriots. "Mates," Tony Abbott tells us, "help each other; they don't tax each other."
In a world where we could rely on people freely dipping into their pockets to solve the world's problems, there might be something to this criticism. But people don't dip into their pockets nearly often - or deep - enough.
According to the Giving Australia report, published in October 2005, voluntary giving in Australia amounts to only 0.68 per cent of GDP (less than half of what Americans give). Of this, only about an eighth goes to people overseas.
This might explain why we resort to taxes to provide much of our foreign aid. But even the foreign aid we give through taxes - about 0.35 per cent of gross national income - is far from enough. When Haiti was rocked by an earthquake last year - a disaster far more costly in monetary and humanitarian terms - Australia provided only $15 million in aid (less than 1 per cent of the $1.8 billion that the government plans to raise through the flood levy).
This is not to criticise or belittle the provision of much-needed support to flood-affected areas. It is only right that we, as fellow citizens, should support those devastated by the recent floods. But do we do enough to help those in need when they are not our "mates"? Are fellow citizens really 100 times more deserving of our support than victims of overseas disasters? We go out of our way to help disaster victims in our own country but we incarcerate people fleeing disasters overseas.
There is nothing fundamentally unjust or unfair about the idea of using taxation to raise aid. The federal government has imposed similar levies before, often for less urgent needs. Nonetheless, the government must ensure that the levy does not exacerbate existing disadvantage.
The purpose of redistributing wealth through taxation should be to alleviate the hardship of those who are worse off, to improve the life chances of the disadvantaged so that it is not only the wealthy who have the opportunity to lead a flourishing life. Taxes that take from the worse off and give to the better off aggravate social disadvantage by increasing the inequality in life chances between the rich and the poor.
The government has rightly made the flood levy a progressive tax, charging people according to their ability to pay.
Much has also been made about those affected by the floods not being asked to pay the levy. This means that anyone who has received either a Disaster Recovery Payment or a Disaster Income Recovery Subsidy will be exempt. But these payments are not means tested. People who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars a year are eligible for these payments. Anyone who was "stranded within their home or unable to gain access to their residence for at least 24 hours, or whose principal place of residence was without electricity, water, gas, sewerage or another essential service for at least 48 hours" is eligible for the payment, while anyone who can demonstrate a direct loss of income from the floods is eligible for the income subsidy.
Even if they don't need these payments, affluent households may still claim them simply to avoid the flood levy, and so many of those living in multimillion-dollar homes along the Brisbane River may well be exempt from paying.
But surely they have a much greater ability to contribute to the costs of rebuilding Queensland than families living on just $55,000 a year in non-flood-affected areas. Since some of the levy will be used to cover the costs of the Disaster Recovery Payment and Income Recovery Subsidy, the levy may well also end up diverting income from the poor to the rich.
There are, of course, a great many people who are very badly off as a result of the floods and in genuine need of assistance, particularly low-income households who thought they were insured against flood damage only to discover that they were not.
The federal government has yet to provide details as to whether part of the levy will be used to help those whose homes are uninsured against flood damage. If it does decide to do so, let us hope that it will distribute this money fairly between flood victims, that claims will be means tested, and that people will not be entitled to more compensation simply because their homes are more valuable.
In the Christchurch earthquake, homes that sustained little damage other than to antique furniture and artwork are nevertheless entitled to compensation (up to $20,000). The mechanics of New Zealand's earthquake fund are very different to the flood levy (it is paid for by pooled insurance premium contributions), but let us hope that no such claims for compensation will be entertained by either the state or federal governments: that aid will be directed to those most in need and that the levy will not penalise the poor to cover the losses of the rich.
SOURCE
The NSW political disaster
The retirement of Bob Carr has exposed how little talent there is in NSW Labor
THE first electoral test of the year will be on March 26 when NSW voters go to the polls. Kristina Keneally must know it is therefore only a matter of months before she is out of the state's top job, which is why some inside the Labor Party are canvassing the possibility of her switching to federal politics, moving into the seat of Kingsford Smith if Peter Garrett chooses to call it quits.
But the fact that Labor has been in office in NSW for 16 long years is not the only reason that it is lurching towards a sizeable defeat. Policy decision making (or sometimes a lack thereof) is at the heart of voter disillusionment with the NSW Labor government.
Just before Christmas that feeling was once again fuelled when Treasurer Eric Roozendaal authorised the sale of the state's electricity services. It was a fire sale, reaping just over $5 billion (but really only $3bn because one of the conditions of the sale was that the government purchase a $2bn coal mine).
Carr tried to sell electricity assets in 1997 for approximately $30bn but was overruled by Labor's state conference and Morris Iemma tried again in 2007 for half that amount but was also overruled (being toppled as leader as a consequence).
The cheap price tag of today is doubly galling for voters, especially considering the opposition is opposed to the sale and would have retained the assets at least until they were able to get a better price once elected.
Keneally is for all intents and purposes presiding over a caretaker administration. She had no business allowing such a controversial sale right before an election, certainly not considering that to make it happen the government had to replace nine directors from the boards of the public electricity companies because they refused to approve the plan, believing it was a dud sale.
Throw in the fact that the man most likely to take over the reins for Labor after the election is John Roberston, the former union official who scuttled Iemma's bid to sell electricity assets at a more reasonable price three years ago - and the political damage this issue has caused Labor may not end on polling day.
But electricity privatisation isn't the only controversial policy area in NSW. The release of land for development has been slow. The alternative policy of creating inner-city density has upset local communities who feel crowded out by too many home units in their suburbs. And the state's infrastructure has been allowed to run down, even with a late injection of funds courtesy of the federal government's Infrastructure Australia fund.
What we will find out when Barry O'Farrell becomes premier after the March election is whether the problems of Sydney are simply big-city issues that are unavoidable when urban sprawl reaches the level it has in Australia's largest city, or whether the problems can be addressed by good management and a rationalisation of government services.
If the former is the case the Labor Party just might recover quickly to become politically competitive in Labor's favourite state. If, however, the latter is the case and O'Farrell repairs Labor's mess, it could be a long wait in the political wilderness for the NSW Labor machine and that would also have federal implications.
Julia Gillard will be hoping that with NSW Labor out of power she will be able to rebuild Labor's brand in the commonwealth's largest state. But she might want to think again about that prospect, because with voter angst so strongly opposed to the NSW Labor brand, the federal party will need to be careful, given the number of names in its ranks who built careers in NSW Labor.
SOURCE
Aid goes in too many directions, says report
AUSTRALIA'S overseas aid is often fragmented, poorly directed and difficult to evaluate, according to an annual report on the effectiveness of the government's overseas development program.
The report, by AusAID's internal watchdog, the Office of Development Effectiveness, praised the aid program's "impressive reach … and effectiveness", but said there were significant structural problems.
"AusAID does not have an overarching strategy on implementing the aid effectiveness agenda and has not clarified how to report against aid effectiveness principles," the report says.
"It needs a strategy for reporting that sets out benchmarks and targets for country and regional programs in terms of aid effectiveness principles."
The report, covering 2009 but made public only recently, comes soon after the Foreign Affairs Minister, Kevin Rudd, ordered the first independent review of the aid program in 15 years.
A panel will assess whether Australia's $4.3 billion in annual aid is being spent efficiently and make recommendations to improve its structure and delivery.
Since his appointment as foreign minister after the election in August, Mr Rudd has emphasised that Australia's aid program must be defined by its effectiveness as much as the total spent.
In October the government announced the number of Australian aid advisers in East Timor would be cut by a third, saving an estimated $3 million, which will be redirected to new and existing projects. The cuts followed a similar overhaul of the aid program in Papua New Guinea.
The report says there is a tendency to funnel aid money through the recipient governments, ignoring grassroots organisations.
"Much of the aid program's knowledge of governance and the public sector is at the national level and there is little understanding of the complex system that determines whether services are actually delivered," it says.
It also says there is an increasing tendency for more, smaller projects, noting the number of bilateral aid projects tripled between 1996 and 2006, more than double the increase in aid.
"An increase in the number of small activities increases the burden on partner countries, which have to manage, co-ordinate and monitor aid contributions," it says.
"Australia and its partner countries have made commitments to address proliferation, however, the data suggest that to date there has been a lack of follow-through."
SOURCE
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Tony Abbott says Julia Gillard's flood levy is to cover her overspending
OPPOSITION leader Tony Abbott is urging rural independent MPs to ditch their support for Prime Minister Julia Gillard, accusing her of using the floods to mask her government's spending addiction.
