From Mungo MacCallum

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And at the bottom are the underclass: the increasing numbers living on or below what is accepted as the poverty line. These days they are seldom starving (although many are hungry), but they are, unmistakeably, the downtrodden. And the present government apparently believes that it is entirely their own fault, and that they are not even entitled to expect the trade unions invoked by Menzies to help them out of it.

Not only that, the inequality gap is widening, and widening fast. It is perfectly true, as Hockey avers, that while the rich have got richer, so have the poor - what used to be called the trickle-down effect. But the figures that worry the sociologists who compiled the "Advance Australia Fair?" report released last week show that the rich are breaking well clear of the pack in terms of both.

At the end of the 1970s - ironically the time of Hockey's class warfare rhetoric - Australia was one of the most egalitarian countries in the world; for almost all the previous 50 years incomes at the bottom of the scale had risen faster than those at the top. This was what Australians meant when they boasted of the land of the fair go.

But things have changed. The richest fifth of Australian households now account for 61 percent of net household worth, while the poorest fifth hold just 1 per cent. And the income share of the top 1 per cent has doubled, while the income share of the top 0.001 per cent - just 230 of the super-rich - has more than trebled. This is a shift not just in the distribution of money, but also of power: the ability of well-organised wealth to influence government policy has become more blatant in recent times - the mining industry being the most obvious case study, but there have been others and there will be more.

To draw attention to the problems, as those unhappy with the Abbott-Hockey approach have done, is hardly class warfare. And in any case, it is not the critics who started the fight but Hockey himself. Not content with producing a budget which has done about as much to promote national harmony as the Cronulla race riots, the man John Howard once described as his "big bear" of a man has gone out of his way to spruik in the most inflammatory terms possible.

It was Hockey who divided us into lifters and leaners; Hockey who claimed (absurdly) that every wage earner was labouring for more than a month each year to buy welfare for someone else; Hockey who assured us that only 45 percent of us paid tax to cover more than $6,000 worth of entitlements for every man woman and child in the country: us against them, not the haves versus the have-nots, but the workers versus the bludgers.

This is pure Tea Party: if you're poor, you're guilty...

Read more: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-16/maccallum-who-exactly-is-engaging-in-class-warfare/5526378

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School curriculum reviewers fail to offer suggestions for change

As of the time of the interim report the reviewers had held four formal panel meetings.

The Greens claimed credit for the report's release, given a pending Senate order to produce review documents.

The party's spokeswoman on schools, Penny Wright, said the report reinforced her concerns that the review was hasty and unnecessary and she was not surprised by how little had been achieved by the reviewers.

"Given the vacuity of this current document, Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire have essentially only three more months to review six years’ worth of work by hundreds of experts," Wright said. "A report with a poor process like this can have no integrity. Minister Pyne should dump this implausible review."

Wiltshire, a conservative commentator whose appointment was controversial given his past strong criticism of the national curriculum, had held "extensive discussions" with representatives from the OECD Directorate for Education and Skills, the English Department for Education and UK-based think tanks, the report said.

The review team was also hiring subject area specialists to evaluate the various areas of the curriculum, the report said. These specialists were being asked to provide advice on the "comprehensiveness, structure and sequencing" of the content.

They would consider how each learning area compared "with the curriculum of two other relevant countries".

One of the questions to be answered was "whether the curriculum for this learning area encourage a love of learning, a joy of discovery, and a quest for knowledge and related skills", the report said.

Labor has previously argued the curriculum review was a politically motivated attempt to distract from concerns over the future of needs-based school funding.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/17/school-curriculum-review-fails-to-offer-suggestions-for-change

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From Dr Kevin Donnelly

It always bemuses me when "fly in, fly out" experts are brought to Australia to pontificate about an education scene they know little, if anything, about. 

Usually, such visitors are described as "world's best" and touted as renowned educationalists who, if we only listen and act on their advice, will remedy intractable problems that the locals are unable to solve.

And so to Pasi Sahlberg, a former senior educationalist from Finland who travels the world spreading his message of equity and social justice and who, on Monday, was preparing to address the NSW Teachers Federation.

