This Really Is A Pretty Awful Indictment Of The Australian Education System

This appeared last week:

This school has joined the education revolution. What about your kids?

Australian schools are finally catching up with a back to basics revolution that is lifting results all over the world.

Julie Hare Education editor

Aug 16, 2024 – 1.30pm

Steve Capp’s decision to get on board a grassroots movement that is shaking up Australian classrooms came after he witnessed the power of taking an evidence-based approach to how children are taught.

In the short time he has been principal at Chelsea Heights Primary School on Melbourne’s Mornington Peninsula, Capp’s approach has borne fruit. The proportion of children in his school above the national benchmark in literacy has jumped from 69 to 90 per cent.

“That’s just grade three and in only one year,” Capp says.

The approach, which has been dismissed and contested by much of the educational fraternity for decades, is a kind of back-to-basics approach which uses explicit instruction and a structured and sequenced approach to delivering new information.

“It’s about getting the basics right,” says Capp. “If you can’t spell, you can’t put good sentences together, never mind paragraphs.”

The school has seen improvements not only with children who previously struggled but also with high achievers after finding they can be extended. At the same time, behaviour has improved so much there is almost no need for disciplinary action.

The approach adopted at Chelsea Heights is building up a head of steam in schools across Australia as a growing number of teachers and principals became increasingly frustrated by the underperformance of the children in their charge.

There are changes in how classrooms are structured, and how teachers instruct their pupils. Gone are group desk formations. Rows of desks are back. Explicit instruction replaces curiosity-led learning. Phonics replaces whole language. Learning is disaggregated into bite-sized chunks that can be committed to memory and called on as necessary.

Not so long ago, this systematic style of teaching was considered old-fashioned and thought to suffocate creativity. But now federal Education Minister Jason Clare is demanding the states and territories that receive the bulk of public school funding go down the route of Chelsea Heights Primary School.

Experts say it’s the revolution we have to have as the nation reels from two decades of decline then stagnation on national and international tests.

A baseless theory

It seems bizarre, almost unbelievable in fact, that universities have for at least four decades being peddling a baseless theory of early literacy and reading – the whole-word approach – that has undermined the educational attainment of millions of children and sabotaged many adulthoods.

The cost of that experiment in what has been dubbed “pseudoscience” has been high for millions who have passed through the education system over the past few decades and left without the reading, writing and numeracy skills to be able to function effectively as an adult.

This year’s National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) has provided yet another sad indictment on the impact of that prevailing orthodoxy.

One in three children is behind on where they should be at their stage of learning, one in 10 desperately so. The poorer a child is and the further away from a major city they live, the worse their results are.

One in 10 are so far behind they are at a high risk of becoming functionally illiterate as adults.

As The Australian Financial Review pointed out, NAPLAN has become a closer measure of family wealth than of student ability. It’s a sad fact that wealthy kids do well at school, poor kids don’t.

Today, as many as 40 per cent of year 9 boys and one in three girls are functionally illiterate, according to the latest NAPLAN scores. That has vast implications for their future lives – and for the nation’s productivity.

The evidence of Australia’s educational malaise is not limited to NAPLAN. On the OECD’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), just three in every five 15-year-olds can read at the “national proficient standard” – which is not very demanding – and just over half reach that benchmark for numeracy.

Finally, though, there is hope of a turnaround. The voice of reason, backed by science and evidence, is finally winning.

Experts largely agree on four things. First, money is important, but Australia is spending too much in the wrong places. Second, geographical differences in student performance are a national embarrassment. Third, the gender divide in academic performance needs a lot of attention. Finally, behaviour issues and school attendance are at all-time lows and that is in no small way linked to what is happening – or not happening – in classrooms.

Failing the majority

Whole-word and student-led learning might work for the brightest children, but they fail the majority. An analysis of NAPLAN writing data, which took in 10 million results spanning 2011 to 2021, found that the ability to write persuasively – or to be able to clearly organise thoughts and construct an argument supported by reasoning and evidence – has been declining over the past decade, even among the most high-achieving students, as the gap between high- and low-performing students became wider.

The dire state of Australia’s school education system, in particular its failure to pick up and remediate children at the lower end of the achievement spectrum, was writ large in a Productivity Commission report released last year.

The terse report was overflowing with data and facts that should be unacceptable in a developed economy such as Australia’s.

It found that despite a 21 per cent increase in student funding in the decade since the Gonski funding began, there had been no noticeable improvements in student learning outcomes.

Students who live outside major cities are, on average, 1.75 years behind their city cousins in literacy and two years behind in numeracy. The poorest 25 per cent of kids are 2.75 years behind rich kids in reading and three years behind in numeracy.

Melbourne University’s dean of education, Professor Jim Watterston, has previously pointed out that Australia has four education systems based on geography.