In a speech to the Young Liberals convention on the Gold Coast today, Mr Abbott ramped up his criticism of the federal government's flood levy to rebuild Queensland's infrastructure.
Also today, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally continued to push for changes to the national flood levy due to the high cost of living in Sydney, despite Ms Gillard ruling out any special treatment, and Treasurer Wayne Swan said he felt sickened Mr Abbott was putting his own political ambitions ahead of rebuilding the shattered lives of Queensland flood victims.
Ms Gillard, on Thursday, announced the government would impose a one-off, modest flood levy on taxpayers earning more than $50,000.
"A prime minister who's unconvincing when responding to a natural disaster is unlikely to solve the much more politically and administratively complex problems that she had previously set herself to fix," Mr Abbott told the audience. "Like the global financial crisis under Kevin Rudd, the government could use the floods as a justification for its spending addiction and as a licensed distraction from actually delivering on its promises.
"At some point, the independent MPs who returned the government to office could start to reconsider their decision."
Mr Abbott said Ms Gillard will face a voter backlash. "The Prime Minister is pitching it as a mateship tax even though mateship is about helping people, not taxing them," he said. "Mates choose to help; they're not coerced. Mateship comes from people, not from government. People resent being ordered to pay what they'd gladly give of their own volition especially by a government so reckless with taxpayers' money.
"Invoking a disaster to justify a tax, compounds the allegedly wooden demeanour that Julia Gillard showed during the floods with a tin ear afterwards."
He conceded the federal government will have to cover the lion's share of the repair bill for damaged infrastructure but said money could be found elsewhere.
"Flood victims simply can't be without the roads and the railways which are necessary for modern life," he said. "(The bill) will run into billions of dollars but that's no excuse for the flood tax ... there's about $2 billion uncommitted in various funds."
Mr Abbott urged Ms Gillard to drop the tax for the "spirit of national unity". "She apparently can't grasp the rip-off involved in taxing people in order to be generous to them," he said. "Two years ago, the government sent out $900 cheques to almost nine million people. Now, it's effectively taking the money back."
More here
Nanny-staters think that people read labels
The few who do are probably careful about what they eat and drink anyway. The New York experience shows that the sort of labelling advocated below will achieve nothing. Do the brainiacs below think Australians are more sophisticated than New Yorkers? Good luck with that assumption
FOOD police would enforce labels showing nutritional value on packaging and cigarette-style health warnings on alcohol under changes recommended for national laws.
A report released yesterday to improve food labelling laws in Australia and New Zealand contains 61 recommendations, including dropping mandatory "per serve" columns while explicitly stating the inclusion of trans-fats and salt content.
The report, Labelling Logic, was commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand Food Regulation Ministerial Council in October 2009 and compiled by a panel of independent experts, led by former federal health minister Dr Neal Blewett.
Information about food safety would be of primary importance followed by preventative health, new technologies such as genetic modification and lastly consumer values like "free range".
"The crux of the review was to address the tensions between competing interests that drive food labelling policy and seek to resolve them," Dr Blewett said.
Some of the recommendations call for food manufacturers to voluntarily adopt proposals such as a traffic light front-of-pack labelling system before they are legislated.
Food manufacturers attacked the traffic light recommendation, arguing there was a lack of consensus on the best way to label food. "The industry rejects traffic light labelling on the basis that it's badly understood by consumers and the system has been rejected by countries around the world," Australian Food and Grocery Council CEO Kate Carnell said.
The Federal Government has until December to respond to the recommendations.
The State Government has welcomed the review, which recommends fast food chains and vending machines declare energy (kilojoule) content - a move introduced in New South Wales last November which takes effect from February 1.
Under the recommendations, country-of-origin labelling would be tightened along with mandatory identification of any food prepared or treated with new technologies.
Alcoholic beverages would have generic health warnings including specific messages about the risks of drinking while pregnant. Alcoholic drink labels would also have to reveal their energy content.
SOURCE
Get tough on Victoria's bad school teachers, say parents
VICTORIAN parents want bad teachers sacked and schools with poor results to be named and shamed. A national schools survey found most of the state's parents feared their children would fall victim to physical or cyber bullying and believed alcohol and drug abuse among students was getting worse.
Nearly 5000 Australians responded to the Sunday Herald Sun online survey, revealing parents wanted schools and teachers to be more accountable for their children's performance at school.
Responses from the 1646 Victorians surveyed showed parents and teachers were often at loggerheads about what was best for students. At the heart of the great divide was parents' demands for more information about their children's schools and for teachers who don't make the grade to be sacked.
Of 794 Victorian parents surveyed, 63 per cent believed the worst-performing teachers needed to be expelled from the education system. On the flip side, teachers achieving good academic results should be paid more than their colleagues, according to 79 per cent of parents.
Schools were also in the firing line, with 67 per cent of parents calling for a rating system for schools, and more than half saying under-performing schools should be publicly named and shamed.
Mordialloc mother Jenny Power, who has two school-age children, called on the Department of Education to provide more information on schools' academic performances. "Most parents are limited for choice when it comes to schools, but it would be nice to know how your own kid's school stacks up against the others," Ms Power said. "If teachers aren't achieving what they should in the classroom, they shouldn't be there, just like any other profession."
But Australian Education Union president Mary Bluett said ranking schools and sacking low-performing teachers was a simplistic approach to fixing a complex system. "Education does suffer from the fact that everyone has been to school and everyone thinks they are an expert," Ms Bluett said. "Certainly, nobody wants incompetent teachers, but having said that, I'm happy to say the overwhelming majority of teachers are very competent."
Ms Bluett said existing ways to measure schools' performances - including NAPLAN tests - didn't give an accurate picture of teaching standards.
Up to 76 per cent of teachers were against ranking schools and only 13 per cent supported naming and shaming schools that under-perform in numeracy and literacy.
More here
Victorian Labor government ignored flood advice
They probably believed Greenie prophecies of drought
THE Brumby government knew for three years that Victoria was ill-equipped to deal with flood disasters but ignored recommendations to introduce a warning system that had the backing of the state's top emergency services and weather experts.
A report prepared for the Brumby government in 2007 said the Google Maps-style, web-based system would reduce losses, damage and injury, and save $16.5 million from Victoria's average annual flood bill, estimated at $350 million.
The report, released by the Baillieu government yesterday as northern Victoria continued to battle a massive inland sea, said such a system would greatly improve the co-ordination and response of emergency services that were relying on "skeletal information" to predict how and when flood waters would hit communities.
The Baillieu government yesterday vowed to explore the sort of state-of-the-art flood management system Labor had ignored.
A government spokesman slammed the previous government, accusing it of neglectfully ignoring funding requests for a system that would allow the public, emergency services and the media to predict and analyse floodwaters more accurately.
In the October 2007 report, Labor was told by its public service that it could "vastly improve" flood management by investing in an $11 million system called FloodZoom, which would use weather forecasts, satellite observations, river gauges and hydraulic modelling to simulate the depth and spread of flood waters.
The system was backed at the time by the State Emergency Service, Melbourne Water, the Bureau of Meteorology, the State Flood Policy Committee and the then emergency services commissioner, Bruce Esplin, who saw the need for better communication and warning systems after the Gippsland floods of 2007.
Speaking to The Sunday Age yesterday, Mr Esplin, who recently resigned after a decade as the state's top emergency manager, said the system "would provide a way for the community and the media to understand what floodwaters are doing" and limit the need for people to call Triple 0 for information.
A Baillieu government spokesman said it was committed to implementing a better statewide flood warning and management system. "The Brumby government had ignored at least three years of strong recommendations to implement better flood management and warning systems in Victoria. The neglect … is appalling," the spokesman said.
But Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews said the Premier was playing cheap politics when he should be "spending all his time supporting flood victims". "While thousands of Victorians are still devastated by these floods, it is disgraceful that Ted Baillieu is playing politics with this issue," Mr Andrews said.
Labor sources said the bid for a better flood management system had been one of many proposals fighting for limited funds as part of the state innovation strategy. Also, they said, in 2007 Victoria was in drought, and the government would have been criticised for diverting money to flood management.
The Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development report warned:
* The state had "significant deficiency" in its emergency response to flood, and emergency workers had few tools to issue accurate flood warnings, leading to most major floods being "characterised by confusion and uncertainty".
* It was difficult to provide a clear depiction of the extent, severity and movement of a live flood situation or to answer questions about likely developments over hours and days under different weather conditions.