...

Dr Kevin Donnelly is director of the Education Standards Institute and a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Catholic University. He is also co-chairing the review of the Australian National Curriculum. View his full profile here.

don't read more : http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-17/donnelly-school-equity-experts-barking-up-the-wrong-tree/5527358

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Gus: I say don't read more because, of course, Kevin Donelly is one half of that Review Panel of two ultra right-wing binoculars employed by Tony Abbott's barking dog, Christopher Pyne, to destroy the fair Gonski program of school education. The Gonski program is light years ahead, of course, of any formula used on the entire planet in regard to education equity. It was especially designed to provide a fair education system and stop the rort of "private" education siphoning more cash than public school. The creation of the Gonski formula was helped by many education experts on all side of the political spectrum. The yet again new "review" is only supported by the rabid right-wing nuts in this country who want to protect privileges and proselytising. 

Thus straight away, as Donelly "blasts a fly-in fly out expert from other countries" he also commits the same crime so to speak. He places himself as an "expert" while everyone else is wrong, ending up mentioning the experience of you've guessed it, poor schools in the US, where faith base education is king and blah blah blah... And we have only "his" word to believe that what he says is correct. 

Many real education experts in this country would disagree. 

Donelly and Wiltshire appointments were politically motivated by the ultra-conservatives in this country to destroy any hope of equity in education — which was mostly achieved by the Gonski model, a model that this lying Abbott regime was understood to "support" before the election, then turned around in a jiffy and wasted no time in wasting money on a review by these ultra right wing so-called experts.

This is the real scandal... not something that did not may be happened 20 years ago... but is now the subject of a useless nasty royal commission set up by the lying Abbott regime. 

Oz gives Media Watch a lecture on ethics, fails to disclose again ….

from Crikey …..

The Australian's point-scoring against rivals is normally confined to the Media pages, or, at best, a sidebar on the front page. But "the heart of the nation" splashed front and centre with its response to Monday's episode of Media Watch (itself a takedown of the Oz's "tobacco consumption is going up" June 6 exclusive -- which Crikey handily debunked the same day).

But that wasn't all. Page 4 had a further four commentary and analysis pieces on the disagreement (including a rather a dry one about how to interpret data). But the report that took the most chutzpah was the one by legal affairs editor Chris Merritt, which pinged Media Watch for a lapse in journalistic ethics for not disclosing the political affiliations of its two key witnesses. Economist Stephen Koukoulas, quoted in the Media Watch piece, worked for Julia Gillard, while public health expert Professor Mike Daube, also quoted in Media Watch, chaired a government panel that recommended plain packaging laws. In case that hasn't hit home, the report goes on to quote the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance journalistic code of ethics on the issue.

Hang on a minute. On the very same page, an analysis piece by Sinclair Davidson fails to disclose the fact that he's a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, an organisation with political allegiances relevant to a discussion of tobacco laws (and, as revealed by Media Watch, that benefits financially from tobacco).

And that's not all. While we'll leave the statistical wrangling to those who know how to do it better (the aforementioned Koukoulas already has a further response to the reports up on his blog), we did notice the Oz's report described, again, data source InfoView as an "independent firm that uses industry sales figures". When Crikey did our own debunking of that June 6 plain packaging yarn, reporter Sally Whyte called InfoView to ask a few questions about its data.

To quote her report:

"... The research is funded by Big Tobacco. When Crikey called InfoView to ask about the research, we were told InfoView would not make any comment and any inquiries about the research should go to Scott McIntyre, spokesman for British American Tobacco, a multinational tobacco company. McIntyre says the data comes from numbers provided by the industry to Sir Cyril Chantler, who is leading the British review into the possibility of plain packaging in the UK.

"McIntyre confirms that British American Tobacco pays InfoView to collate the information. 'Just like any company with fast-moving goods, we keep an eye on the market. It’s mainly something we use to keep an eye on the industry.'"

So InfoView is funded by British American Tobacco, relies on British American Tobacco's spokesman to handle media inquiries for it, and is something British American Tobacco uses to "keep an eye on the industry". Some "independence". And yet, we are told, its figures are more reliable than those from the ABS.