“It’s like a stepladder. If you take the eight metropolitan cities, students are as good as anywhere in the world. When you get to regional, it’s one step down where outcomes are average. When you go down another step to rural, the outcomes are really poor – and by the time we get to remote and rural, then we are in a Third World country,” Watterston says.

Proof outside Australia

Australia is late to the party, where the case for evidence-based learning from overseas is compelling. One needs only to look to Mississippi in the United States. One of the poorest states, it is ranked worst in the country for child poverty and hunger, highest in teen births, and third-last for adults with a high school diploma or equivalent.

However, since teachers started receiving training in scientifically based reading instruction with coaches embedded in schools, and additional intervention for all students having difficulty learning to read, the turnaround has been staggering.

As education advocate Leslie Loble points out: “The results from Mississippi show that students experiencing severe disadvantage are not only able to improve beyond previous state levels, they are improving so much they are overtaking other states in national rankings.

“Mississippi is one of only two states with improved fourth-grade maths scores over the past decade, and one of only three states with gains in fourth-grade reading over the decade.”

Over the past 10 to 15 years, the literacy and numeracy skills of children in England have improved measurably and significantly compared to most other high-income countries.

On PISA tests, England eclipses the G7 average and outperforms the OECD average – despite a squeeze on school funding over much of this period.

While England is middle of the pack on inequality, among OECD nations only Canada, Estonia, Ireland and Japan manage to deliver both stronger average attainment and lower inequality than England.

“This speaks to the success of teachers, schools and policymakers in improving the productivity of England’s education system,” reads a research paper released in June by the Institute of Fiscal studies.

This is despite, as in Australia, rising incidence of absenteeism, poor mental health, and the lagged effects on academic performance of lockdowns during COVID-19.

England’s success in turning around the academic performance of its students began in 1997 when Tony Blair became prime minister. He was hailed for saying his top three priorities in government were “education, education, education”.

At the time, England’s school system was sadly lacking compared to other industrialised nations. But the Blair government put in place ambitious standards, clear targets and straightforward accountability measures, while also increasing funding to improve the professional development of the teacher workforce.

Ross Fox is director of Catholic Education Canberra Goulburn (CECG), which has taken a system-wide approach to what is taught, how it is taught and how it is assessed.

This approach systematically builds one piece of learning on top of another to ensure students master key concepts before progressing to more advanced areas.

“Teachers realise that what they’ve been relying on as their knowledge base to achieve high-quality teaching and learning is insufficient,” Fox says, adding that much has been invested in professional development.

“Students learn in the right sequence. Teachers check in with high frequency that what they have taught is being learned. We need to make precious use of the million minutes that students have with us from kindergarten to year 12 and ensure they are engaged from the highest possible expectation of cognitive tasks.”

The diocese, which takes in the south-east coast of NSW, has since 2019 produced statistically significant improvements in NAPLAN reading in year 3 and year 5.

For example, the average year 3 reading score for children in CECG in 2023 was 422, while the national average was just 404. In numeracy, the score was 419 against a national average of 407.

While the comparative lead by year 5 is not as dramatic, it’s still there. In reading, for example, the average across CECG is 506 while the national average is 496. For numeracy, CECG children scored an average of 490, slightly above the national average of 487.

A survey of teachers in CECG found four in five agreed that using high-impact teaching methods meant students learned more and that it was worth the time and effort to implement.

Back to the lab

Professor Pam Snow and her college Professor Tanya Serry from La Trobe University were so frustrated with the lack of foundational understanding of the science of learning and explicit instruction most teachers had after graduating from university, they set up their own short course – the Science of Language and Reading (SOLAR) Lab – in 2020.

The lab takes the basic principle that teaching is largely a science, not an art. They were gravely concerned that most graduates were leaving their courses without basic knowledge of explicit teaching methods, and only the barest of skills in classroom management.

“There will not be any change in Australia’s educational outcomes until entire systems adopt new approaches that are based in evidence,” Snow says.

If schools were delivering evidence-based literacy programs as a whole-school approach, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

— Stella Finch, teacher and school counsellor

“The Commonwealth government has been complicit in not holding university education faculties to account. Teachers have to go and get the information themselves in a really inefficient way.”

They have put 12,000 teachers through the program since it began.

There is movement. NSW, Victoria, Tasmania, Western Australia, the ACT and the Northern Territory have all signed on to a federal government request that they implement evidence-based teaching in their classrooms. Only Queensland and South Australia are hold-outs as the clock ticks for a new national funding agreement set to be signed by the end of September.

Under current arrangements, the federal government puts up 20 per cent of funding for public schools, while the states contribute, in theory, 80 per cent. The total annual cost is more than $9 billion in federal money and $46 billion for the states.

The 20:80 formula was agreed under the last reform agreement, based on businessman David Gonski’s review of school funding. It calculated what is known as the schooling resource standard – an estimate of how much each student needs to have their educational needs adequately met.

