Abusers, Predators, or Exploiters?

Pic courtesy Med CPD

I am not sure, gentle reader, of the best title for this post.

Read it, and take your pick.

Many years ago, I was the principal of a small special school in the Northern suburbs of Brisbane.  Just up the road from the school was a corner store, which amongst other things, sold sweets.

Occasionally, parents would give their children pocket money, and because it was safe traffic wise, we'd let the physically able kids go to the shop to buy sweets at lunch time.

I began to get visits and phone calls from parents who were complaining because they'd give their child a small note - five or ten dollars to spend, and at the end of the day when they arrived home, there was no change. 

The majority of those children involved had Down Syndrome, and it was obvious that they had an intellectual impairment.

It didn't take too long to work out what the shopkeeper was doing. Because the children never questioned him, he would take their money and offer no change. 

I challenged him, and he became abusive and told me to mind my own business. The shop was declared "out of bounds" and what had been a useful chance for the children to practice living skills evaporated.

Today I read about NDIS providers defrauding clients. While the majority of providers operate honestly, the scheme has been exploited by predatory operators and organized crime syndicates. Instances of fraud cost taxpayers and vulnerable participants millions of dollars annually through false claims and overcharging.

On social media I see the word "retard" used as a form of insult.

These two examples reflect the attitude of a few people in the community who are users and abusers. 

They reflect it both in their language and behaviour. It's pretty sad, as it provides a barrier to best quality of life for people with disabilities, and defrauds both this cohort of our community and the Australian taxpayer.

 

Advice for the Troops

 

When I was on the way to Vietnam on the HMAS Sydney in February 1970, we were given a pamphlet outlining how we were expected to behave as soldiers in our interactions with Vietnamese civilians.

We had very little contact with civvies, except on leave in Vung Tau, so it wasn't all that useful, but coming across this little piece of history online the other day, reminded me that the military did make an effort to provide some factual information for its soldiers.

In the fact sheet above, issued to American GIs in World War Two, the military explained the phenomenon of fascism, the ideology that these same GIs were fighting.

Taking some of that advice, and applying it to the current situation under the Trump administration, is a revelatory exercise. 

The Fact Sheet #64 was entitled "Can We Spot It?"

The second paragraph begins with - 

Any fascist attempt to gain power in America would not use the exact Hitler pattern. It would work under the guise of "super-patriotism" and "super-Americanism". 

Trump's slogan is "Make America Great Again". 

It goes on to list three fascist aims -

1. Pitting of religious, racial and economic groups in order to break down national unity - In the United States native fascists have often been anti-Catholic, anti-Jew, anti-Negro, anti-Labor, anti foreign-born"

That is a pretty accurate summary of what is happening in the USA now, where members of minority groups are being taken off the streets into detention. It has an application in this country as well, when you look at the hate that is daily posted on social media, usually referring to Indigenous Australians, Muslim Australians, and Asian Australians. It's the bread and butter of One Nation.

2. Fascists cannot tolerate such religious and ethical concepts as "the brotherhood of man". Fascists deny the need for international cooperation. 

This has a very familiar ring when Trump's railing against globalism is considered.

3. It is accurate to call a member of a communist a "communist" - Indiscriminate pinning of the label "Red" on people and proposals which one opposes is a common political device. It iis a favourite trick of native as well as foreign fascists.

This labelling is used with boring frequency. It has the advantage for the neo-fascists in this country and abroad in that it removes any possibility of debate. The label is enough. It is particularly popular on social media, as it operates as a type of shorthand which suits those who are too lazy or ignorant to describe what they actually object to. 

My father fought fascists in World War Two, a war in which forty thousand Australians died.

The ignoramuses who post about the communist menace have short memories, or no understanding of history.

Of Gardens, Cars and Connections

One of the few perks of ageing is the connections it provides. 

This has been brought home to me recently, gentle reader, by a number of encounters which appear at first glance, absolutely random, but when considered carefully are an inevitable result of longevity and mobility.

Yesterday my bride and I went to check out a garden just out of town owned by a mate I first met in 1971 when teaching at the State School for Spastic Children at New Farm, Brisbane.  At the time he and I were the only males on staff, and I was fresh from a year in Vietnam.

At the gate was a charity tent staffed by two women about my age. They introduced themselves and somehow during the conversation, the fact that they were both teachers, and had worked in Townsville, emerged.

I explained that as a special school principal I had opened two schools in Townsville. Turns out that one of them was a very good friend of the ex-principal of one of the two schools which had amalgamated, and he and I had collaborated a great deal at the time.

Sadly, he had died last year, but she was able to show me a photo taken a few years ago in which he looked very happy. He didn't seemed to have changed much.

I then chatted with the bloke who owned the garden (although his wife is the main hobbyist - this bloke is into restoring cars rather than creating gardens). In this conversation I discovered through the medium of a discussion about classic cars, that another long lost acquaintance of mine in the seventies is also well known to my mate. The long lost acquaintance is into Alfas and Porsches, the gardener Citroens. 

His son favours Peugeots, and I gifted him my old 404 about ten years ago. It's undergoing a slow restoration, and I'm on a promise to drive it when it's finished, if I last that long. It is indeed a very slow restoration. The son is a busy policeman. 

The car I gave away.

When you think about it, these connections weren't all that unusual. Special education was a small but rapidly growing segment of the education community in Queensland back then. The progress and expansion since has been incredible.

The nomenclature has changed for the better. Calling a school "The State School for Spastic Children" would not be possible these days. 

The term "spastic" describes just one of the manifestations of cerebral palsy. The fact that it has gone from the language except when used by nitwits as a form of abuse is no bad thing.

Affirmative Action

 

It was different in 1968

Teaching has always been a tough gig, but these days it seems to be getting tougher.

The attrition rate for early career teachers is pretty constant, and remains a problem. 

This report provides some useful detail.