Barry's response (on Twitter): "Some days I just have to pinch myself to know I've not dreaming."

Here, we also debunked the tobacco article of News Limited on the same day...:

blaming the piper for the rats...

The Australian Medical Association has accused Rupert Murdoch’s The Australian newspaper of promoting smoking and “big tobacco” by publishing a series of articles undermining the nation’s plain packaging legislation.

The Australian, owned by News Corp, has previously argued that plain packaging deprives tobacco firms of their intellectual property rights, and earlier this month went further and claimed that plain packaging had led to an increase in tobacco sales.

“The AMA urges the government to restate its support for the plain packaging laws and tobacco control generally, and we urge the Australian and other media to stop giving Big Tobacco a free ride in promoting its killer products,” the AMA president, Associate Professor Brian Owler, said.

The intervention of the peak medical body came after The Australian published another five articles on Wednesday critical of public health initiatives to decrease smoking rates, including plain packaging.

The series of news reports and opinion pieces were in response to the ABC’s Media Watch program, which slammed The Australian’s earlier exclusive story claiming that there had been an increase in consumption as “garbage”.

On 6 June The Australian ran a front-page story headlined “Labor's plain packaging fails as cigarette sales rise”.

“Labor’s nanny state push to kill off the country’s addiction to cigarettes with plain packaging has backfired, with new sales figures showing tobacco consumption growing during the first full year of the new laws,” the newspaper reported.

But the accuracy of the evidence presented in the report was immediately called into question by some economists and health experts, as it directly contradicted government figures.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/18/australian-medical-association-accuses-the-australian-of-promoting-smoking

One of the world's leading educators says Australia is losing its equity in education as the system becomes segregated due to the number of students now attending non-government schools.

Finland's former Director General of Education and now a visiting professor at Harvard University, Pasi Stahlberg, is in Australia this week delivering a series of talks about equity and excellence in education and how Finland has built its highly regarded education system.

Dr Stahlberg says it is "surprising" that Australia is not taking the Gonski school funding model more seriously.

"What has happened to Australia in education is that you have lost some of that equity that you used to have before here and when you lose the equity it seems like this ... is tracking and pulling back the quality," he said.

The Federal Government has committed to fund the first four years of Gonski but not the final two years when the largest share of funding kicks in.

This week, New South Wales agreed to spend a record $14.4 billion on education that will fully fund Gonski and pay for major school redevelopments.

Education Minister Adrian Piccoli says the 2014-15 budget delivers on New South Wales's commitment to fully fund its $1.76 billion Gonski commitment.

"Where the Commonwealth Government refused to fund its share of the agreement beyond 2017, NSW has kept faith with school communities around the state by allocating additional funds across the forward estimates," he said.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-18/equity-in-education/5533820

Gus: Pasi Stahlberg is obviously more in tune with proper education than the pick from Turdy Abbott, Dr Kevin Donnelly who criticised Stahlberg for being a "fly in, fly out" expert... Unfortunately, we're stuck with these blatantly biased "experts" of our own, Dr Kevin Donnelly and Ken Wiltshire — who are used as stooges of the ultra-nutty rabid right wing Abbott regime. Will they open their eyes?... The Gonski reform is the best thing in education and should be given a chance to operate fully.

A big donor to the ruling Liberal National Party in Queensland has escaped prosecution for illegal quarrying because of a last-minute change to legislation ordered by the state's Deputy Premier.

Karreman Quarries was this month facing legal action by the Department of Natural Resources and Mines over unlawful extraction of sand and gravel from the Upper Brisbane River when an amendment, slipped unnoticed into a package of reforms to the Water Act, retrospectively legalised its activities.

The change was not mentioned in the bill that preceded the vote on the amendments and even the Labor Opposition knew nothing about it.

ABC's 7.30 has learned the amendment was drafted after a meeting in April called at short notice by Deputy Premier Jeff Seeney at which the Karreman case was raised. The meeting was attended by Natural Resources Minister Andrew Cripps and senior bureaucrats.