Residents in Wickliffe, in the state's west, called for a better warning system after they were forced to make hasty evacuations from floodwaters in the early hours of January 15. They said there had been no warnings that the town was at risk of flood.
SOURCE
OPPOSITION leader Tony Abbott is urging rural independent MPs to ditch their support for Prime Minister Julia Gillard, accusing her of using the floods to mask her government's spending addiction.
In a speech to the Young Liberals convention on the Gold Coast today, Mr Abbott ramped up his criticism of the federal government's flood levy to rebuild Queensland's infrastructure.
Also today, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally continued to push for changes to the national flood levy due to the high cost of living in Sydney, despite Ms Gillard ruling out any special treatment, and Treasurer Wayne Swan said he felt sickened Mr Abbott was putting his own political ambitions ahead of rebuilding the shattered lives of Queensland flood victims.
Ms Gillard, on Thursday, announced the government would impose a one-off, modest flood levy on taxpayers earning more than $50,000.
"A prime minister who's unconvincing when responding to a natural disaster is unlikely to solve the much more politically and administratively complex problems that she had previously set herself to fix," Mr Abbott told the audience. "Like the global financial crisis under Kevin Rudd, the government could use the floods as a justification for its spending addiction and as a licensed distraction from actually delivering on its promises.
"At some point, the independent MPs who returned the government to office could start to reconsider their decision."
Mr Abbott said Ms Gillard will face a voter backlash. "The Prime Minister is pitching it as a mateship tax even though mateship is about helping people, not taxing them," he said. "Mates choose to help; they're not coerced. Mateship comes from people, not from government. People resent being ordered to pay what they'd gladly give of their own volition especially by a government so reckless with taxpayers' money.
"Invoking a disaster to justify a tax, compounds the allegedly wooden demeanour that Julia Gillard showed during the floods with a tin ear afterwards."
He conceded the federal government will have to cover the lion's share of the repair bill for damaged infrastructure but said money could be found elsewhere.
"Flood victims simply can't be without the roads and the railways which are necessary for modern life," he said. "(The bill) will run into billions of dollars but that's no excuse for the flood tax ... there's about $2 billion uncommitted in various funds."
Mr Abbott urged Ms Gillard to drop the tax for the "spirit of national unity". "She apparently can't grasp the rip-off involved in taxing people in order to be generous to them," he said. "Two years ago, the government sent out $900 cheques to almost nine million people. Now, it's effectively taking the money back."
More here
Nanny-staters think that people read labels
The few who do are probably careful about what they eat and drink anyway. The New York experience shows that the sort of labelling advocated below will achieve nothing. Do the brainiacs below think Australians are more sophisticated than New Yorkers? Good luck with that assumption
FOOD police would enforce labels showing nutritional value on packaging and cigarette-style health warnings on alcohol under changes recommended for national laws.
A report released yesterday to improve food labelling laws in Australia and New Zealand contains 61 recommendations, including dropping mandatory "per serve" columns while explicitly stating the inclusion of trans-fats and salt content.
The report, Labelling Logic, was commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand Food Regulation Ministerial Council in October 2009 and compiled by a panel of independent experts, led by former federal health minister Dr Neal Blewett.
Information about food safety would be of primary importance followed by preventative health, new technologies such as genetic modification and lastly consumer values like "free range".
"The crux of the review was to address the tensions between competing interests that drive food labelling policy and seek to resolve them," Dr Blewett said.
Some of the recommendations call for food manufacturers to voluntarily adopt proposals such as a traffic light front-of-pack labelling system before they are legislated.
Food manufacturers attacked the traffic light recommendation, arguing there was a lack of consensus on the best way to label food. "The industry rejects traffic light labelling on the basis that it's badly understood by consumers and the system has been rejected by countries around the world," Australian Food and Grocery Council CEO Kate Carnell said.
The Federal Government has until December to respond to the recommendations.
The State Government has welcomed the review, which recommends fast food chains and vending machines declare energy (kilojoule) content - a move introduced in New South Wales last November which takes effect from February 1.
Under the recommendations, country-of-origin labelling would be tightened along with mandatory identification of any food prepared or treated with new technologies.
Alcoholic beverages would have generic health warnings including specific messages about the risks of drinking while pregnant. Alcoholic drink labels would also have to reveal their energy content.
SOURCE
Get tough on Victoria's bad school teachers, say parents
VICTORIAN parents want bad teachers sacked and schools with poor results to be named and shamed. A national schools survey found most of the state's parents feared their children would fall victim to physical or cyber bullying and believed alcohol and drug abuse among students was getting worse.
Nearly 5000 Australians responded to the Sunday Herald Sun online survey, revealing parents wanted schools and teachers to be more accountable for their children's performance at school.
Responses from the 1646 Victorians surveyed showed parents and teachers were often at loggerheads about what was best for students. At the heart of the great divide was parents' demands for more information about their children's schools and for teachers who don't make the grade to be sacked.
Of 794 Victorian parents surveyed, 63 per cent believed the worst-performing teachers needed to be expelled from the education system. On the flip side, teachers achieving good academic results should be paid more than their colleagues, according to 79 per cent of parents.
Schools were also in the firing line, with 67 per cent of parents calling for a rating system for schools, and more than half saying under-performing schools should be publicly named and shamed.
Mordialloc mother Jenny Power, who has two school-age children, called on the Department of Education to provide more information on schools' academic performances. "Most parents are limited for choice when it comes to schools, but it would be nice to know how your own kid's school stacks up against the others," Ms Power said. "If teachers aren't achieving what they should in the classroom, they shouldn't be there, just like any other profession."
But Australian Education Union president Mary Bluett said ranking schools and sacking low-performing teachers was a simplistic approach to fixing a complex system. "Education does suffer from the fact that everyone has been to school and everyone thinks they are an expert," Ms Bluett said. "Certainly, nobody wants incompetent teachers, but having said that, I'm happy to say the overwhelming majority of teachers are very competent."
Ms Bluett said existing ways to measure schools' performances - including NAPLAN tests - didn't give an accurate picture of teaching standards.
Up to 76 per cent of teachers were against ranking schools and only 13 per cent supported naming and shaming schools that under-perform in numeracy and literacy.
More here
Victorian Labor government ignored flood advice
They probably believed Greenie prophecies of drought
THE Brumby government knew for three years that Victoria was ill-equipped to deal with flood disasters but ignored recommendations to introduce a warning system that had the backing of the state's top emergency services and weather experts.
A report prepared for the Brumby government in 2007 said the Google Maps-style, web-based system would reduce losses, damage and injury, and save $16.5 million from Victoria's average annual flood bill, estimated at $350 million.
The report, released by the Baillieu government yesterday as northern Victoria continued to battle a massive inland sea, said such a system would greatly improve the co-ordination and response of emergency services that were relying on "skeletal information" to predict how and when flood waters would hit communities.
The Baillieu government yesterday vowed to explore the sort of state-of-the-art flood management system Labor had ignored.
A government spokesman slammed the previous government, accusing it of neglectfully ignoring funding requests for a system that would allow the public, emergency services and the media to predict and analyse floodwaters more accurately.
In the October 2007 report, Labor was told by its public service that it could "vastly improve" flood management by investing in an $11 million system called FloodZoom, which would use weather forecasts, satellite observations, river gauges and hydraulic modelling to simulate the depth and spread of flood waters.
The system was backed at the time by the State Emergency Service, Melbourne Water, the Bureau of Meteorology, the State Flood Policy Committee and the then emergency services commissioner, Bruce Esplin, who saw the need for better communication and warning systems after the Gippsland floods of 2007.
Speaking to The Sunday Age yesterday, Mr Esplin, who recently resigned after a decade as the state's top emergency manager, said the system "would provide a way for the community and the media to understand what floodwaters are doing" and limit the need for people to call Triple 0 for information.
A Baillieu government spokesman said it was committed to implementing a better statewide flood warning and management system. "The Brumby government had ignored at least three years of strong recommendations to implement better flood management and warning systems in Victoria. The neglect … is appalling," the spokesman said.
But Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews said the Premier was playing cheap politics when he should be "spending all his time supporting flood victims". "While thousands of Victorians are still devastated by these floods, it is disgraceful that Ted Baillieu is playing politics with this issue," Mr Andrews said.
Labor sources said the bid for a better flood management system had been one of many proposals fighting for limited funds as part of the state innovation strategy. Also, they said, in 2007 Victoria was in drought, and the government would have been criticised for diverting money to flood management.
The Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development report warned:
* The state had "significant deficiency" in its emergency response to flood, and emergency workers had few tools to issue accurate flood warnings, leading to most major floods being "characterised by confusion and uncertainty".
* It was difficult to provide a clear depiction of the extent, severity and movement of a live flood situation or to answer questions about likely developments over hours and days under different weather conditions.
Residents in Wickliffe, in the state's west, called for a better warning system after they were forced to make hasty evacuations from floodwaters in the early hours of January 15. They said there had been no warnings that the town was at risk of flood.
SOURCE
Tony Abbott says Julia Gillard's flood levy is to cover her overspending
OPPOSITION leader Tony Abbott is urging rural independent MPs to ditch their support for Prime Minister Julia Gillard, accusing her of using the floods to mask her government's spending addiction.
In a speech to the Young Liberals convention on the Gold Coast today, Mr Abbott ramped up his criticism of the federal government's flood levy to rebuild Queensland's infrastructure.
Also today, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally continued to push for changes to the national flood levy due to the high cost of living in Sydney, despite Ms Gillard ruling out any special treatment, and Treasurer Wayne Swan said he felt sickened Mr Abbott was putting his own political ambitions ahead of rebuilding the shattered lives of Queensland flood victims.
Ms Gillard, on Thursday, announced the government would impose a one-off, modest flood levy on taxpayers earning more than $50,000.
"A prime minister who's unconvincing when responding to a natural disaster is unlikely to solve the much more politically and administratively complex problems that she had previously set herself to fix," Mr Abbott told the audience. "Like the global financial crisis under Kevin Rudd, the government could use the floods as a justification for its spending addiction and as a licensed distraction from actually delivering on its promises.
"At some point, the independent MPs who returned the government to office could start to reconsider their decision."
Mr Abbott said Ms Gillard will face a voter backlash. "The Prime Minister is pitching it as a mateship tax even though mateship is about helping people, not taxing them," he said. "Mates choose to help; they're not coerced. Mateship comes from people, not from government. People resent being ordered to pay what they'd gladly give of their own volition especially by a government so reckless with taxpayers' money.
"Invoking a disaster to justify a tax, compounds the allegedly wooden demeanour that Julia Gillard showed during the floods with a tin ear afterwards."
He conceded the federal government will have to cover the lion's share of the repair bill for damaged infrastructure but said money could be found elsewhere.
"Flood victims simply can't be without the roads and the railways which are necessary for modern life," he said. "(The bill) will run into billions of dollars but that's no excuse for the flood tax ... there's about $2 billion uncommitted in various funds."
Mr Abbott urged Ms Gillard to drop the tax for the "spirit of national unity". "She apparently can't grasp the rip-off involved in taxing people in order to be generous to them," he said. "Two years ago, the government sent out $900 cheques to almost nine million people. Now, it's effectively taking the money back."
More here
Nanny-staters think that people read labels
The few who do are probably careful about what they eat and drink anyway. The New York experience shows that the sort of labelling advocated below will achieve nothing. Do the brainiacs below think Australians are more sophisticated than New Yorkers? Good luck with that assumption
FOOD police would enforce labels showing nutritional value on packaging and cigarette-style health warnings on alcohol under changes recommended for national laws.
A report released yesterday to improve food labelling laws in Australia and New Zealand contains 61 recommendations, including dropping mandatory "per serve" columns while explicitly stating the inclusion of trans-fats and salt content.
The report, Labelling Logic, was commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand Food Regulation Ministerial Council in October 2009 and compiled by a panel of independent experts, led by former federal health minister Dr Neal Blewett.
Information about food safety would be of primary importance followed by preventative health, new technologies such as genetic modification and lastly consumer values like "free range".
"The crux of the review was to address the tensions between competing interests that drive food labelling policy and seek to resolve them," Dr Blewett said.
Some of the recommendations call for food manufacturers to voluntarily adopt proposals such as a traffic light front-of-pack labelling system before they are legislated.
Food manufacturers attacked the traffic light recommendation, arguing there was a lack of consensus on the best way to label food. "The industry rejects traffic light labelling on the basis that it's badly understood by consumers and the system has been rejected by countries around the world," Australian Food and Grocery Council CEO Kate Carnell said.
The Federal Government has until December to respond to the recommendations.
The State Government has welcomed the review, which recommends fast food chains and vending machines declare energy (kilojoule) content - a move introduced in New South Wales last November which takes effect from February 1.
Under the recommendations, country-of-origin labelling would be tightened along with mandatory identification of any food prepared or treated with new technologies.
Alcoholic beverages would have generic health warnings including specific messages about the risks of drinking while pregnant. Alcoholic drink labels would also have to reveal their energy content.
SOURCE
Get tough on Victoria's bad school teachers, say parents
VICTORIAN parents want bad teachers sacked and schools with poor results to be named and shamed. A national schools survey found most of the state's parents feared their children would fall victim to physical or cyber bullying and believed alcohol and drug abuse among students was getting worse.
Nearly 5000 Australians responded to the Sunday Herald Sun online survey, revealing parents wanted schools and teachers to be more accountable for their children's performance at school.
Responses from the 1646 Victorians surveyed showed parents and teachers were often at loggerheads about what was best for students. At the heart of the great divide was parents' demands for more information about their children's schools and for teachers who don't make the grade to be sacked.
Of 794 Victorian parents surveyed, 63 per cent believed the worst-performing teachers needed to be expelled from the education system. On the flip side, teachers achieving good academic results should be paid more than their colleagues, according to 79 per cent of parents.
Schools were also in the firing line, with 67 per cent of parents calling for a rating system for schools, and more than half saying under-performing schools should be publicly named and shamed.
Mordialloc mother Jenny Power, who has two school-age children, called on the Department of Education to provide more information on schools' academic performances. "Most parents are limited for choice when it comes to schools, but it would be nice to know how your own kid's school stacks up against the others," Ms Power said. "If teachers aren't achieving what they should in the classroom, they shouldn't be there, just like any other profession."
But Australian Education Union president Mary Bluett said ranking schools and sacking low-performing teachers was a simplistic approach to fixing a complex system. "Education does suffer from the fact that everyone has been to school and everyone thinks they are an expert," Ms Bluett said. "Certainly, nobody wants incompetent teachers, but having said that, I'm happy to say the overwhelming majority of teachers are very competent."
Ms Bluett said existing ways to measure schools' performances - including NAPLAN tests - didn't give an accurate picture of teaching standards.
Up to 76 per cent of teachers were against ranking schools and only 13 per cent supported naming and shaming schools that under-perform in numeracy and literacy.
More here
Victorian Labor government ignored flood advice
They probably believed Greenie prophecies of drought
THE Brumby government knew for three years that Victoria was ill-equipped to deal with flood disasters but ignored recommendations to introduce a warning system that had the backing of the state's top emergency services and weather experts.
A report prepared for the Brumby government in 2007 said the Google Maps-style, web-based system would reduce losses, damage and injury, and save $16.5 million from Victoria's average annual flood bill, estimated at $350 million.
The report, released by the Baillieu government yesterday as northern Victoria continued to battle a massive inland sea, said such a system would greatly improve the co-ordination and response of emergency services that were relying on "skeletal information" to predict how and when flood waters would hit communities.
The Baillieu government yesterday vowed to explore the sort of state-of-the-art flood management system Labor had ignored.
A government spokesman slammed the previous government, accusing it of neglectfully ignoring funding requests for a system that would allow the public, emergency services and the media to predict and analyse floodwaters more accurately.
In the October 2007 report, Labor was told by its public service that it could "vastly improve" flood management by investing in an $11 million system called FloodZoom, which would use weather forecasts, satellite observations, river gauges and hydraulic modelling to simulate the depth and spread of flood waters.
The system was backed at the time by the State Emergency Service, Melbourne Water, the Bureau of Meteorology, the State Flood Policy Committee and the then emergency services commissioner, Bruce Esplin, who saw the need for better communication and warning systems after the Gippsland floods of 2007.
Speaking to The Sunday Age yesterday, Mr Esplin, who recently resigned after a decade as the state's top emergency manager, said the system "would provide a way for the community and the media to understand what floodwaters are doing" and limit the need for people to call Triple 0 for information.
A Baillieu government spokesman said it was committed to implementing a better statewide flood warning and management system. "The Brumby government had ignored at least three years of strong recommendations to implement better flood management and warning systems in Victoria. The neglect … is appalling," the spokesman said.
But Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews said the Premier was playing cheap politics when he should be "spending all his time supporting flood victims". "While thousands of Victorians are still devastated by these floods, it is disgraceful that Ted Baillieu is playing politics with this issue," Mr Andrews said.