Recently, reports of misogynistic behaviour directed at young female teachers have appeared. This essay describes an experience that is, unfortunately, far from unusual. 

It's nothing new, of course, and the plight of the casual or relief teacher is well-known. I had the opportunity to do some relief teaching post retirement, but chose advisory visiting teaching instead. The idea of working with a different bunch of students each day did not appeal. 

Frankly, without the possibility of properly engaging with your students for more than one day at a time, it seemed to me a futile exercise, despite the fact that it pays well.

This issue overlaps with the problem of gender balance within the profession, or as it frequently labelled, the feminisation of teaching.

If the statistics weren't enough evidence of a problem, my recent experience as a consultant made it abundantly clear. I had been working for a number of years in support of the rural primary school where I started my career in 1968.

At the time I was a member of a staff of eighteen, eight of whom were male. During my sojourn in support of the same school between 2006 and 2017, the school which now has thirty full timers on staff had only one male teacher.

The janitor-groundsman was male, but that really didn't assist. The phenomenon of a staff of female teachers led by a male principal (the cliche we hear a great deal) was also absent, as the principal was female.

In any profession, a gender balance which has gone beyond say, 80/20 either way, is regarded as undesirable. This gender balance report was compiled from the standpoint of improving diversity in corporate structures.  Most contemporary writings on the subject adopt a point of view which discriminates between the raw numbers and the hierarchical structures as they apply to gender in the profession.  

The problem is complicated in that whilst a large majority of teachers are female, the hierarchical structures within the profession favour career paths for men because they don't have to manage the interruptions caused by childbirth and child rearing.

Does this mean that the problems encountered by the author of the essay above are insoluble? 

I hope not, as apart from creating a difficult path for aspiring teacher of either gender, they simply encourage a view of teaching as a profession lacking in clout and significance. There is some irony in the fact that teachers are roundly criticised in some (especially right wing) media for leading children astray in a political sense, whilst these same criticisms imply that the profession is not all that important.

Perhaps there is room for a campaign of affirmative action that attracts males to the profession, driven by the same energy used (for example) to attract women into the trades and STEM. There is ample evidence out there that boys need strong and non-violent male models who can successfully relate to both genders.

Given the current worthy emphasis on the message that "women can do anything", maybe we need another message that says that "men can do most things, including teaching".

Diversity, by definition, requires balance.

  

A Small Life Retrieved

A montage from that time.

One of the most satisfying aspects of a long and varied career as a teacher, is remembering the amazing people encountered along the way.

Let me take you back, gentle reader, to the late eighties, when I had the privilege of opening a new special school in North Queensland.

Because it was a new school, it was staffed with graduate (first year) teachers. What they had in common was youth, enthusiasm, and dedication to the students with disabilities enrolled.

These children were predominantly of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander heritage. Itinerant health clinics visiting their communities had identified them as being at risk, and over the years they had been  brought to live in a residential home run in those days by the North Queensland Crippled Children's Association (now Cootharinga). 

There they received excellent care, but they were separated from their homes and families. These days, they would probably be cared for on their own country, but that was not the practice thirty-five years ago. When the new school was opened in 1987, these children, for the first time in their lives, began to share an experience shared with children living at home with family, by attending a school located separately from where they lived. Previously the school was an annexe of the nursing home. In that situation the children ate, slept, and went to school on the one site. It was a pretty restricted environment, and once removed from their communities, they rarely returned. It was institutionalisation writ large. 

One of these children was a seven year-old from Boigu Island, living with just about every sensory disability possible. He was hearing impaired, had low vision, and microcephaly. Of greatest concern was that he was failing to thrive. There were a number of reasons for this, but a major issue was his capacity (or rather incapacity) to chew and swallow. It took literally hours to patiently feed him, much in the same fashion as a baby is fed, and finding the time to do this, both at the nursing home, and at school was a major challenge.

He had to be carefully positioned and supported and his special food presented to him one small spoonful at a time. The nursing staff would attempt this in the morning before he left for school on the bus, but time was severely limited. Much the same was true in the evening, given the staffing at the home, and he was steadily losing weight. The "failure to thrive" diagnosis would have meant a hospital admission, and tube feeding.

His teacher was determined that this would not happen, so she took the whole hour long lunch time at school to set him up and feed him. This meant she had no lunch break herself, and I'll admit turning a blind eye to her continuing to feed him past the end of the designated time, whilst a teacher aide looked after the rest of the class. Conventionally, the feeding task should have been allocated to a teacher aide, but he refused to take food from anyone else.

After a few weeks of this process, he ceased losing weight, but he was scarcely thriving. The teacher had a bright idea, based on what she had learned about him. He had been born and reared within the sound and smell of the sea, so she decided to take him to the beach to feed him. This was straightforward, as we had a bus at school, I had taught most of the teachers to drive it, and she booked it for a weekly trip to Rowes Bay, pretty close to the nursing home. She would put him on the sand, and feed him there. Unsurprisingly perhaps, he seemed keen to eat there, and it became an enjoyable experience, rather than an ordeal. The rest of her class enjoyed the beach, as well.

The teacher's theory was that this little boy's olfactory sense was critically significant to him, and the familiar smell of the sea helped him relax enough to chew and swallow. Based on his weight gain as this protocol continued, it seemed she was correct. Across a period of six months, his weight improved, he became more alert, and he began to respond more often and more clearly to other students and staff. By the time this teacher was transferred away, two years later, his life had been transformed.

Over the years, I've lost track of both teacher and child, although I did encounter the teacher at a principal's conference in 1997. She had done well, and was by that time, a junior principal. That cohort of beginning teachers were high achievers.

Most of them are now in senior positions.

Short Finals at Cunnamulla

I was going through some archived video the other day, and came across this.

It was a video grab (via iPhone) of a landing we made at Cunnamulla in 2017, when I was working permanent part time as an Advisory Visiting teacher.