The change to the law means officials are no longer able to prosecute the company. It also means the company's activities at Harlin, worth more than $15 million annually, can continue unimpeded for another five years.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-06-23/karreman-quarries-escapes-prosecution-for-illegal-quarrying/5543896

It had to come, the character assassination of Bill Shorten. The Opposition Leader has been doing too well in the polls for Australia's right-wing hunting pack to leave him untouched.

Listen to any radio shock jock or ranting TV host and the drum beat has started. The hunting pack's star witness is a former Victorian Australian Workers Union official, Bob Kernohan. Earlier this month, he told the trade union royal commission that in the mid-1990s Shorten (then aged 28) urged him to ignore the rorting of union funds. This is precisely what the feral right wants to hear. It's a chance to smear Shorten and practise the politics of personal destruction.

As ever, the Prime Minister's lickspittle, Andrew Bolt, is leading the chase, asking, with mounting frustration: "How come the mud isn't sticking to Bill Shorten?" Bolt's News Corp colleague Jason Morrison has gone a step further, calling on the Labor leader to stand aside. In the way of these things, we can expect to hear a lot more about Kernohan's allegation in the lead up to the next election. Already, 2GB has it on a continuous replay loop. But how credible is Kernohan and his testimony to the royal commission?

A significant part of his evidence was seriously flawed, revealing a delusional figure who has reconstructed the memory of major events in his life. In wanting the mud to stick, Bolt is relying on someone who contradicted himself under oath. The details are set out in the commission's transcripts. A big part of Kernohan's public persona has been to portray himself as a whistleblower, the only honest man in the Victorian AWU 20 years ago

One of Kathy Jackson's biggest supporters has been rightwing blogger Michael Smith, but with Julia Gillard's main AWU accuser jumping ship and alleging Jackson may be corrupt, where does this leave Smith? Peter Wicks from Wixxyleaks reports.

THOSE OF YOU familiar with the Trade Union Royal Commission would be familiar with the name Michael Smith.

Michael Smith has been at the forefront of the so-called 'AWU affair', that those with agenda’s claim leaves former PM Julia Gillard with some serious questions to answer.

Of course, some of you may also remember Gillard stood in a room full of journalists and said she was going to stand there and answer any question on the conspiracy theories promulgated by Smith and others until they were all exhausted. This she did and when the questions ran dry, she went back to her job of running the country.

Read more at: http://www.independentaustralia.net/life/life-display/gillard-accuser-deserts-michael-smith-over-kathy-jackson,6706

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Gus: It would have been best for Media Watch to leave this story alone (see article at top), because we have not seen the end of it... And there will be eggs on the face of many (including Media Watch). Too many people have been lying and/or profiting from pilfering. And of all things, I don't think this has been Julia Gillard's style in her life. The whole process here as far as Peter Wicks sees it, humbly seconded by Gus, is to damage all the enemies of the Liberals (CONservatives) without any regard for the truth.  Suddenly someone is pushing the panic button:

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A comment then appeared on a post on Michael Smith's website from Bob Kernohan regarding Kathy Jacksons involvement in the Peter Mac money scandal, which saw her end up with what appears to be a $250,000 expense account she has tried to claim is a HSU slush fund. This claim comes despite evidence from bank statements showing only cash withdrawals and personal spending, with any union expenditure completely invisible.

Mr Kernohan's incendiary comment was:

The Peter Mac money is a scandal in its self, and serious questions must be answered. Regardless of how the elected union officials seem to have seen it as there "god given right" to spend it as they did, it gives rise to some very important questions to be answered by those elected officers of the HSU at the time, and yes mate that includes Kathy Jackson........ They have no given right under the rules of a registered union to take personal ownership of that money and spend it like it was their own personal money...THEY HAD NO RIGHT AT ALL, so some very serious questions need to be answered. I hope you post this my friend and pursue it like you have done with Gillard/Wilson and co in respect to the AWU scandal. I have kept a copy of this post just in case, for whatever reason it is not posted. I have saved this comment and will share it on FB if you don't allow it to be published on your blog.

Bob Kernohan