Labor sources said the bid for a better flood management system had been one of many proposals fighting for limited funds as part of the state innovation strategy. Also, they said, in 2007 Victoria was in drought, and the government would have been criticised for diverting money to flood management.
The Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development report warned:
* The state had "significant deficiency" in its emergency response to flood, and emergency workers had few tools to issue accurate flood warnings, leading to most major floods being "characterised by confusion and uncertainty".
* It was difficult to provide a clear depiction of the extent, severity and movement of a live flood situation or to answer questions about likely developments over hours and days under different weather conditions.
Residents in Wickliffe, in the state's west, called for a better warning system after they were forced to make hasty evacuations from floodwaters in the early hours of January 15. They said there had been no warnings that the town was at risk of flood.
SOURCE
OPPOSITION leader Tony Abbott is urging rural independent MPs to ditch their support for Prime Minister Julia Gillard, accusing her of using the floods to mask her government's spending addiction.
In a speech to the Young Liberals convention on the Gold Coast today, Mr Abbott ramped up his criticism of the federal government's flood levy to rebuild Queensland's infrastructure.
Also today, NSW Premier Kristina Keneally continued to push for changes to the national flood levy due to the high cost of living in Sydney, despite Ms Gillard ruling out any special treatment, and Treasurer Wayne Swan said he felt sickened Mr Abbott was putting his own political ambitions ahead of rebuilding the shattered lives of Queensland flood victims.
Ms Gillard, on Thursday, announced the government would impose a one-off, modest flood levy on taxpayers earning more than $50,000.
"A prime minister who's unconvincing when responding to a natural disaster is unlikely to solve the much more politically and administratively complex problems that she had previously set herself to fix," Mr Abbott told the audience. "Like the global financial crisis under Kevin Rudd, the government could use the floods as a justification for its spending addiction and as a licensed distraction from actually delivering on its promises.
"At some point, the independent MPs who returned the government to office could start to reconsider their decision."
Mr Abbott said Ms Gillard will face a voter backlash. "The Prime Minister is pitching it as a mateship tax even though mateship is about helping people, not taxing them," he said. "Mates choose to help; they're not coerced. Mateship comes from people, not from government. People resent being ordered to pay what they'd gladly give of their own volition especially by a government so reckless with taxpayers' money.
"Invoking a disaster to justify a tax, compounds the allegedly wooden demeanour that Julia Gillard showed during the floods with a tin ear afterwards."
He conceded the federal government will have to cover the lion's share of the repair bill for damaged infrastructure but said money could be found elsewhere.
"Flood victims simply can't be without the roads and the railways which are necessary for modern life," he said. "(The bill) will run into billions of dollars but that's no excuse for the flood tax ... there's about $2 billion uncommitted in various funds."
Mr Abbott urged Ms Gillard to drop the tax for the "spirit of national unity". "She apparently can't grasp the rip-off involved in taxing people in order to be generous to them," he said. "Two years ago, the government sent out $900 cheques to almost nine million people. Now, it's effectively taking the money back."
More here
Nanny-staters think that people read labels
The few who do are probably careful about what they eat and drink anyway. The New York experience shows that the sort of labelling advocated below will achieve nothing. Do the brainiacs below think Australians are more sophisticated than New Yorkers? Good luck with that assumption
FOOD police would enforce labels showing nutritional value on packaging and cigarette-style health warnings on alcohol under changes recommended for national laws.
A report released yesterday to improve food labelling laws in Australia and New Zealand contains 61 recommendations, including dropping mandatory "per serve" columns while explicitly stating the inclusion of trans-fats and salt content.
The report, Labelling Logic, was commissioned by the Australia and New Zealand Food Regulation Ministerial Council in October 2009 and compiled by a panel of independent experts, led by former federal health minister Dr Neal Blewett.
Information about food safety would be of primary importance followed by preventative health, new technologies such as genetic modification and lastly consumer values like "free range".
"The crux of the review was to address the tensions between competing interests that drive food labelling policy and seek to resolve them," Dr Blewett said.
Some of the recommendations call for food manufacturers to voluntarily adopt proposals such as a traffic light front-of-pack labelling system before they are legislated.
Food manufacturers attacked the traffic light recommendation, arguing there was a lack of consensus on the best way to label food. "The industry rejects traffic light labelling on the basis that it's badly understood by consumers and the system has been rejected by countries around the world," Australian Food and Grocery Council CEO Kate Carnell said.
The Federal Government has until December to respond to the recommendations.
The State Government has welcomed the review, which recommends fast food chains and vending machines declare energy (kilojoule) content - a move introduced in New South Wales last November which takes effect from February 1.
Under the recommendations, country-of-origin labelling would be tightened along with mandatory identification of any food prepared or treated with new technologies.
Alcoholic beverages would have generic health warnings including specific messages about the risks of drinking while pregnant. Alcoholic drink labels would also have to reveal their energy content.
SOURCE
Get tough on Victoria's bad school teachers, say parents
VICTORIAN parents want bad teachers sacked and schools with poor results to be named and shamed. A national schools survey found most of the state's parents feared their children would fall victim to physical or cyber bullying and believed alcohol and drug abuse among students was getting worse.
Nearly 5000 Australians responded to the Sunday Herald Sun online survey, revealing parents wanted schools and teachers to be more accountable for their children's performance at school.
Responses from the 1646 Victorians surveyed showed parents and teachers were often at loggerheads about what was best for students. At the heart of the great divide was parents' demands for more information about their children's schools and for teachers who don't make the grade to be sacked.
Of 794 Victorian parents surveyed, 63 per cent believed the worst-performing teachers needed to be expelled from the education system. On the flip side, teachers achieving good academic results should be paid more than their colleagues, according to 79 per cent of parents.
Schools were also in the firing line, with 67 per cent of parents calling for a rating system for schools, and more than half saying under-performing schools should be publicly named and shamed.
Mordialloc mother Jenny Power, who has two school-age children, called on the Department of Education to provide more information on schools' academic performances. "Most parents are limited for choice when it comes to schools, but it would be nice to know how your own kid's school stacks up against the others," Ms Power said. "If teachers aren't achieving what they should in the classroom, they shouldn't be there, just like any other profession."
But Australian Education Union president Mary Bluett said ranking schools and sacking low-performing teachers was a simplistic approach to fixing a complex system. "Education does suffer from the fact that everyone has been to school and everyone thinks they are an expert," Ms Bluett said. "Certainly, nobody wants incompetent teachers, but having said that, I'm happy to say the overwhelming majority of teachers are very competent."
Ms Bluett said existing ways to measure schools' performances - including NAPLAN tests - didn't give an accurate picture of teaching standards.
Up to 76 per cent of teachers were against ranking schools and only 13 per cent supported naming and shaming schools that under-perform in numeracy and literacy.
More here
Victorian Labor government ignored flood advice
They probably believed Greenie prophecies of drought
THE Brumby government knew for three years that Victoria was ill-equipped to deal with flood disasters but ignored recommendations to introduce a warning system that had the backing of the state's top emergency services and weather experts.
A report prepared for the Brumby government in 2007 said the Google Maps-style, web-based system would reduce losses, damage and injury, and save $16.5 million from Victoria's average annual flood bill, estimated at $350 million.
The report, released by the Baillieu government yesterday as northern Victoria continued to battle a massive inland sea, said such a system would greatly improve the co-ordination and response of emergency services that were relying on "skeletal information" to predict how and when flood waters would hit communities.
The Baillieu government yesterday vowed to explore the sort of state-of-the-art flood management system Labor had ignored.
A government spokesman slammed the previous government, accusing it of neglectfully ignoring funding requests for a system that would allow the public, emergency services and the media to predict and analyse floodwaters more accurately.
In the October 2007 report, Labor was told by its public service that it could "vastly improve" flood management by investing in an $11 million system called FloodZoom, which would use weather forecasts, satellite observations, river gauges and hydraulic modelling to simulate the depth and spread of flood waters.
The system was backed at the time by the State Emergency Service, Melbourne Water, the Bureau of Meteorology, the State Flood Policy Committee and the then emergency services commissioner, Bruce Esplin, who saw the need for better communication and warning systems after the Gippsland floods of 2007.
Speaking to The Sunday Age yesterday, Mr Esplin, who recently resigned after a decade as the state's top emergency manager, said the system "would provide a way for the community and the media to understand what floodwaters are doing" and limit the need for people to call Triple 0 for information.