The chartered flight (Beechcraft Super King Air) flew Roma - Cunnamulla on Thursdays with the flying surgeon and his offsider anaesthetist. As far as I know, he never performed surgery on these occasions. Rather, he was assessing and preparing patients for procedures carried out in Roma.

To be honest, I never had any idea what he was doing during the day. Upon arrival, I would be dropped off at the school, and the medical (QHealth) people at the hospital. We'd be collected by a government vehicle at the end of the day and driven to the airport. Boarding the aircraft after it had been locked up and sat in the sun all day, particularly in the summer, wasn't much fun, although once the engines were started it cooled down quickly. 

Hitching a ride on these regular charters was a very efficient use of taxpayer resources. The aircraft was a nine-seater, there was plenty of room, and a whole day wasted on travel by car was avoided.

Nevertheless, permission to do it was withdrawn shortly at head office level, overriding the very sensible local decision to allow it. I never was told exactly why. It's possible that it had something to do with cost and/or insurance.

In any case, I always enjoyed the flights, and usually sat in the cockpit where I could see what was going on. The airstrip at Cunnamulla was originally built for US bombers (B-17s) stationed there in World War Two. One of the US personnel involved was a certain Lt Commander Lyndon B Johnson on leave from the US Congress. Apparently he had advised that  Cunnamulla was inland far enough to be out of range of Japanese attacks.

That history explains the length of the strip at Cunnamulla at 1733 metres. It would still be marginal for modern airliners. A 737 needs 2133 metres.  

 

Personal Pronoun Primer

 

Image courtesy Liveabout

Perhaps my teaching background is an issue, but the misuse of common English grammar both in social and corporate media drives me nuts.

Even when working as an itinerant consultant in bush schools between 2007 and 2017, I frequently had to restrain myself from correcting the grammar written on blackboards by teachers that I saw from time to time .

There are two common examples.

Take "your", and "you're" for example.

"Your" is the first person possessive pronoun. Its usage is very straightforward. Yet, somehow people confuse it with "you're" which is a contraction. "You're" is a shortening of "you are". 

For example - "You're late for your appointment".

Then there's "their" and "they're". 

"Their" is the third person possessive pronoun. "They're" is a contraction, a shortening of "they are".

For example - "They're going to collect their wages".

It's pretty simple.

I reserve the right to correct any grammar errors that are posted in comments on this site. I will always correct them on any sites I comment on, and am, as a consequence, often accused of pedantry.

It's weird that the same people who are bemoaning what they consider an erosion of Anglo values, are disrespecting the heritage they claim to honour by abusing the basic grammar of the English language.

Strange but true.

Same Old, Same Old...

 

Pic courtesy Montrose Services

The Disability Royal Commission has just released its findings. 

There are over two hundred recommendations. Enacting them will be a monumental task. 

The last Royal Commission with as many recommendations as this one was the 1991 inquiry into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody. 

Of *RCIADIC's 339 recommendations, a Deloitte Access Economics review in 2018 found that, 64% have been implemented in full, 14% have been mostly implemented, 16% have been partially implemented and 6% have not been implemented.

It's to be hoped that twenty-seven years down the track, the disability royal commission has a better outcome.

Somehow, although I won't be around to see it that far down the track, I believe that the result for people with disabilities will be similar to that for indigenous people in custody.

I write this because everything I saw in my 40 year career in special education points in this direction. Ironically, the five years I spent in aboriginal education in remote North-West Queensland confirms it.

Both are areas of enormous challenge, and both are shaped by the general population's disregard, sprinkled with a fair amount of fear and ignorance.

It is dismaying to note the disagreement about recommendations for the future of both special schools and group homes reflected in the findings. The commissioners were divided.

It's profoundly depressing, that in the year 2023, we are stuck in the worn out debates about provision, with the argument cycling around binary concepts, of one style of organisation opposing another.

Here's a simpler solution. All schools should be special schools, and all accommodation universal. By that I mean that the lock-step, highly graded and hierarchical organisational structure of conventional schools doesn't really suit anyone, let alone students with disabilities. 

Schools should be ultimately flexible, and organised around the learning needs of the enrolment, not the classroom spaces and timetable. It can be done, and has been successful. The Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership has released a paper that is well worth a read. 

State governments in this country are generally responsible for schooling, and I can't see any of the current governments with the requisite courage and foresight to change the fundamentals. This is, of course, because governments are run by politicians, not teachers, and education is one of the most politically sensitive aspects of government. It was ever thus...

*Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody

 

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Back to School

                        

Image courtesy MastersDegree.net

After three years part-time, gentle reader, I've graduated in my M.A.

Resuming study in your seventh decade is perhaps a little unusual, but I need a goal, and I'm a lousy golfer.

I already had two degrees from the seventies and eighties, when I got a leg-up post Vietnam through a Department of Labour and National Service rehabilitation scholarship, so I had no problem getting admitted once the University of Queensland dug up my academic record.

I wasn't so lucky in getting a statement from my post-graduate diploma from Griffith University, as it had been lost in a warehouse in the 2011 flood, but they did write a letter of confirmation of enrolment.

Academia has changed more than a little in forty plus years, but the principles remain the same. You simply have to do a little work each day. It's straightforward when you're retired.

These days, information technology is all the goal, so I had to brush up a little on my computer skills. None of that was around in the seventies.

My project was an examination of the old myth "Every national serviceman who went to Vietnam was a volunteer". Others have already exposed it as nonsense, but I wanted to investigate it myself, and did so by interviewing Vietnam veterans who were Nashos. I managed to find a few volunteer Nashos, but they're like hens teeth. 

Bizarrely, some of those who applied for early registration finished up as accidental volunteers - strange but true.

Because the experience was so enjoyable, I'm considering continuing, although I'll need an institution, a new supervisor and a new project. I'm open to suggestions.