In 2024, the SRS funding amounts are $13,570 for primary students and $17,053 for secondary students. The states want the federal government to contribute 25 per cent and an additional $32 billion over 10 years. The federal government has offered 2.5 per cent and wants the states to chip in the other 2.5 per cent.

The stand-off continues.

Shopping around

Stella Finch (not her real name) is a teacher and school counsellor who works in public schools in Queensland. She has seen the dysfunction when schools don’t prioritise evidence-based teaching and the desperation of young teachers who believe they lack the resources and knowledge to lift their students’ performance.

“If schools were delivering evidence-based literacy programs as a whole-school approach, we wouldn’t be in this mess,” Finch says.

“I have been privy to many choose-your-own-adventure literacy programs that are far from evidenced based. And I’ve witnessed the resistance – or the ignorance – of principals who choose not to opt for evidenced-based programs, even when advised otherwise.”

There is a personal edge to her professional experience – her own son could not read by the end of year 2. Frustrated by the school’s indifference to what was happening, she moved him to another school that had adopted a whole-school evidence-based reading program.

Two years later, her son is close to the top band for year 5 reading on NAPLAN.

“I just hope that my story can somehow help convince our ministers of education that putting some simple reforms in place is critical so we are not sitting here with the same problem in 20 years.”

Here is the link:

https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/this-school-has-joined-the-education-revolution-what-about-your-kids-20240814-p5k2ef

It really is pretty sad what a mess we somehow seem to have wound up in!

Some have suggested recalcitrant teaching unions may be at least part of the cause – I wonder if it is true?

No matter how you see it – bureaucracy is partly to blame I am sure! It is a worry we are apparently yet to really make strides towards to present state of the art - and all that can bring for our kids!

David.

No Matter Who Is To Blame This Is An Appalling Catastrophe! God Is Not To Blame But Neither Did He Prevent It!

This appeared last week:

As Gaza toll passes 40,000, the dead are buried in yards, streets, stacked graves

By Julia Frankel and Wafaa Shurafa

Updated August 16, 2024 — 7.06pm first published at 6.59pm

Deir Al-Balah, Gaza Strip: Tiers of graves are stacked deep underground in a bloated Gaza cemetery, where Sa’di Baraka spends his days hacking at the earth, making room for more dead.

“Sometimes we make graves on top of graves,” he said.

Baraka and his solemn corps of volunteer gravediggers in the Deir al-Balah cemetery start at sunrise, digging new trenches or reopening existing ones. The dead can sometimes come from kilometres away, stretches of Gaza where burial grounds are destroyed or unreachable.

The cemetery is 70 years old. A quarter of its graves are new.

The death toll in Gaza since the beginning of the 10-month-old Israel-Hamas war has passed 40,000, according to the Health Ministry in the Hamas-run territory. The count does not distinguish civilians from militants.

The small, densely populated strip of land is now packed with bodies.

They fill morgues and overflow cemeteries. Families, fleeing repeatedly to escape offensives, bury their dead wherever possible: in backyards and parking lots, beneath staircases and along roadsides, according to witness accounts and video footage. Others lie under rubble, their families unsure they will ever be counted.

‘One large cemetery’

A steady drumbeat of death since October has claimed nearly 2 per cent of Gaza’s prewar population. Health officials and civil defence workers say the true toll could be thousands more, including bodies under rubble that the United Nations says weighs 40 million tonnes.

“It seems,” Palestinian author Yousri Alghoul wrote for the Institute for Palestine Studies, “that Gaza’s fate is to become one large cemetery, with its streets, parks, and homes, where the living are merely dead awaiting their turn.”

Israel began striking Gaza after Hamas-led militants stormed across the Israeli border on October 7, killing about 1200 people and taking some 250 others hostage. Israel seeks Hamas’ destruction and claims it confines its attacks to militants. It blames Hamas for civilian deaths, saying the militants operate from residential neighbourhoods laced with tunnels. The fighting has killed 329 Israeli soldiers.

Even in death, Palestinians have been displaced by Israel’s offensives.

Palestinians move corpses, shielding them from the path of war. Israel’s military has dug up, ploughed over and bombed more than 20 cemeteries, according to satellite imagery analysed by investigative outlet Bellingcat. Troops have taken scores of bodies into Israel, searching for hostages. Trucked back to Gaza, the bodies are often decomposed and unidentifiable, buried quickly in a mass grave.

Israel’s military said that it is attempting to rescue hostage bodies where intelligence indicates they may be located. It said bodies determined not to be hostages are returned “with dignity and respect.”

Haneen Salem, a photographer and writer from northern Gaza, has lost over 270 extended family members in bombardments and shelling. Salem said between 15 and 20 of them have been disinterred — some after troops destroyed cemeteries and others moved by relatives out of fear Israeli forces would destroy their graves.

“I don’t know how to explain what it feels like to see the bodies of my loved ones lying on the ground, scattered, a piece of flesh here and bone there,” she said. “After the war, if we remain alive, we will dig a new grave and spread roses and water over it for their good souls.”