A Baillieu government spokesman said it was committed to implementing a better statewide flood warning and management system. "The Brumby government had ignored at least three years of strong recommendations to implement better flood management and warning systems in Victoria. The neglect … is appalling," the spokesman said.
But Opposition Leader Daniel Andrews said the Premier was playing cheap politics when he should be "spending all his time supporting flood victims". "While thousands of Victorians are still devastated by these floods, it is disgraceful that Ted Baillieu is playing politics with this issue," Mr Andrews said.
Labor sources said the bid for a better flood management system had been one of many proposals fighting for limited funds as part of the state innovation strategy. Also, they said, in 2007 Victoria was in drought, and the government would have been criticised for diverting money to flood management.
The Department of Innovation, Industry and Regional Development report warned:
* The state had "significant deficiency" in its emergency response to flood, and emergency workers had few tools to issue accurate flood warnings, leading to most major floods being "characterised by confusion and uncertainty".
* It was difficult to provide a clear depiction of the extent, severity and movement of a live flood situation or to answer questions about likely developments over hours and days under different weather conditions.
Residents in Wickliffe, in the state's west, called for a better warning system after they were forced to make hasty evacuations from floodwaters in the early hours of January 15. They said there had been no warnings that the town was at risk of flood.
SOURCE
Friday, January 28, 2011
Wrapped in the flag and loving it
Sally Neighbour makes observations below that are similar to the ones I made briefly on Australia day. Note that I was able to explain what she cannot
NOT usually one for patriotic musings, at lunchtime on Wednesday I nonetheless found myself pondering the meaning of Australia Day and how this once second-rate public holiday became the source of such riotous celebration across the land.
At the time I was floating on a giant inflatable plastic thong, clinging to a rope tethered between buoys beyond the breakers at Bondi Beach.
For the record, it wasn't my idea. But there we were, bobbing on the ocean, me and 2067 other patsies, all set to make a world record for the number of people gullible enough to queue for 45 minutes and - get this - pay $30 to promote a foreign brand of rubber thong. The marketing genius who thought that up surely deserves an Order of Australia for services to advertising.
As the hoary strains of Men At Work's Down Under drifted predictably across the sea, our mooring provided a novel vantage point of Bondi Beach, now crowded with tens of thousands of bodies, outnumbered only by Australian flags - on bikinis, board shorts, towels, hats, umbrellas, beach shelters, painted faces and fake tattoos.
I wondered: how had it come to this? How had I been roped into such a commercial stunt? (In short, because my in-principle objections sounded lame in the face of my 11-year-old's protestation: "but it'll be fun". And damn it, it was.) More to the point, when and why had Australians embraced with such gusto an event that, not long ago, was regarded as just an excuse for a day off?
In the 1970s and 80s, having a holiday to commemorate the arrival of the first boats of white settlers was widely regarded - at least among my generation - as passe, an anachronistic nod to a history we weren't sure whether to be proud of or not.
As for the Australian flag, it was seen by many as an irrelevant relic of our colonial past, doomed for the scrapheap come the republic.
We would no sooner have draped ourselves in such a frumpy ensign than donned our grandma's bowling whites and headed for the local green.
For some, a vague discomfort with Australia's national symbols was only sharpened in recent years by the spectre of Pauline Hanson wrapped in the flag and its use as a symbol of ugly jingoism at Cronulla in 2005. "The cloak of racism," one friend calls it.
But such reservations have little traction among generations X and Y. Ambivalence has given way to unabashed pride in all things Australian, not least the flag.
They turn up to the Big Day Out with it tattooed on their skin. The same young Australians flock to Gallipoli each year to mark Anzac Day, and trek in their thousands along the Kokoda Track.
Just why this is so is a question that intrigues social researcher Rebecca Huntley, director of the survey-based market research firm, Ipsos. She has commissioned a study beginning this year called "being Australian", which will examine, among other things, the patriotism of gens X and Y.
Ipsos research thus far shows the things people most typically associate with being Australian are time-honoured values such as the "great Australian dream" of owning their own home, the idea of having a "laid-back" lifestyle, which Huntley says is "a core part of being Australian", and the knowledge that people will pull together in a time of need such as the recent floods. The surging affinity with nationalistic symbols is a more recent trend, most markedly in the past three years.
Huntley is reluctant to jump to conclusions about why young Australians are clearly more comfortable with the flag than the generation before them.
Maybe the young revellers simply realise how fortunate they are. It's hard to know when all you can get out of them is, "Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, Oi Oi Oi!" It was left to a jubilant newcomer at a citizenship ceremony in Sydney to articulate why being Australian was something to be immensely grateful for. "The opportunity to find jobs here is much better and it's much safer. I do think that Australians who haven't travelled and seen how the rest of the world lives take the freedom here for granted."
SOURCE
The chattering classes are out of step
Christopher Pearson
ANOTHER Australia Day means yet another opportunity to trash national institutions, most notably the constitution and the flag.
It comes as no surprise that the latest Australian of the Year, Simon McKeon, is as disdainful of both as 12 of his recent predecessors. What does continue to surprise is that ignorance about the constitution and eagerness to get rid of a very popular flag still pass for evidence of civic virtue in the mass media.
Even in the pages of The Weekend Australian Magazine, the Heart of the Nation page last Saturday was given over to jejune institution-bashing. It carried a photograph of the interior of the memorial hall at Cambooya, a town on the Darling Downs.
An elderly man is seen draping bunting decorated with the flag over a framed picture of the young Queen Elizabeth , which just happens to be hanging over the door to the men's toilet.
The accompanying text, by Ross Bilton, quotes Dawn Ruming, the secretary of the hall committee, as saying that Cambooya is a conservative sort of place and monarchist feelings run deep.
Would she and her committee stand still for the portrait having a permanent place over the gents, I wonder, or was this a set-up shot designed to parody rather than illustrate the values of rural communities?
Perhaps Bilton's story provides a few clues. His opening line is: "God bless the Queen. Even if you favour a republic, you've got to admit the old girl has been worth her weight in public holidays." As dopily dismissive remarks go, it's not really up there with Thomas Keneally's likening the queen to a colostomy bag on the body politic, but it's certainly callow.
No fair-minded observer could doubt that she has honoured her coronation oath of a life lived in service to her people, or that she has been a model of constitutional propriety. As well, for many she's an embodiment of social stability, the rule of law and Christian civilisation.
Even people who don't set nearly as much store in such values as the previous generation should recognise their utility in an era of tumultuous change.
Bilton tells us to disregard the portrait's placement and the fact that the image is 60 years out of date. "The point is that this satellite town of Toowoomba, with its hotel, post office, general store, school and garage, still feels part of her realm: the same realm that also takes in the frozen wastes of Canada, the beaches of Barbados and the jungles of Belize."
Patrick Hamilton, the photographer around whose picture the story is built, doesn't feel himself a member of this sophisticated supra-national commonwealth. Instead he's an old-school gumnut nationalist and, Bilton notes, "he's a republican. And Australia Day to him simply means barbecued lamb chops, wine and friends."
Forget about our country's contributions to defeating fascism in World War II, a more recent triumph in East Timor or battlefield valour in Afghanistan. It's as though, chez Hamilton, remembering them on the national holiday were somehow anachronistic, perhaps almost in bad taste.
As if, for Bilton, one self-congratulatory banality weren't enough to be going on with, he tells us that for Hamilton, the kindness of complete strangers to victims of the Brisbane floods "says far more to him about our national identity than the Queen, or the flag, ever will".
Far be it from me to underestimate the Good Samaritan instinct wherever it emerges, but I often wonder whether the notion that we're more richly endowed with it than other countries isn't self-serving mythology.
SOURCE
Labor MPs revolt over Julia Gillard's flood tax levy
A new tax is always "courageous", as Sir Humphrey would say
FURIOUS Labor MPs have turned on Prime Minister Julia Gillard over the controversial $1.8 billion flood tax, labelling it one of the "dumbest decisions" by a federal government.
Premier Kristina Keneally publicly criticised the levy, calling for western Sydney to be spared its full effects, reported The Daily Telegraph.
As Ms Gillard embarked on a publicity offensive to sell the $5.6 billion flood rescue package, senior Labor figures were shaking their heads at the lack of consultation with Cabinet. It is understood ministers only received a full briefing on the rescue package a few hours before they met in Canberra on Wednesday morning.
Adding to pressure on Ms Gillard, one of Australia's most powerful unions claimed scrapping the Green Car Innovation Fund would cost jobs. In a direct challenge to the PM, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union boss Dave Oliver said he would lobby key independent MPs and the Greens to retain the scheme.