In the meantime, here's a link to my thesis. It's not exactly light reading, but some of you may be interested.

Comments closed.

The Power of Listening (2)

 

Apparently that's me. I don't really understand the picture.

I've blogged about this before, gentle reader, but now that the legislation clearing the way for the referendum to be held has been passed, I'll have another look at the issue.

 One of the reactions to that post was interesting, in that it claimed that self-interest has put a barrier between the resources allocated and the outcomes achieved. I wouldn't for a moment disagree with that, but that failed top-down model is the whole point of setting up a voice.

The historical record has shown us that whenever non-indigenous agencies come up with "solutions" to the problem of indigenous disadvantage, the result is failure. There is a succession of these "solutions", ranging from the formation of ATSIC in 1990 and its dissolution in 2005, to Howard's intervention in 2007.  

ATSIC's abolition followed a 2005 report and enquiry by its Select Committee which found that although there had been widespread support for instituting changes to the way that ATSIC was structured and operated, there was also "overwhelming" support for the continued existence of a national Indigenous representative body. Most witnesses to the inquiry had suggested that regional operations could be improved, but they were strongly in favour of having a national, elected Indigenous representative body. Deep concerns were expressed about the disempowerment of Indigenous peoples. One of the recommendations was that the government "give active support and funding to the formation of a national Indigenous elected representative body, and provide it with ongoing funding". That recommendation went begging.

That recommendation could be seen as the origin of the Voice. The dismantling of ATSIC was seen by many commentators as harmful to Aboriginal people in Australia. In 2009, Lowitja O'Donoghue opined that reform of the agency would have been better than abolishing it.

It's instructive to compare the behaviour of Geoff Clarke (disgraced ex ATSIC Commissioner) involving pub brawls, and sexual assaults, with that alleged to have been carried out by Kathryn Campbell (ex Secretary of the Department of Human Services) which occurred in the air-conditioned offices of the DHS, by people "neat and clean and well-advised"*. Clarke's offences didn't kill anyone. It appears that what happened under Campbell's watch did.

The discussion about listening reminded me of my experiences in North-West Queensland referred to in my original post. 

At the time I was a naive, but well-intentioned middle class public servant commissioned to manage and annual budget of $2.8 million to support the NATSIEP (National Aboriginal and Torres strait Education Programme)  initiative in an area twice the size of victoria and Tasmania combined. 

I had to learn on the job. When I left that position, I did so with the good wishes of the Mitakoodi and Kalkadoon elders that I had worked with in the portfolio, and they presented me with some parting gifts. The first one is a dot painting shown at the top of this post.

The second was the poem above. 

What gobsmacked me when I read it again (after nearly 30 years) was the reference to "listening" in the opening line of the second verse. 

I learned a great deal from these wonderful people in the five years I worked with them. Much of the listening took place as I was driving with them along the Flinders Highway to Cloncurry and Hughenden or the Beef Developmental Road (now Route 83) to Dajarra, Boulia, Bedourie and Birdsville. 

Those journey lasted hours, so I learned plenty. All they ever wanted back then was to be listened to and taken seriously. When that was done, and their initiatives and suggestions followed, progress was made. There was never any place for judgement - (see the second line of the second verse). 

They'd had generations of that. 

I doubt much has changed since the nineties.

*From the old Irish Ballad.

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Groundhog Day - Consultants on the Taxpayer's Dollar

 

Image courtesy Australian Financial Review

We're reading and watching plenty of media about the big four consulting firms. 

My brief experience as a school principal with consultancies was an eye opener, and showed just how much of a scam many of their operations were. Nothing has changed.

Back in the late nineties, I was principal of a large regional special school. There was a department supplied special bus supplied as part of the infrastructure. It was equipped with a wheelchair hoist which allowed children with physical impairments to attend excursions along with their able-bodied peers. The previous three special schools I had led were similarly equipped, as were all other Queensland special schools at the time.

Apparently, providing kids with disabilities equity of access had become a low priority and Treasury had decided that supplying these buses on the taxpayer dollar was a bridge too far, even though the real cost was slight.  They were replaced every five years, by which time the Q-Fleet leases resulted in an almost cost neutral exercise. They were traded at a price about the same as they were purchased tax-free by Q-fleet.

The decision had to be justified, of course, so Education Queensland commissioned a firm of consultants to come up with a rationale. The first I knew was when I received a phone call from someone senior in resources branch in head office saying that I would get a visit from a representative of the firm to assess the way in which the bus was being used. Half a dozen other schools statewide were also being investigated.

The consultant turned up shortly afterward armed with copious supplies of paperwork. He explained that he had a range of data collection documents, conveniently mounted on clipboards, that staff would be required to complete every time they used the bus. Information requested included destination, distance, reason for the journey including the educational aims of the excursion, name and role of the driver, and an approximation of the cost of the fuel involved. 

Once completed, the documents were to be forwarded by post to the consultancy. I asked him what would be done with the information. He replied that it would be collated and sent to Treasury. I asked what the firm was being paid for the exercise, but he wouldn't tell me, claiming "commercial in confidence".

Off he went, back to Brisbane. After considering what my already overworked teachers were being asked to do, I phoned a few of my principal colleagues, who  expressed reservations similar to mine. Eventually, we agreed that this task was beyond the role of our teachers, and one by one, phoned central office to break the sad news that we wouldn't cooperate. All the consultants were being paid for was to enter information into a database, summarise it, and forward it to central office. This information was not received with enthusiasm by head office, and comments were made about the career damaging possibilities of this non-cooperation. 

The Union became involved, and that was the end of the exercise. Treasury pulled the pin.

Looking back on it, the episode was emblematic of how the use of consultants, on taxpayers' funds, has crept into public institutions. The current malfeasance exhibited by the big four is simply a sophisticated evolution of the process.