Honouring the dead

In peacetime, Gaza funerals were large family affairs.

The corpse would be washed and wrapped in a shroud, according to Islamic tradition. After prayers over the body at a mosque, a procession would take it to the graveyard, where it would be laid on its right side facing east, toward Mecca.

The rituals are the most basic way to honour the dead, said Hassan Fares. “This does not exist in Gaza.”

Twenty-five members of Fares’ family were killed by an airstrike on October 13 in northern Gaza. Without gravediggers available, Fares dug three ditches in a cemetery, burying four cousins, his aunt and his uncle. Survivors whispered quick prayers over the distant hum of warplanes.

Those who died early in the war might have been the lucky ones, Fares said. They had funerals, even if brief.

Nawaf al-Zuriei, a morgue worker at Deir al-Balah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital, is on the front lines of the rush of dead. Workers cover the damaged bodies in plastic to avoid bloodstains on white shrouds.

“We wipe the blood off the face so it’s in a suitable state for his loved ones to bid him farewell,” he said.

Following Israeli troop withdrawals, dozens of bodies are left on streets. With fuel scarce, workers collecting the dead fill trucks with corpses, strapping some on top to save gas, said civil defence official Mohammed el-Mougher.

Headstones are rare; some graves are marked with chunks of rubble.

When a corpse remains unidentified, workers place a plastic placard at the grave, bearing the burial date, identification number and where the body was found.

Searching for lost loved ones

The uncertain fate of relatives’ bodies haunts families.

Mousa Jomaa, an orthopedist who lives in al-Ram in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has watched from afar as the war claimed 21 relatives in Gaza.

Jomaa’s cousin Mohammed was killed in an Israeli airstrike early in the war while operating an ambulance in southern Gaza and was buried in Rafah, away from the family’s home in central Gaza. The cemetery was damaged in a later offensive. There’s no sign of Mohammed’s body, Jomaa said.

Ceasefire talks are underway as the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza surpasses 40,000.

A strike in December then destroyed Jomaa’s uncle’s house, killing his aunt and her children, 8-year-old Mira and 10-year-old Omar. Jomaa’s uncle, Dr. Hani Jomaa, rushed home to search the rubble. Before he could find Mira’s body, a strike killed him too.

Because her body has not been recovered, Mira has not been counted among the dead, said Jomaa, who showed a photo of the young girl standing beside her brother, with a rainbow handbag matching her barrette.

In July, an Israeli tank killed two more cousins, Mohammed and Baha. Baha’s body was torn apart, and the shelling made it too dangerous to collect the remains for weeks.

Jomaa said that come the end of the war, he plans to visit Gaza to search for Mira’s remains.

Smashed graves and cemeteries off-limits

Israeli evacuation orders cover much of Gaza, leaving some of the largest cemeteries off-limits.

Jake Godin, a Bellingcat researcher, has used satellite imagery to document the destruction to more than 20 cemeteries. Sandy, bulldozed expanses appear where some cemeteries once stood. Gaza City’s Sheikh Radwan graveyard is cratered. In Gaza’s Eastern Cemetery, roads carved by heavy vehicles bury headstones under tyre tracks, he said.

“Anywhere the [Israeli military] is active, they bulldoze and destroy the ground without regard to cemeteries,” Godin said.

The military said it does not have a policy of destroying graves. “The unfortunate reality of ground warfare in condensed civilian areas” can result in harm to cemeteries, it said, adding it found Hamas tunnels underneath a cemetery east of the southern city of Khan Younis.

Mahmoud Alkrunz, a student in Turkey, said his father, mother, two brothers, sister and three of his siblings’ children were buried in the Bureij refugee camp’s cemetery after Israel bombed their home.

When Israel withdrew from Bureij in January, the graves were found unearthed. Alkrunz fainted when his uncle delivered the news.

“We don’t know what has happened to the bodies,” he said.

AP

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/world/middle-east/as-gaza-toll-passes-40-000-the-dead-are-buried-in-yards-streets-tiered-graves-20240816-p5k2vv.html

I have nothing to add except my horror and sadness. This many deaths just makes a mockery of all I did as a doctor and many like me as well!

We really should be able to do better than this!

David.

I Am Waiting To See How Many Health Bureaucrats Are Fired Over This Stuff Up!

This appeared last week:

Patients told to drink water as hospitals ration IV drips

By Henrietta Cook and Jewel Topsfield

August 17, 2024 — 5.00am

Victorian hospitals have been urged to ration intravenous fluids by getting patients to drink water, scaling back the use of drips during surgeries and administering medications orally after warnings about a global shortage of saline.

An internal Victorian Department of Health document – sent to hospital chief executives, directors of medical and surgical units, nursing and pharmacy directors and Ambulance Victoria – calls on health services to conserve 14 intravenous fluid products at risk of shortages.