Labor MPs said they were being "belted" by the public reaction to the levy. "This is one of the dumbest decisions I have ever seen - the feedback is we have made an atrocious decision," one Labor MP said.
The Government will exempt anyone earning less than $50,000 from paying the flood tax but this has done little to quell anger in caucus. "The Labor heartland feels it is being singled out in this levy," a Labor MP said.
Ms Keneally is understood to have consulted senior colleagues before deciding to go public with concerns that the flood tax will place further strain on Sydney families.
The flood tax will cost someone earning $100,000 an extra $5 a week but Ms Keneally believes Canberra should take account of higher living costs in Sydney. "Mortgages are higher in NSW on average and other costs of living are higher than other capital cities," she said.
Ministers were so angry Ms Gillard - who was monstered during several media appearances yesterday - treated Cabinet with "contempt" that some were drawing an unfavourable parallel with the behaviour of Kevin Rudd
SOURCE
Start the revolution with basics of English
QUIS MAGISTROS IPSOS DOCEBIT? (Who will teach the teachers?)
ACROSS Australia, schools are reopening for the start of the academic year. This year also heralds the start of the national curriculum, on a limited trial basis.
In May, students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 will take the fourth round of national literacy and numeracy testing, known as NAPLAN. When those results are released, parents and others will again make judgments about schools and teachers, reigniting the controversy that has marked this component of Labor's education revolution.
In fairness to the children who attempt the NAPLAN tests, whose schooling is directly affected by every change made by federal and state curriculum authorities, and who are dependent on the teachers appointed to work with them each day, it is important to consider this stage of the revolution from their point of view. What is needed to deliver the promised transparency in educational practices and the improvements in teacher quality?
The NAPLAN tests are designed to provide a snapshot of student progress to inform teaching practices and to evaluate the performance of schools. But at least one test, of language conventions (grammar, spelling and punctuation), is demonstrably inadequate for both purposes.
There are three reasons for this. First, the tests are poorly designed. Second, no national curriculum is in place to which the tests can be clearly linked. Third, and most importantly, the longstanding failure to train teachers in these aspects of English means that not only is there no consensus on how language conventions should be taught, teachers themselves are not confident about their professional competence.
The major drawback of the language tests is that they lack order and coherence. The range of questions does not adequately address the common errors that characterise students' written work, and are most detrimental to fluency. Some items appear to be testing multiple points simultaneously. Other questions are written in ways that rely on native speaker intuition, or common sense and logic, rather than a solid grasp of how English works. The language used to frame the questions is inconsistent, sometimes referring to a part of speech by its appropriate name, and at other times asking simply for the correct "word/s". If students are expected to learn and to use the metalanguage in other subjects such as mathematics, music and geography, why is this not the case in English?
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which administers the tests, is developing a national curriculum that appears to place a strong emphasis on accurate written expression. ACARA's National Curriculum Framing Paper (English) states that: "Attention should be given to grammar across K-12, as part of the 'toolkit' that helps all students access the resources necessary to meet the demands of schooling and of their lives outside of school."
ACARA chairman Barry McGaw says: "We don't want to just nod in the direction of grammar and say it should be taught. We need to say what that means."
But as the Australian Association of Teachers of English points out, agreement is yet to be reached on how to teach grammar. The English Teachers Association of Western Australia claims "English teachers are concerned about their ability to teach grammar". The Queensland Department of Education concedes that: "Many of our teachers are young graduates with limited grammar, who realise that this deficit makes it difficult for them to discuss work with their students."
Students rely on their teachers to model best practice and to be able to identify and to explain all language errors. The sceptic will argue that language is dynamic and that those who insist on correct usage are pedants who place more emphasis on the mechanics than on the message. Our response is that students who master the mechanics of English gain the freedom to concentrate on the sophisticated expression of ideas.
As one teacher commented last year, "Every day we ask the students to produce pieces of written work -- narratives, reports, essays and so on -- and we say that they should edit and proofread their own work, but we don't give them the tools to actually do that, and so many of them just don't know where to start and they give up."
The Australian Primary Principals Association insists that "teaching about language is essential at all stages of schooling and is not confined to the primary school". In secondary schools, any focus on basic literacy skills is normally left to English teachers and literacy co-ordinators.
The sort of courses needed to enable teachers to teach correct English usage have been neglected in recent decades.
A language revolution is required. All teachers must develop the capacity to correct their students' work for language as well as subject content. This will create what the Australian Curriculum describes as "confident communicators who appreciate and use the English language creatively and critically in a range of contexts and for a range of purposes".
Australian educational jurisdictions face a significant, long-term dilemma. As is the case in every profession, there are those who resist change. Some are uncomfortable with the NAPLAN tests and the My School website. However, the new curriculum places a renewed focus on language as a foundation skill, and all teachers in all subjects are now official members of the revolution.
SOURCE
Sally Neighbour makes observations below that are similar to the ones I made briefly on Australia day. Note that I was able to explain what she cannot
NOT usually one for patriotic musings, at lunchtime on Wednesday I nonetheless found myself pondering the meaning of Australia Day and how this once second-rate public holiday became the source of such riotous celebration across the land.
At the time I was floating on a giant inflatable plastic thong, clinging to a rope tethered between buoys beyond the breakers at Bondi Beach.
For the record, it wasn't my idea. But there we were, bobbing on the ocean, me and 2067 other patsies, all set to make a world record for the number of people gullible enough to queue for 45 minutes and - get this - pay $30 to promote a foreign brand of rubber thong. The marketing genius who thought that up surely deserves an Order of Australia for services to advertising.
As the hoary strains of Men At Work's Down Under drifted predictably across the sea, our mooring provided a novel vantage point of Bondi Beach, now crowded with tens of thousands of bodies, outnumbered only by Australian flags - on bikinis, board shorts, towels, hats, umbrellas, beach shelters, painted faces and fake tattoos.
I wondered: how had it come to this? How had I been roped into such a commercial stunt? (In short, because my in-principle objections sounded lame in the face of my 11-year-old's protestation: "but it'll be fun". And damn it, it was.) More to the point, when and why had Australians embraced with such gusto an event that, not long ago, was regarded as just an excuse for a day off?
In the 1970s and 80s, having a holiday to commemorate the arrival of the first boats of white settlers was widely regarded - at least among my generation - as passe, an anachronistic nod to a history we weren't sure whether to be proud of or not.
As for the Australian flag, it was seen by many as an irrelevant relic of our colonial past, doomed for the scrapheap come the republic.
We would no sooner have draped ourselves in such a frumpy ensign than donned our grandma's bowling whites and headed for the local green.
For some, a vague discomfort with Australia's national symbols was only sharpened in recent years by the spectre of Pauline Hanson wrapped in the flag and its use as a symbol of ugly jingoism at Cronulla in 2005. "The cloak of racism," one friend calls it.
But such reservations have little traction among generations X and Y. Ambivalence has given way to unabashed pride in all things Australian, not least the flag.
They turn up to the Big Day Out with it tattooed on their skin. The same young Australians flock to Gallipoli each year to mark Anzac Day, and trek in their thousands along the Kokoda Track.
Just why this is so is a question that intrigues social researcher Rebecca Huntley, director of the survey-based market research firm, Ipsos. She has commissioned a study beginning this year called "being Australian", which will examine, among other things, the patriotism of gens X and Y.
Ipsos research thus far shows the things people most typically associate with being Australian are time-honoured values such as the "great Australian dream" of owning their own home, the idea of having a "laid-back" lifestyle, which Huntley says is "a core part of being Australian", and the knowledge that people will pull together in a time of need such as the recent floods. The surging affinity with nationalistic symbols is a more recent trend, most markedly in the past three years.
Huntley is reluctant to jump to conclusions about why young Australians are clearly more comfortable with the flag than the generation before them.
Maybe the young revellers simply realise how fortunate they are. It's hard to know when all you can get out of them is, "Ozzie Ozzie Ozzie, Oi Oi Oi!" It was left to a jubilant newcomer at a citizenship ceremony in Sydney to articulate why being Australian was something to be immensely grateful for. "The opportunity to find jobs here is much better and it's much safer. I do think that Australians who haven't travelled and seen how the rest of the world lives take the freedom here for granted."
SOURCE
The chattering classes are out of step
Christopher Pearson
ANOTHER Australia Day means yet another opportunity to trash national institutions, most notably the constitution and the flag.