It's gratifying to see it called out at last, but great damage has been done to what used to be a frank and fearless public service. Between this and Robodebt, it's time for public service reform.

Unfortunately, the wound will take years to heal.    

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Super Nonsense

 

Not too many with balances over $2 million (courtesy Firstlinks).

The current confected outrage about possible changes to superannuation is more than a little hypocritical.

Most of the noise is coming from the Coalition, who have always had an ideological loathing of compulsory superannuation.

It's hypocritical because they introduced changes to access to superannuation during the pandemic without previously announcing their intentions. The pandemic, of course was not planned, but neither was the current state of the economy post pandemic. If it was OK to change super as the consequence of one unpredicted emergency (the pandemic), why is it not OK to change tax breaks as the consequence of a different emergency (inflation)?

In terms of "middle Australia", whom John Howard claims are under threat if a cap is introduced to super balances, I question how many "middle Australians" have balances over $3 million?

Superannuation, a Labor initiative, is designed to provide an income post retirement, and saves the taxpayer an arm and a leg, and always has done so. It was never intended as a tax break for multi-millionaires, despite that fact that an industry has developed which does just that, and makes a tidy dollar doing so.

I know well the benefits of super, as it is my current source of income. Back in 1971, I had a different view.

When I was conscripted as a teacher in 1969, I had already been a member of a superannuation fund (then called the State Public Sector Superannuation Scheme) for twelve months. As a "bonded" teacher, my super payments were compulsory, as were the contributions of the then Department of Education. Back then, I had absolutely no understanding of the process, so I made no arrangements to cover my compulsory contributions. To this day, I have no idea of what happened to my employer contributions.

The army had its own scheme (DFRB), and I contributed to that from my princely private's pay (about two thirds of what I was earning as a teacher, even with operational loadings). Nothing went in to QSPSS from my army pay, but I continued, under the 1912 act, to be obliged to make contributions.

The result of this was a bill for about $600 (a fair whack in 1971) on discharge. The bill was made up of my owed contributions, together with interest, because the fund borrowed the money to continue to pay them. I had to buy clothes and a car, put a bond on a flat, and the Education Department failed to pay me because they'd lost my file during the two years I was in the army.  

At that point I began to understand how superannuation works.

I understand it much more clearly now.   

 

 

The Power of Listening

 

Pic courtesy NT Air Services

No doubt, gentle reader, you've been reading and hearing about the proposal to insert in our Australian constitution reference to an indigenous voice to parliament.

You've also, undoubtedly witnessed objections to the proposal voiced (excuse the pun) by people usually labelled "Conservatives". 

Their objection is the alleged lack of information about the proposal.

Frankly, it's a very simple proposition - that the elected parliament listens, and when that parliament has formed legislation as a consequence of the usual numbers on the floors of both houses, legislation as a response will follow. The content of those legislative responses will obviously depend on what the Voice recommends.

For the last two hundred plus years, the situation of indigenous communities has not improved. This situation is starkly obvious when you check the statistics.

There are a complex range of reasons for this, but labelling our indigenous brothers as a primitive hunter-gatherer society, one typical Conservative response, is unhelpful. Our ancestors at the time were not exactly paragons of civilized virtue. One thing I learned, when heading up Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander educational programmes for five years in Northwest Queensland is that non-indigenous Australians don't really know how to listen.

Don't get me wrong, there is no shortage of good intentions in the full range of bureaucracies tasked with helping these communities, but frankly, these well intentioned people don't have a clue. Back in 1992, I was one of them.

I embarked on a very steep learning curve, and one thing I did learn was that listening was essential but neglected. There was no mechanism in the education departmental structures facilitating a process where members of those communities provided advice to the public servants implementing what were expensive programmes.

We set up a group in the Northwest which met on a monthly basis in the various communities in the educational region, and these committees, made up mostly of elders, and mostly of women, examined project proposals put forward by the school sector in these communities, and funded them in order of merit.  

The communities involved were Boulia, Bedourie, Birdsville, Longreach, Dajarra, Urandangie, Camooweal, and Mount Isa. I was often surprised at the order of merit set up by the NATSIEP* group. It was very different from what I considered appropriate, but the group was usually vindicated at the end of the reporting period when we looked at the results.

On one occasion, we had a problem of kids coming and going across the Territory border following funerals and the usual east-west travel patterns. One of the elders suggested we meet with the NT authorities in Alpurrurulam, across the border.

This involved meeting with the Territory people in an old (fortunately air-conditioned) railway carriage at Alpurrurulam, and thrashing out the details. One of the people in the Territory group was Tracker Tilmouth. Because of his name I asked him if he was related to Charlie Tilmouth from my rifle section in 7RAR. It was then that he broke the sad news to me that Colin (Charlie we called him) was his cousin and had died in 1990. Charlie had been RTA'd on 28th April 1970 after being seriously wounded in our bunker contact on 22nd April.

Charlie (Bruce Ravenscroft on left) in 1970

                         Pic courtesy "Contact Wait Out" - Bruce Ravenscroft

 The result of the Alpurrurulam meeting, was a communication protocol with the Territory education authorities that allowed tracking of kids so that they could move seamlessly from one educational jurisdiction to another, with the programme data available in all locations. It worked.

After my experience in the Northwest, it is abundantly clear to me that we need to listen. This notion, of course, turns over two hundred years of interaction on its head, and I reckon this is the problem for the Conservatives.  

I often wonder what Charlie's opinion would have been.

*National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Indigenous Educational Programme 

Comments closed.

 

Pell - Offender or Victim?

 

Pic courtesy The Australian

George Pell died yesterday in Rome after complications post surgery.

I won't make any comment on his successful appeal to the High Court, and the legal journey that led to that.

I wasn't there, I don't know what happened. Only Pell and his Maker hold that truth.

I can, however, reflect on my minor personal experience with him, and his position in the church in Australia.

