Bitter?… NAH
Nursing a grudge
THERE'S never any money for nurses, but there's always extra money for teachers. Considering their performance in the classroom is appalling, why are they always in line for more money?Teachers are entitled to four weeks' annual leave, so why do they take another eight weeks' annual leave, as well as curriculum days?
They should have all their student-free days on the holidays, as well as run catch-up classes for underachieving students, without being paid any extra money. I think taxpayers, parents and students are being ripped off.
For a change, wouldn't it be nice if the hardworking nurses in this country were given some credit in the form of money, not the pat on the back that the Government believes will pay our bills. We, along with doctors, do many hours of unpaid overtime to prop up an ailing health system, yet our wages and working conditions have been going backwards for years.
Not one government has ever considered rewarding nurses, but they will bend over backwards for teachers.
Ann Lowe, Malvern East
Listen honey, going the biff on teachers isn't going to redirect the money to you poor nurses. It might be a little hard to understand but that's just not the way things work.
You can't state as fact, "their performance in the classroom is appalling". While some from the right do like to get out and go teacher bashing, the great majority of people know that this is simply hyperbole and lies.
If you weren't aware, teachers and nurses are very much in the same basket when it comes to funding from governments. Teachers have been just as screwed over as you nurses in recent times. The unfortunate thing for nurses, as you've pointed out, is that you are basically emotionally blackmailed into working more for no money because the health system isn't properly funded. If you really wanted to be heard and maybe effect some change, try a work to rule campaign or refusing overtime. If everyone does it, you'll shortly have some attention.
Maybe you're just a bit jealous that the federal government has been focusing on teachers, with Julie Bishop and John Howard talking about bonus pay for exceptional teachers so as to provide incentive for teachers to better themselves. This isn't actually because they want to give more money to the better teachers. While they suggest they will give with one hand, what it actually does is take away more power for the federal government with the other hand, by attaching requirements such as what history curriculum is taught to high school students. (It's actually just a big ploy to stop people thinking for themselves and learning about some of the disgraceful events in this nation's history but Shhhh, don't tell anyone.)
If your letter is really an indication of where you're coming from, I'm surprised you got into nursing. You didn't really do it for the money did you? Where did you get the impression you were going to be raking it in? I hope that's not how the tertiary institutions are selling it. And I hope not too many other people are falling for it.
Tell you what, it's not too late to salvage this. Just quickly find yourself a nice bloke - ooh, you could probably snare yourself a rich doctor! - put your legs up and start counting the bonus coming to you in 9 months time. That way you'll be able to just stay at home living a life of leisure on handouts and not have to put up with any more of that crap from your patients.
When you’re done raping the earth…
Forest friendly
THE article by Tracee Hutchison "They don't get it" (Opinion, 12/5) and subsequent letters by Don Stokes and Karina Kanepe (14/5) display a disturbing ignorance about forests, wood and climate change.Deforestation in Indonesia is disastrous because it permanently removes forest cover. But this is vastly different from Australian (and Tasmanian) forestry practices under which harvested areas are regenerated with replacement trees. Where this is sustainable — the annually harvested wood volume equals the rate of growth over the whole forest — there should be no net loss of carbon.
Using wood is one of the most positive things we can do to combat climate change. It is natural and renewable whereas substitutes such as concrete involve large emissions of greenhouse gases in their manufacture.
Similarly, using firewood from a sustainable source is one of the most environmentally friendly forms of home heating if it reduces electricity use.
Mark Poynter, Victorian spokesman, the Institute of Foresters of Australia
If logging practices in Australia are so sustainable why is there a need to increase the area logged into water catchments where the amount of water in our reservoirs is greatly affected by logging?
I'm not sure how happy Tasmania will be to find that they're not a part of Australia but maybe they're used to it. As for Mark's claim that 'there should be no net loss of carbon', does he realise that trees aren't made of carbon? That the carbon is released when the wood is burned? Or maybe he's talking about the amount of carbon dioxide in the environment process by the trees.
As for wood being 'one of the most environmentally friendly forms of home heating', is he insane? Slow combustion wood burners are incredibly polluting with the amount of smoke that is released. If all home heating was powered by wood burners, the skies would be permanently hazy and asthmatics and others with respiratory problems would be dropping all over the place.
This is a naive or deliberately deceptive missive from an industry that should face environmental realities and start to think about getting some new skills. And stop wasting everyone's time by trying to convince us you're all touchy-feelie warriors for the environment.
The further degradation of Our ABC
Taking the theatre out of ABC criticism
The ABC's new policies will give audiences a full range of views, writes Mark Scott. The Age, 18/10/06IN MY early weeks as managing director, I have called on some of the ABC's harshest public critics. And almost to a man and woman, they have been at pains to point out how much they love the ABC.
Then comes the but - and as my father-in-law has often warned me, ignore everything before the but. There is a sense that the organisation has issues with balance and fairness, particularly through its news and current affairs content, although some critics would suggest across its entire content. We need to address the criticism carefully and comprehensively. To ignore it or reflexively dismiss it only serves to limit ourselves, and is at odds with the ethos of open debate and discourse that is central to our reason for being.
Instead of facing up to these criticisms, it is easy to take comfort in the market research that suggests the ABC is remarkably popular with its owners: the public. A recent Newspoll indicated 90 per cent of the public believed the ABC provided a valuable or very valuable service. And there is comfort in recent research by Young and Rubicam that said the only brand more popular in Australia than the ABC is Vegemite.