“Efforts to conserve fluids need to increase to enable supply to meet demand,” the August 7 document reads.

“It is critical that all IV fluids are used judiciously.”

The warning comes after reports of a global shortage of saline IV supplies. The Victorian government and the Australian Medical Association stressed that the situation was not dire or a risk to surgeries and patient care.

The association’s Victorian branch president, Dr Jill Tomlinson, said Victorians should be “alert but not alarmed”.

“We haven’t had any elective surgeries cancelled,” she said.

“It is true to say that there are shortages and that is influencing how we do things, but it is not directly impacting patient outcomes.”

The advice comes as Australian health ministers agreed on Friday to share intravenous fluid supplies, which are used in almost all surgeries, to hydrate patients and administer medication directly into the bloodstream.

Federal Health Minister Mark Butler met health ministers to co-ordinate a response to Australia’s declining supplies of IV fluids, including sharing data on usage and supply and helping local manufacturers keep up with demand.

The Therapeutic Goods Administration has said the shortages are due to global supply limitations, unexpected increases in demand, and manufacturing issues.

The state’s health services have been told to convene teams to monitor and manage intravenous fluids “due to the increasing criticality of the shortage”, according to the Victorian Department of Health document, which was labelled “sensitive”.

It said where clinically appropriate, healthcare workers should consider alternatives such as fluid replacement via the mouth or tubes through the nose and into the stomach.

Medication can also be administered via the mouth, beneath the skin or into muscles where appropriate. Other conservation strategies detailed in the document include limiting “routine administration of IV fluids to patients undergoing day surgery” and minimising excessive fasting before surgery to reduce the need for fluid replacement.

A senior clinician at a Melbourne hospital, who did not want to be named because he was not authorised to speak publicly, said IV fluids had been used too liberally by hospitals over many decades.

“I would say half the patients on the surgical ward don’t need it,” he said.

He said healthcare workers at his hospital had been rationing IV fluids in the past month by encouraging patients to drink cups of water or other fluids.

The Royal Melbourne Hospital recently sent a message to staff about “significant interruptions to our supply of intravenous fluid bags”.

It said all health services were required to reduce the amount of IV fluids they used by 20 per cent to enable supply to meet demand.

“We ask that all staff use IV fluids judiciously and where clinically appropriate,” the notice read.

The hospital did not respond to questions from this masthead, referring the matter to the state Health Department.

An Allan government spokesman said Victoria had not been affected at this stage and there had been no disruptions to patient care.

“The department is actively supporting health services to conserve and monitor available stock, amid ongoing discussions with the main suppliers,” he said.

There is only one factory in Australia that is manufacturing IV fluids onshore – Baxter Healthcare’s Toongabbie factory in Sydney’s west.

A Baxter spokesman said the factory was “operating at historical volumes and full capacity to help meet the rising demand”.

Professor Nial Wheate, a medicines scientist from Macquarie University, said the shortage of IV fluid demonstrated that Australia was overly reliant on overseas manufacturers.

“There should definitely be more of a domestic and government-backed industry in Australia for saline and, I would argue, any types of medicines,” Wheate said.

“We are too reliant and when we cannot get medicines it is putting Australian lives at risk.”

Doctors at Northern Health, one of Victoria’s largest health services, were last month told to review prescribed IV infusions and switch to an alternative as soon as clinically possible.

“We are experiencing national stock shortages with sodium chloride 0.9% 500mL intravenous bags with disruption to supply anticipated to continue for the remainder of 2024,” staff were told in an email on July 17.

A spokesman for Northern Health said it was confident of its supply for the coming weeks, and it had not had to reduce any procedures.

The shortage has been more of a problem in NSW, where there have been reports of patients having to stay in hospital for longer following surgery because little or no IV fluid was administered to them, leading to dehydration and hypotension.

The AMA’s national president, Professor Steve Robson, said NSW – which has the biggest healthcare system in Australia – was facing larger logistical challenges than other states.

“We are getting no sense whatsoever of any particular problems in Victoria and Queensland and there seem to be plenty of fluids in Tasmania,” he said.

“I think a big part of it is caution at the moment. Because of uncertainty about supply, people are doing everything they can to preserve IV fluids at the moment and that’s a very reasonable precaution in the circumstances. They’re probably stockpiling as well – we saw the same thing with toilet paper during the pandemic.”

Robson said he commended the Commonwealth and state health ministers for establishing a taskforce to deal with the issue.

With Lachlan Abbott

Here is the link:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/victoria/patients-told-to-drink-water-as-hospitals-ration-iv-drips-20240816-p5k30w.html

Honestly, Monty Python could not have made this up! More seriously just how did this happen and what odds do you give of the population ever knowing the why and who was to blame.  maybe the culprits could forma company and start manufacturing fluids. We know there is a market!!!!

While I live and breath I plan to publish anything I can find out about this travesty! That the shortage is apparently global is astonishing! I wonder how things are in North Korea?