Back in 2011, the then Bishop of Toowoomba Diocese, was removed from office after a series of complaints from the Temple Police. I blogged about this situation back in 2011.

I wrote to cardinal Pell protesting Morris' dismissal, and after an interval of six months received a fairly brusque letter from his private secretary. It thanked me for my concern, but claimed that I had been misguided by the publicity surrounding the history. None of the questions I had put to Pell were answered, and the message was clear - mind your own business.

The fact that I was a member of the diocese and that William Morris was my pastor was apparently irrelevant.

Fast forward to the 2018 conviction, the successful appeal to the High Court in 2020, and Pell's transfer to Rome.

Prior to that was Pell's development of the Melbourne Response, the Royal Commission into Institutional Child Abuse, and the public response to the findings. In reference to Pell, they were -

"We are satisfied that Cardinal Pell's evidence as to the reasons that the CEO deceived him was implausible. We do not accept that Bishop Pell was deceived, intentionally or otherwise."

There are a couple of facts of history that will remain relevant to Pell's stewardship and pastoral activity.

First, he was the head of the Catholic Church in Australia during a period when there were literally thousands of cases of clerical abuse of children.

Secondly, he developed an institutional response that initially capped compensation to victims to $75000. The level of compensation was increased during the process to a ceiling of $150000.

Third, he was resistant to any effort to reform the clericalism that was a very significant element of the problem. I learned as a special school principal, that sexual abuse of vulnerable children is a problem of untrammelled power, rather that sexual dysfunction, and whilst that power remains, so does the abuse.

Clericalism in the church has always been about power and control. Fortunately, under the current Pope, there is a slow transformation towards a more pastoral culture, and the power is leaching, at least at parish level, to the laity. There is a long way to go.

Most significant to me was my experience of the required institutional response, in the state education system, that reporting any suspected episode of abuse is compulsory. Failing to report is a criminal offence.The establishment of Suspected Child Abuse and Neglect (SCAN) teams at regional and district level reflects that.

Criticism of the Melbourne Response has always been that it was designed to protect the institutional church, as much as support the victims.

Pell was probably as much a victim of the perpetrators as the children, in that he was unable, given his attitude towards clerical hierarchy, to escape the consequences. His efforts were stymied by the structures he sought to preserve.

However you regard the history, he will be remembered for the positive influence he apparently engineered in sorting the Vatican's finances. His reputation in his own country is much more complicated.

Luke 4:24 writes that no man is a prophet in his own land. 

I wonder if Pell ever had a chance to reflect on that.

Comments Closed.

Yesterday was Australia Day

 

PUNCH, NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AUSTRALIA. PHOTO: DRAGI MARKOVIC

Here is an extract from the Brisbane Courier of 4th September 1899 - 

Australia is born: The Australian nation is a fact....Now is established the dream of a continent for a people and a people for a continent. No longer shall there exist tose artificial barriers which have divided brother from brother. We are one people with one destiny.

This was one response in the press to the successful referendum on federation held in the then colony of Moreton Bay. 

Previously, successful referenda had been held in Victoria, South Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania. After Queensland, Western Australia followed suit, but only after the Australian constitution had become law in the United Kingdom, although the eventual vote in the west was strongly in favour, with double the number of "yes" votes to "no" votes. It was closer (although earlier) in Queensland, with a slim majority of "yes" of 54%.

The various colonial referenda followed a process which had been kicked off in February 1890, when delegates from each of the colonial parliaments, and the New Zealand parliament met at the Australiasian federation conference in Melbourne. 

The conference produced a resolution which agreed that "the interests and prosperity of the Australian colonies would be served by an early union under the crown".

An economic depression stalled the process for a while, but it was rejuvenated in 1893, and by 1895 had gathered momentum.

After the various votes (albeit in dribs and drabs in the cases of Queensland and Western Australia) popular support solidified, and the actual ceremonial recognition was massive.  

About 500000 people turned out on January 1st 1901 in Sydney at the ceremonial declaration. That crowd size was unprecedented in 1901, and only exceeded in actual numbers by the Vietnam moratoriums in Melbourne in 1970.

There are a couple of bizarre aspects to the celebration of Australia Day now, when considered in the light of this history. One is the depth of ignorance of the average Australian of the federation process. It is simply not covered in Australian schools. If you doubt this, ask any of your school age children to provide a brief outline of how Australia became to be a nation, and how our constitution was developed.

You'll probably hear something about Phillip planting a flag on the sand at Port Jackson in 26th January 1788. Three questions to ask in response could be - Why do we celebrate the arrival of a fleet of ships carrying British convicts and marines on our soil? Weren't they simply setting up a jail? Did any of these people consider that they were establishing a nation?

So yesterday marks the one hundred and twenty second anniversary of the establishment of our nation, based on a series of decisions made freely by Australians voting to set up a constitution and a parliamentary bicameral system of government.

I believe that is worth celebrating. 

Instead, we celebrate the opening of a jail, set up to rid the old country of a bunch of losers that were an inconvenience.

It beggars belief, when you think about it, and that's before any consideration of offence caused to our original indigenous inhabitants.

It's time we moved the date. January 1st is a no-brainer, but if that is considered an unsuitable date because New Year's day is already a public holiday, why not find a significant date remembering an important step in the constitutional process?

The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 was passed by the British Parliament on 5th July 1900, and given royal assent by Queen Victoria on 9th July.

Either of those two dates would work.

Comments closed.

Whitlam

 

Today is the 50th anniversary of the election of the Whitlam government. 

That event has enormous significance for the country, paralleled for me by nostalgic personal recollections.

On the day of the election, 2nd December 1972, I worked as a polling clerk at the then Greenslopes Repatriation Hospital in Brisbane, which was an interesting experience. I'll write more about that later on this blog.