It comes as no surprise that the latest Australian of the Year, Simon McKeon, is as disdainful of both as 12 of his recent predecessors. What does continue to surprise is that ignorance about the constitution and eagerness to get rid of a very popular flag still pass for evidence of civic virtue in the mass media.
Even in the pages of The Weekend Australian Magazine, the Heart of the Nation page last Saturday was given over to jejune institution-bashing. It carried a photograph of the interior of the memorial hall at Cambooya, a town on the Darling Downs.
An elderly man is seen draping bunting decorated with the flag over a framed picture of the young Queen Elizabeth , which just happens to be hanging over the door to the men's toilet.
The accompanying text, by Ross Bilton, quotes Dawn Ruming, the secretary of the hall committee, as saying that Cambooya is a conservative sort of place and monarchist feelings run deep.
Would she and her committee stand still for the portrait having a permanent place over the gents, I wonder, or was this a set-up shot designed to parody rather than illustrate the values of rural communities?
Perhaps Bilton's story provides a few clues. His opening line is: "God bless the Queen. Even if you favour a republic, you've got to admit the old girl has been worth her weight in public holidays." As dopily dismissive remarks go, it's not really up there with Thomas Keneally's likening the queen to a colostomy bag on the body politic, but it's certainly callow.
No fair-minded observer could doubt that she has honoured her coronation oath of a life lived in service to her people, or that she has been a model of constitutional propriety. As well, for many she's an embodiment of social stability, the rule of law and Christian civilisation.
Even people who don't set nearly as much store in such values as the previous generation should recognise their utility in an era of tumultuous change.
Bilton tells us to disregard the portrait's placement and the fact that the image is 60 years out of date. "The point is that this satellite town of Toowoomba, with its hotel, post office, general store, school and garage, still feels part of her realm: the same realm that also takes in the frozen wastes of Canada, the beaches of Barbados and the jungles of Belize."
Patrick Hamilton, the photographer around whose picture the story is built, doesn't feel himself a member of this sophisticated supra-national commonwealth. Instead he's an old-school gumnut nationalist and, Bilton notes, "he's a republican. And Australia Day to him simply means barbecued lamb chops, wine and friends."
Forget about our country's contributions to defeating fascism in World War II, a more recent triumph in East Timor or battlefield valour in Afghanistan. It's as though, chez Hamilton, remembering them on the national holiday were somehow anachronistic, perhaps almost in bad taste.
As if, for Bilton, one self-congratulatory banality weren't enough to be going on with, he tells us that for Hamilton, the kindness of complete strangers to victims of the Brisbane floods "says far more to him about our national identity than the Queen, or the flag, ever will".
Far be it from me to underestimate the Good Samaritan instinct wherever it emerges, but I often wonder whether the notion that we're more richly endowed with it than other countries isn't self-serving mythology.
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Labor MPs revolt over Julia Gillard's flood tax levy
A new tax is always "courageous", as Sir Humphrey would say
FURIOUS Labor MPs have turned on Prime Minister Julia Gillard over the controversial $1.8 billion flood tax, labelling it one of the "dumbest decisions" by a federal government.
Premier Kristina Keneally publicly criticised the levy, calling for western Sydney to be spared its full effects, reported The Daily Telegraph.
As Ms Gillard embarked on a publicity offensive to sell the $5.6 billion flood rescue package, senior Labor figures were shaking their heads at the lack of consultation with Cabinet. It is understood ministers only received a full briefing on the rescue package a few hours before they met in Canberra on Wednesday morning.
Adding to pressure on Ms Gillard, one of Australia's most powerful unions claimed scrapping the Green Car Innovation Fund would cost jobs. In a direct challenge to the PM, Australian Manufacturing Workers Union boss Dave Oliver said he would lobby key independent MPs and the Greens to retain the scheme.
Labor MPs said they were being "belted" by the public reaction to the levy. "This is one of the dumbest decisions I have ever seen - the feedback is we have made an atrocious decision," one Labor MP said.
The Government will exempt anyone earning less than $50,000 from paying the flood tax but this has done little to quell anger in caucus. "The Labor heartland feels it is being singled out in this levy," a Labor MP said.
Ms Keneally is understood to have consulted senior colleagues before deciding to go public with concerns that the flood tax will place further strain on Sydney families.
The flood tax will cost someone earning $100,000 an extra $5 a week but Ms Keneally believes Canberra should take account of higher living costs in Sydney. "Mortgages are higher in NSW on average and other costs of living are higher than other capital cities," she said.
Ministers were so angry Ms Gillard - who was monstered during several media appearances yesterday - treated Cabinet with "contempt" that some were drawing an unfavourable parallel with the behaviour of Kevin Rudd
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Start the revolution with basics of English
QUIS MAGISTROS IPSOS DOCEBIT? (Who will teach the teachers?)
ACROSS Australia, schools are reopening for the start of the academic year. This year also heralds the start of the national curriculum, on a limited trial basis.
In May, students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 will take the fourth round of national literacy and numeracy testing, known as NAPLAN. When those results are released, parents and others will again make judgments about schools and teachers, reigniting the controversy that has marked this component of Labor's education revolution.
In fairness to the children who attempt the NAPLAN tests, whose schooling is directly affected by every change made by federal and state curriculum authorities, and who are dependent on the teachers appointed to work with them each day, it is important to consider this stage of the revolution from their point of view. What is needed to deliver the promised transparency in educational practices and the improvements in teacher quality?
The NAPLAN tests are designed to provide a snapshot of student progress to inform teaching practices and to evaluate the performance of schools. But at least one test, of language conventions (grammar, spelling and punctuation), is demonstrably inadequate for both purposes.
There are three reasons for this. First, the tests are poorly designed. Second, no national curriculum is in place to which the tests can be clearly linked. Third, and most importantly, the longstanding failure to train teachers in these aspects of English means that not only is there no consensus on how language conventions should be taught, teachers themselves are not confident about their professional competence.
The major drawback of the language tests is that they lack order and coherence. The range of questions does not adequately address the common errors that characterise students' written work, and are most detrimental to fluency. Some items appear to be testing multiple points simultaneously. Other questions are written in ways that rely on native speaker intuition, or common sense and logic, rather than a solid grasp of how English works. The language used to frame the questions is inconsistent, sometimes referring to a part of speech by its appropriate name, and at other times asking simply for the correct "word/s". If students are expected to learn and to use the metalanguage in other subjects such as mathematics, music and geography, why is this not the case in English?
The Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority, which administers the tests, is developing a national curriculum that appears to place a strong emphasis on accurate written expression. ACARA's National Curriculum Framing Paper (English) states that: "Attention should be given to grammar across K-12, as part of the 'toolkit' that helps all students access the resources necessary to meet the demands of schooling and of their lives outside of school."
ACARA chairman Barry McGaw says: "We don't want to just nod in the direction of grammar and say it should be taught. We need to say what that means."
But as the Australian Association of Teachers of English points out, agreement is yet to be reached on how to teach grammar. The English Teachers Association of Western Australia claims "English teachers are concerned about their ability to teach grammar". The Queensland Department of Education concedes that: "Many of our teachers are young graduates with limited grammar, who realise that this deficit makes it difficult for them to discuss work with their students."
Students rely on their teachers to model best practice and to be able to identify and to explain all language errors. The sceptic will argue that language is dynamic and that those who insist on correct usage are pedants who place more emphasis on the mechanics than on the message. Our response is that students who master the mechanics of English gain the freedom to concentrate on the sophisticated expression of ideas.
As one teacher commented last year, "Every day we ask the students to produce pieces of written work -- narratives, reports, essays and so on -- and we say that they should edit and proofread their own work, but we don't give them the tools to actually do that, and so many of them just don't know where to start and they give up."
The Australian Primary Principals Association insists that "teaching about language is essential at all stages of schooling and is not confined to the primary school". In secondary schools, any focus on basic literacy skills is normally left to English teachers and literacy co-ordinators.
The sort of courses needed to enable teachers to teach correct English usage have been neglected in recent decades.
A language revolution is required. All teachers must develop the capacity to correct their students' work for language as well as subject content. This will create what the Australian Curriculum describes as "confident communicators who appreciate and use the English language creatively and critically in a range of contexts and for a range of purposes".
Australian educational jurisdictions face a significant, long-term dilemma. As is the case in every profession, there are those who resist change. Some are uncomfortable with the NAPLAN tests and the My School website. However, the new curriculum places a renewed focus on language as a foundation skill, and all teachers in all subjects are now official members of the revolution.
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