Any tips / insights much appreciated! A prize is on offer for identifying the next global stuff-up!

David.

I Thought All The Extreme Luddites Had Already Been Disposed Of – But It Seems Not!

This appeared last week!

Greenhouse gas emissions

Chair of Nuclear for Australia denies that calling CO2 ‘plant food’ means he is a climate denier

Dr Adi Paterson’s statements are apparently at odds with the group’s official position, which says nuclear is needed to tackle the climate crisis

Graham Readfearn

Sat 17 Aug 2024 01.00 AESTLast modified on Sat 17 Aug 2024 02.02 AEST

The chair of a leading Australian nuclear advocacy group has called concerns that carbon dioxide emissions are driving a climate crisis an “irrational fear of a trace gas which is plant food” and has rejected links between worsening extreme weather and global heating.

Several statements from Dr Adi Paterson, reviewed by the Guardian, appear at odds with statements from the group he chairs, Nuclear for Australia, which is hosting a petition saying nuclear is needed to tackle an “energy and climate crisis”.

Nuclear for Australia was founded by 18-year-old Queensland nuclear advocate Will Shackel, who has said repeatedly he believes reactors are needed to fight “the climate crisis”.

Two climate science experts told the Guardian that Paterson’s statements were misguided and typical of climate science denial.

Paterson defended his statements, telling the Guardian he was “not a climate denier”. He described himself as “a climate realist” and an “expert on climate science”.

In May, Paterson, who resigned in 2020 as the chief executive of the government’s Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, suggested on LinkedIn that concerns about climate change were “an irrational fear of a trace gas which is plant food”. He has been a regular guest on right-wing media outlets since the Coalition earlier this year said it wanted to lift the ban on nuclear and build reactors in seven locations.

On his Facebook page, Paterson has said that “cold is more dangerous than warm” and described a leading scientist as a “climate creep”.

On LinkedIn, he said US space agency Nasa was “deliberately confusing public understanding by publishing ground surface temperatures”, saying the agency’s climate work “should be given to a credible independent group. Defund NASA!”

In April, Paterson told an audience at the Centre for Independent Studies that “you can’t make a correlation between extreme events and climate” and said “no matter what you believe about carbon dioxide – it is plant food”.

“Increasing carbon a little bit is not going to dramatically change the climate. The plants will grow better,” he said, saying the planet was in a period of low CO₂.

Prof David Karoly, a councillor at the Climate Council and a respected atmospheric scientist who has been studying the affects of CO2 on the climate since the late 1980s, said Paterson’s statements were typical of those from climate science deniers.

He said while CO2 levels were currently low in comparison to other times in Earth’s history, they were higher than at any time since the emergence of homo sapiens.

“He is misguided,” Karoly said. “CO2 has led to increases in temperature extremes, extreme rainfall, sea level rise and increases in bushfires and fire weather. CO2 has already dramatically changed the climate.”

Dr John Cook, an expert on climate change misinformation at the University of Melbourne, said Paterson was “regurgitating arguments” across a range of “thoroughly debunked talking points”.

He said: “It’s inconsistent to argue that CO2 is a trace gas which can’t possibly make any difference but at the same time claim that CO2 is going to green the planet.”

Shackel did not respond to questions. In an interview with the Guardian, Paterson argued the UN’s climate change panel “has made it very clear” that it was “not possible at this point” to link extreme events to changes in the climate.

But the panel’s latest report said it was “an established fact that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions have led to an increased frequency and/or intensity of some weather and climate extremes”, with evidence for rising temperature extremes, extreme rainfall, droughts, tropical cyclones and more dangerous fire weather.

Paterson said he did think rising levels of CO₂ were a problem and that fossil fuels needed to be limited “as soon as we can”. “It is a very, very serious problem but it is not a climate crisis,” he said.

He said he had been concerned about climate change for many years but said unduly worrying children over the issue was “a form of child abuse”, and “the chance of significant catastrophic events” occurring in the next 30 years “related to an increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere in the southern hemisphere” was “small”.

Paterson added he was more concerned about the “ecocide” from building wind and solar farms” than about climate change.

Here is the link:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/aug/17/dr-adi-paterson-nuclear-for-australia-climate-change

This is really all very confusing but does not change the basic fact that we need to be going full steam towards a zero-carbon future. To be doing anything else is to defy what we know to be true about emissions and global heating / warming.

I really wish the science community could get their act together and on this speak with one voice! Some people really do not know when to shut up - or are too fond of the sound of their own voice! All this stuff does is confuse those who lack a PhD in a scientific discipline and can sort the facts from fiction! 

I find this all pretty sad and time wasting!

David.

Let Us All Be Clear On This – Buying Elicit Drugs By Mail Is Very Dangerous - Unless You Can Access Proper Drung Testing – And Rat Bag Governments Won’t Make That Service Available.