At the end of the 1972 academic year, I had just completed twelve months on a Labour and National Service post-discharge Rehabilitation Scholarship, which had set the foundation for the following ten years part time study culminating in two degrees. The day's salary for the polling work with the AEC was timely. That scholarship, although requiring me to do factory work during the university vacation to pay the rent, was one of the few positive outcomes from my service in Vietnam.

In 1972 I was still technically a member of the army reserve, but nothing short of nuclear attack would have put me back in uniform. I'd had the army up to here. One of Whitlam's first actions in government was to abolish conscription. The existence of the scheme which targeted 12% of twenty year olds had been a moral blight on the nation since its introduction in 1965.

At the time I had commenced, mostly by accident, a career in special education, and there was a happy coincidence between this and the election of a government which reformed support for people with disabilities through its focus on human rights and social justice.

Subsequently, initiatives taken by the Labor government in the relatively short time it held power, transformed the quality of lives of children with disabilities, initially by securing support for mainstreaming, and by the time it lost office, setting up institutional structures such as AHRC which gave teeth to legislation supporting their right to full access.

In Queensland (and most other states) at the time of Whitlam's election, children with severe disabilities went to school in segregated institutions, mostly in capital cities, and run by charitable organisations, such as the (then) Spastic Welfare league, Crippled Children's' Association and the (then) Subnormal Children's' Association. The titles of these organisations reflect very accurately the social attitude to disability at the time. 

In 1971, immediately on return from Vietnam, I worked as a teacher at the State School for Spastic Children, New Farm. On the same campus was a separate training centre for students with cerebral palsy who were considered ineducable. Above a certain IQ, they went to school. Below it, they attended the training centre. This was anathema to the ALP reforms.

Some of my class at New farm 1971

The fact that the IQ tests used at the time weren't standardised on a population of children with cerebral palsy was not considered relevant. During the time I was at the school, the training centre was closed, and the school was staffed with teachers from the state system. Similar processes were on the way in regional centres up and down the coast in Queensland, and the institutionalised schools for the blind and deaf in Brisbane were losing enrolments as special education units for students with hearing and vision impairments were being established in local schools.

As part of the move of students with disabilities from special to regular school settings, I worked as an itinerant visiting teacher in the mid-seventies, preparing both schools and students for mainstreaming. This was enjoyable and fulfilling work, and post retirement as a principal in 2005, I returned for a time to this work. It remained enjoyable, but these days the pioneering aspect has gone. 

Mainstreaming was driven by Whitlam's reform agenda. 

Children with these very common disabilities were now able to stay with their families and attend school with their non-disabled peers. 

All of this was driven initially by the human rights reforms championed by the Labor reforms, and even though the Whitlam government was relatively short lived, these structural changes became firmly embedded in public education provision in Queensland and elsewhere. These reforms profoundly improved the quality of the lives of these children and their families.

Later, in the early eighties when the money driven by Whitlam's reforms began to cascade from the commonwealth to the states, I was again in the right place at the right time, and spent six months offline developing a design brief for a new special school in Townsville. When opened in 1987, this school moved about seventy children with physical impairments from a 1940s model boarding institution to a school to which they travelled every day. 

I founded this school, built with $2.8 million of Whitlam money, which was not small bikkies at the time. When the National Party state minister for education (Lin Powell) arrived for the official opening, I was sorely tempted to remind him that the money to build it was a result of Labor reforms, but thought better of it.

Lin (Lionel)  Powell - Qld Minister for Education 1987

So when I look back on the anniversary of the 1972 Whitlam victory, I feel deeply privileged to have been able to participate personally in the transformational reforms created for Australians with disabilities.

I wouldn't have missed it for quids.... 

Comments closed.

The AWM - Memorial or Museum?

 

Vietnam memorial as it looked when I visited in 2020.

A low-key announcement was made in a press conference on 6th October by Matt Keogh, Minister for Veterans' Affairs in the presence of Brendan nelson, the Chairman of the War Memorial's governing Council, saying that the current $550 million expansion of the memorial would allow for greater attention to the frontier wars.

There are two elements to this announcement that are worth discussing, gentle reader.

The first is the cost of the expansion, and in my view, the necessity for it. I have been an infrequent visitor to the AWM, mostly in relation to my project on national service. On these occasions, the staff (particularly in the reading room) have been very helpful, and the holdings in the library are extremely important.

The many displays, on the other hand, and their cost, are in my opinion, difficult to justify. It's almost as if the displays have taken on a life of their own, being developed and re-developed at a furious rate. Perhaps the haste is driven by the possibility that in time we may run out of war memorabilia to. display. It only....

I guess they have an educative function, but maybe that function could better be implemented by the teaching in our schools of the facts of our wartime history, rather than the mythology. There is a need, and always has been, to create mobile displays that take the history to the schools in their local situations, rather than expecting organised (and expensive) tours to be organised.

The second noteworthy element is the introduction of the commemoration of the frontier wars into the role of the AWM. This has always been controversial, driven by the notion that a war is only a war when people in uniform fight it. This is a strange concept driven more by the ANZAC myth than the reality of history. The fact that our colonial history is pretty ugly, does not mean we should ignore it. That's simply another form of "cancel culture", that the conservative media rails against.

It's difficult to ignore genocide (the destruction of the Palawa) and the massacres, both by Aboriginal Australians, and the settlers, that are recorded in our colonial history.

What I found quite bizarre, is the reaction of some members of our veteran community., who believe that they have a unique ownership of our military history, and are only people entitled to hold an opinion about it.

The phenomenon observed in the ranks of some that "my war was worse than yours" reminds me of the days (mostly during the seventies and mid-eighties) when RSL clubs turned Vietnam veterans away, because we were told "Your war wasn't a real War..."

Obviously, as a nation we've learned something since that time. 

If only we ran out of wars...

Fair Go for Nashos

 

Those of you who subscribe to any number of ex-service Facebook groups may have already come across this petition.