Within the ABC, it is easy to say that people like us, the ratings are reasonable and the critics are the ones who really don't get it. At times it does appear that criticism of the ABC takes the form of set-piece theatre: everyone knowing their lines and going through well-known rituals. But such an approach is unwise and misses the real point: is there substance in the criticism? Does the ABC have a problem with editorial values? It is an important question. It is very clear to me that this pattern of critique and reflexive defence needs to be challenged.
What I am outlining represents the ABC taking the lead to break this ritual. It is a challenge to both ourselves and our critics to learn some new steps and think afresh about how we deliver balance, diversity, impartiality. It is only reasonable, that as the public broadcaster using public money, the ABC set high standards for itself; higher standards than anyone else in the Australian media.
The public invests its trust in all ABC content, regardless of its source within the ABC. The new policies reflect this reality. The policies will ensure that ABC audiences can see and hear a broad range of viewpoints on matters of importance. The policies are contained in a document that runs to some 50 pages. It says upfront that as a creator, broadcaster and publisher of news and current affairs content, there is a requirement for impartiality. Each news and current affairs story and program must be impartial. For opinion programs or programs of topical and factual content, individual items of content can take a particular perspective, but the ABC must be able to demonstrate that it has provided audiences with a range of different perspectives on the subject under consideration on each platform, be it radio, television or online.
On contentious matters, we need to hear the full range of voices. We have taken another look at fairness and what it means to be impartial. Impartiality is a long-held expectation of our news coverage. Being a responsible public broadcaster is not synonymous with universal public popularity. The editorial policies now require the ABC to be impartial as a broadcaster and generator of content. As we assess the output of each of our platforms - ABC TV, Radio National, local stations such as 702 ABC Sydney - there is now the expectation that there is impartiality. That there is a demonstrated plurality of opinion and perspective.
The new category of opinion will be content presented from a partisan point of view about a matter of public contention. This content will be signposted as opinion and the impartiality test will be: has the ABC presented a plurality of views? And the ABC will expect staff to operate in a way that is reflecting key values of honesty, fairness, independence and respect.
We are looking to have three mechanisms for quality assurance around the implementation of our editorial policies. The first is regular program and performance review. Second, we have our established mechanism for dealing with public complaints.
A new mechanism is through the director of editorial policies, who will be able to commission research to provide better insight into whether we are meeting our own expectations. And when staff are dealing with a difficult decision in light of interpreting editorial policies, or I am concerned about a matter before broadcast or publication, the director of editorial policies will be able to provide independent advice.
Our journalists need to be able to undertake courageous journalism. Our radio broadcasters need to be lively and engaging and provocative at times to win and keep an audience. So, too, with television and online. Our policies promote the spirit of inquiry, not dampen it. As I have explained to our newsrooms, I want them to practise great journalism. To find the big stories and to hold those who seek to lead us to account for the promises they have made and the truths they espouse. But to achieve great journalism, you need to practise good journalism. Journalism that is fair, accurate, balanced and objective.
If there is a deference in these policies, it is to the primacy of ideas, to the intelligence of an audience, to the right of audience members to make up their own minds.
Mark Scott is managing director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. This is an edited version of his speech to the Sydney Institute last night.
The critics that Mark Scott speaks of are, invariably, right-wing, conservative supporters of the Howard government - people like Andrew Bolt, Gerard Henderson (who is the executive director of the Sydney Institute - who happened to host the speech) and Piers Ackerman - people who support Australia being part of the invading forces in Iraq, the locking up of asylum-seekers in detention centres, the denial of climate change and the refusal to sign the Kyoto agreement, the new "work choices" industrial relations legislation that reduces the pay and conditions of Australian workers and the reduction in public funding for the ABC.
And the reason why they are loud, bully-boy critics of the ABC is because the ABC hasn't played the part of a cheer squad on each of these issues as they've arisen and they don't like being challenged. Mark Scott's new policy simply panders to these thugs and gives them more air time than they already have to spout their lies and to proselytise for their church of the far right... not to mention the more extreme groups of the right who will be compulsorily included so that we "hear the full range of voices" "on contentious matters".
For example, this means that if there's a program that deals in evolution - say Walking With Dinosaurs - which some claim is a contentious matter, the ABC would have to give air time to creationists to argue their case for creationism or, as they've repackaged it, Intelligent Design. A similar thing has happened in various states in the US in the schools' curricula with 'Intelligent Design' being taught in SCIENCE classes, in order to refute Darwin's theory of evolution and consolidate the belief that the Genesis book of the bible is a literal document of how God created all life.
Already, even without any new policy, 774 radio in Melbourne has filled their afternoon and drive programs with Richard Stubbs and Lindy Burns - two presenters that distinctly lack the intelligence of their predecessors who present programs that waste two and three hours every day covering crap like world massage day and whether footballers should be held up to greater accountability because they're role models.
Already we've got Helen Razer cutting off guests because they say that newly appointed, conservative ABC board member, Keith Windshuttle's denial of the Aboriginal stolen generation is akin to holocaust deniers - because she'll lose her job.
The new ABC policy marks the beginning of the end of the ABC being anything but an excuse for dead air that acts merely as an exercise in covering its own ass, lest the vocal, far-right, conservatives be offended.
Now let's take a look at who's at the controls of the ABC: Mark Scott is the Managing Director of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. He was previously the senior political adviser to former NSW Liberal education minister, Terry Metherell.
According to a report by Crikey.com.au, while editor-in-chief of metropolitan newspapers at Fairfax, Scott overturned a decision by the editorial staff at The Age newspaper's to call for a change of government at the 2004 federal election. Accoding to Crikey, "a decision was taken to call for a change of government. That decision was then overturned by Mark Scott, Fairfax's head of metropolitan newspapers, who apparently made the rather extraordinary claim that backing [Opposition Leader Mark] Latham wasn't in the commercial interests of the company."