This appeared last week:

‘Rocked to our core’: Warning over son’s dark web laced ‘oxycodone’ death

A young Australian tradie felt he had to turn to the dark web for pain medication, but the pills were laced with a deadly unregulated opioid.

Blair Jackson

August 18, 2024 - 11:37AM

NewsWire

The parents of a teenage Melbourne tradie are raising the alarm about purchasing medicine online after their son’s overdose death on a synthetic opioid.

Jetson Gordon, 18, died in April 2022 after an overdose of what he thought was oxycodone, but was actually laced with a dangerous, potent synthetic opioid called nitazene.

Mr Gordon bought the pills on the dark web and his parents later found the package in his bedroom.

The health authorities in multiple Australian states have issued alerts about various types of nitazenes in recent years, in cases where the potent substances have been sold as or cut into MDMA, ketamine, and meth, as well as heroin or pills sold illegally as actual prescription opioids.

Mr Gordon’s parents told the ABC their son “had an unfortunate experience around pharmaceuticals and prescribed medication”, so he decided to purchase oxycodone on the dark web.

The 18-year-old was enjoying his carpentry apprenticeship but stressed about living out of home for the first time, his parents said, having moved from regional New South Wales to Melbourne.

“It’s completely rocked us to our core … it’s life-changing,” his stepmother Emily Berry said.

“I don’t think he knew of any risks in doing it or he wouldn’t have done it,” she said.

Nitazenes are regularly tens-of-times more potent than fentanyl, and hundreds-times the strength of morphine. This dramatically increases the chances of the user becoming unconscious and stopping breathing.

Doctors found Mr Gordon died from n-pyrrolidino etonitazene toxicity, ABC reported.

After Mr Gordon’s flatmates found him dead, the young man’s parents found a package from the UK in his bedroom; there were 24 pills inside, and half a pill in his bed.

The pills were stamped with an “M”, as some legally-produced oxycodone is.

British authorities say nitazenes are being made in China and shipped through the UK.

The Gordon family says authorities have told them it will be impossible to trace the dark web pills.

Here is the link:

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/rocked-to-our-core-warning-over-sons-dark-web-laced-oxycodone-death/news-story/a235d4da679fc24f81041f6d63db072e

We know from the ACT pill-testing experience that people will use drug-testing services if they are available but when it comes to it, Governments really could not actually care less if the odd patient dies because there is not ‘pill-testing’ available.

If they did care they would actually do something with the scale and reach needed – it is as easy as that! They won't because 'Mr/Mrs Self-righteous' would apparently prefer these 'druggies' just die!

It is hard to work out just which ‘Circle of Hell’ best suits these politicians and their flunky bureaucrats but it should be a hot one!!!

I really find this sort of hypocrisy both infuriating and terribly sad. What about actually doing what you suggest you will to get elected?

Any clever ideas to provoke change?

David.

AusHealthIT Poll Number 760 – Results – 18 August 2024.

Here are the results of the poll.

Are You Concerned About The Risk Of A Terrorist Incident At Present In Australia?

Yes                                                                               13 (62%)

No                                                                                  8 (38%)

I Have No Idea                                                              0 (0%)

Total No. Of Votes: 21

A totally apathetic poll from which I reckon zilch can be drawn! Seems like I need to leave them up for longer – or make them more interesting! Comments welcome to break my boredom!

Please suggest a few topics we might all enjoy!!!

Any insights on the poll are welcome, as a comment, as usual!

A totally disconnected voting turnout. 

0 of 21 who answered the poll admitted to not being sure about the answer to the question!

Again, many, many special thanks to all those who voted! 

David.

An Expert Observer Warns We Are In Pretty Uncharted Waters!

This appeared last week:

It’s the most volatile election in living memory and anything can and will happen

Tom Switzer

10 January, 2024

In five decades of living alternately on the two sides of the Pacific, I have never seen anything like it. The political atmosphere in America is far more pessimistic, partisan and polarising than anything seen in Australia.

The left’s venomous hatred of Donald Trump, with its comparisons with Adolf Hitler, is matched by the right’s loathing of the Democrats and hostility towards liberals. On political shows, talking heads of old have become shouting heads.

Meanwhile, in the centre, inhabited by about a third of Americans, there is despair at the extremism of both left and right.

Indeed, this year’s presidential election campaign seems more volatile than anything seen in the US since 1968 – with the race riots, war protests, political assassinations and burning of the cities.

Witness the extraordinary twists and turns during the past few weeks: the sudden debacle of the presidential debate; the near-assassination of a former president; the sudden scratching of the incumbent President from the race; the sudden elevation of a Vice-President her own party had deemed a serious burden; and then, lo and behold, the same VP suddenly pulling even in the presidential contest.

What makes matters even more turbulent is the global disorder: from eastern Europe to northeast Asia to the Middle East, the world faces several threats that could easily spin out of control and suck Uncle Sam into more 21st-century quagmires.