In case you haven't, here is a quick and dirty explanation.

Between 1964 and 1972, 63,740 twenty year-olds were called up and enlisted into the army. This was the number of men who had their birthdates drawn in one of the sixteen ballots, and who passed the medical. 

In all, 804,286 registered for national service, but the bulk of these (92%) maintained their lifestyles when their birthdates weren't drawn.

Of the 63,740, only 15,300 saw active service in Vietnam, which means that 48,440 Nashos served their two years in units in Australia. Among them were such well known sporting celebrities as Doug Walters , Peter Brock, and Dick Johnson.

Most weren't celebrities, of course, and their lives were turned upside down by the simple fact that they were born on the wrong date. I have two in my extended family. One (who died a few years ago) served in Malaya, and one as a driver in a Brisbane unit. He was part of a small business in Clermont at the time and it took him (and the burgeoning enterprise) a long time to recover. He is now dealing with injuries occasioned at training.

It's worth remembering that this scheme was the only national service programme that was not universal, so it was completely unjust and morally absurd.

More detail is contained here.

When the two years was up, these men were entitled to return to their pre-Nasho jobs, but that was about the only benefit they received.

Contrast that with somebody like me who saw active service, was provided with a war service home loan and a *DLNS rehabilitation scholarship, and a DVA gold card at age 70. 

I reckon these 48,000 (or perhaps given the ravages of time, the approximate 30,000 who survive) are entitled to some form of compensation. The provision of a gold card at age 70 would seem to me to be utterly reasonable.

So I completely support this initiative.

I am bemused by some fellow Vietnam veterans who oppose it. 

The term "dog in the manger" comes to mind.

*Department of Labour and National Service

Teach - Don't Cancel

 

Image courtesy dictionary.com

We hear so much today, gentle reader, about "cancel culture".

As usual, most of what we hear emanates from across the Pacific. The Americans have been doing this kind of thing for years, but it seems to have caught on in Oz.

To be perfectly frank, to me the notion of destroying a symbol because you object to what it stood for is adolescent.

Surely, if the evil that men do lives after them (as the bard suggests), it should be remembered, rather than forgotten. You would hope that the recall of past evil would help guard against its recurrence. 

Cancel cancel is nothing new.

When I lived in Mount Isa in the nineties, there was a memorial on the Barkly Highway, near Kajabbi and not far from the site of Battle Mountain where a massacre of Kalkadoon people occured in 1884.

This monument was destroyed by gelignite twice in the five years I lived in Mount Isa. It was an easy target, because it was sited on the highway in the middle of nowhere. 

It has been rebuilt.

Perhaps, instead of destroying symbols (statues or whatever) informative and accurate information should be displayed on or near them. This would have the benefit of informing about evil past deeds, rather than obliterating their memory.

As both a student and teacher of history, I've always regarded the truth as instructive.

Education's Groundhog Day

                                                      Pic courtesy Learners' Edge

No doubt, gentle reader, you've read reports of a teacher shortage, and a meeting held yesterday to address it. Teacher shortages are nothing new, but the current situation is alarming.

The pandemic has brought it to a head, but these issues have been floating around for decades.

I spent four years in the nineties in a job where I was responsible (amongst other things) for recruiting teachers to work with students with disabilities in remote schools in the then North Western Region. Regional office was based in Mount Isa, and the region covered an area twice the size of Victoria and Tasmania combined.

The majority of the schools in the region were small, all were remote, and over two-thirds had majority Aboriginal enrolments. They were challenging environments and recruiting always a challenge. The Statewide Human Resource branch  made concessions to remote regions which helped. These included allowing us to contact newly-graduated teachers first, and offering positions which hopefully would be taken up by the graduates before they were offered something less remote. I was the person making the offers on the phone, and was frequently surprised by the ignorance of the geography of Queensland demonstrated by the graduate teachers.

I remember offering a job at Cloncurry to a young woman who asked - "That's somewhere on the Sunshine Coast, isn't it?". I suggested she consult a map, and her enthusiasm diminished rapidly. She was confusing Cloncurry with Caloundra.

We were successful in attracting graduates who grew up in the region and were familiar with it, but there weren't many of those. There was (and it remains) a remote area scheme based on a system which awarded transfer points to teachers in remote locations. This meant that two or three years' service in a remote school earned a posting to a favourable area, usually coastal South-east.

The upshot was a constant battle to fill positions, and quite obviously, that situation continues, and apparently is now beginning to affect less remote regions. Hence, yesterday's conference.

What I found supremely ironic were the recommendations tabled from the meeting. They include the establishment of paid internships, recruitment of teachers from overseas, and proposals to pay highly accomplished teachers salaries of more than $110000 p.a.

The irony in situation lies in the fact that the first two are resurrections of strategies used when I began working in Special Education in the seventies post Vietnam. I was a beneficiary of the internship strategy in that I was granted a twelve month post graduate programme that provided training in my speciality which was Physical Impairment. These internships were offered in Vision Impairment (which my wife completed), Intellectual Impairment and Hearing Impairment. They offered experienced teachers either six or twelfth month study secondments which up-skilled them and prepared them for leadership positions in their specialities.  

Even the proposals to pay higher salaries to accomplished teachers are not really novel. The Senior Teacher programme that operated in Queensland in the early 2000s was not a great success. This is hardly surprising. Cherry-picking "accomplished" teachers and paying them higher salaries simply doesn't work. Teaching is a collaborative activity, and competition for higher pay essentially kills collaboration. It's way past time that politicians began listening to teachers, rather than looking for political brownie points with silver bullet solutions.

There may actually be a silver bullet. Paying all teachers what they are worth, accomplished or otherwise would be a good start. 

Another silver bullet might be quarantining teachers from data collection, NAPLAN administration and other non-teaching (and unproductive) activity. 

This works in countries such as Finland, where marketplace competition is completely absent.