All this reminds one of the final episode of Fawlty Towers, the brilliant English comedy of the 1970s. The local health and safety inspector confronts a hapless Basil Fawlty with a long and horrendous list of everything that is wrong with his hotel, including a filthy kitchen, inadequate temperature control, cracked and missing wall and floor tiles, lack of hand basins and – gasp! – two dead pigeons in the water tank. To which actor John Cleese replies: “Otherwise, OK?”

Well, for many Americans and indeed many people around the world, things are far from OK.

One can be forgiven for thinking the 2024 US presidential race – a contest between a left-wing firebrand from the union’s most left-wing state and a rude, crude, lewd buffoon charged with four indictments – is like what Henry Kissinger thought of the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s: it’s too bad both sides can’t lose.

It’s a truism in contemporary US politics that to win the White House a candidate needs to win over independents and undecideds in about seven key swing states: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. The question is whether Trump or Kamala Harris, notwithstanding their many flaws, can appeal to these swing voters.

The 78-year-old Trump taps into legitimate grievances about lax border controls, identity politics, energy prices and the direction of US foreign policy under neo-conservatives and liberal interventionists. As distinguished British historian Niall Ferguson warns, any great power that spends more on servicing its debt than on defence will not stay great for long. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, recognise this banal truth.

To reorder US strategic priorities away from Europe to Asia is hardly isolationist. It is a prudent recognition of the limits to power in a multipolar world that does not accommodate the US dominating the globe as it did during unipolarity. It is also consistent with Barack Obama’s much-touted pivot to Asia more than a decade ago that was aimed to counter the China threat.

Yet Trump’s polarising style of politics, much less his character and temperament, disgusts many independents and even right-leaning suburban voters.

Bret Stephens, the award-winning columnist from The New York Times and a recent guest of the public policy research organisation I head, reflects the views of many Americans on the right intellectual spectrum when he laments that Trump has “done the most to reshape the Republican Party into something unrecognisable to someone like me, who grew up in Ronald Reagan’s shadow”.

In Stephens’s judgment, Trump’s main crime is to smash “the old conservative consensus, which believed in classically liberal ideals like free trade, strong international alliances and the benefits of immigration, as well as some classically conservative ones, like the necessity of moral character in political leadership and civility in public life”.

Remember Trump and Vance pledge a 10 per cent across-the-board tariff that is reminiscent of the trade protectionism that helped turn a great recession into the Great Depression in the 1930s.

Add to this their support for a mass deportation of immigrant workers, who have been a source of American growth, and it’s no wonder so many age-old conservative institutions – from publications such as National Review and The Wall Street Journal editorial page to think tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute – are profoundly uneasy about Trump mark II.

Then there is 59-year-old Harris: the prospect of America having its first female president, who’s also black, has energised millions – not just ethnic minorities but also the young and those who have never voted.

But Harris is also a San Francisco Democrat – a metropolitan sophisticate whose politics are fundamentally at odds with the thoughts and attitudes of Middle America – and she has chosen as her running mate a fellow left-winger from Minnesota, which has not voted Republican since 1972.

The Democrat ticket promises more of the same regulation and subsidies of Joe Biden, plus huge tax increases – even as Harris tacks or changes her lines on various issues such as fracking. For those who believe America’s greatest strength, from which the world benefits, is the can-do individualism that fuels its economy, Harris and Tim Walz present a worrying prospect. What is also disturbing about Harris is her refusal to subject herself to any media scrutiny. In the three weeks she has been the Democratic candidate, Harris has not faced one press conference or interview with a senior journalist. Can you imagine a new Australian prime minister or opposition leader shying away from any interviews or press conferences weeks out from an election?

Sky News host Rita Panahi has hit out at the media for trying to rebrand Tim Walz as a "safe centrist".

According to Gerard Baker, a regular contributor to The Times and The Wall Street Journal, the American mainstream media may well do “what they nearly got away with doing for Biden the last few years and cover for someone evidently incapable of holding office”.

All this makes for an unhappy country and helps explains why the race is a dead heat: all the available opinion polling evidence suggests Harris is now breaking even with Trump in battleground states.

But how reliable are the polls? In 2016 and even 2020, polls massively underestimated Trump’s strengths. A few weeks out from both elections, Hillary Clinton and Biden held commanding double-digit point leads. Yet both elections were exceedingly close. Then again, the polls before the November 2022 congressional midterms predicted a big Republican victory in the House of Representatives. They, too, were wrong.

In the most volatile election in living memory, even the most seasoned observers of American politics have no idea what will happen on November 5. Does anybody?

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies.

Here is the link:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/its-the-most-volatile-election-in-living-memory-and-anything-can-and-will-happen/news-story/eb7737ba34daaa1d9e749f70524298f8

I agree with Tom we are in for a pretty wild ride over the next 5 months!

Buckle up!

David.