Cranky Queenslander

I went for my early morning walk this morning and was once again struck by just how lazy and dirty the local population are around where I live.

The number of fast food wrappers, drink cans (including post mix alcoholic beverages), cigarette packets and other assorted crap littering the area is staggering.

I wonder if its time we went "singapore" on the issue. Dropping your garbage on the street there can result in thousands of dollars in fines and hours of community service picking up the rubbish. I wouldn’t have a problem with really high fines for littering. If we made the fine $1000, and employed just one guy to police it, he’d only need to catch two offenders a week to easily cover the cost of employing him.

That being said, I think we need more than that. How about the local high school organises groups of its students to do a clean up run every so often? In my area, a lot of the problem is caused by lazy high school students, so that idea seems to have the double effect of cleaning up the mess and educating the little darlings.

Beyond that, why doesn’t the local council install bins in public areas? On my 30 minute morning walk, there isn’t one single rubbish bin, yet there are three bus stops, four take away shops, a pub and various other service providers.

I guess it’s time to write to the local council again and ask for help!

I thought I’d title this post as a question, because I have never heard of the Heiner affair. Until today, that is, I was blissfully unaware that allegations of criminal misconduct were floating around against many prominent Labor politicians, including Prime Minister Kevin Rudd!

From what I have learned so far, the story is that an inquiry by retired magistrate Noel Heiner into complaints of sexual abuse at the Brisbane Youth Detention Centre was shut down only weeks after the Goss government came to power in 1989.

Not only that, but the cabinet of the day decided, for reasons that have yet to be uncovered in court, to shred all documentation collected thus far. These people knew that the information they were destroying was necessary to bring criminal charges against those involved in the abuse, yet they still chose to destroy them.

Various senior officials are implicated in a nine-volume audit report by leading Sydney barrister David Rofe, QC. Despite that is said to contain as many as 68 specific allegations with enough evidence to bring charges.

Some of those named include current Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and his proposed new Governor General Quentin Bryce.

Those who have waited nearly 20 years for justice to be served might finally be in luck, as the Rofe report has been loged with the Queensland Parliamentary Crime and Misconduct Committee on February 14. Its a shame that the same report was not able to tabled in Federal Parliament back on 19th September 2007. All it took was one Labor senator to object, and Senator Barnaby Joyce was unable to table the document.

Having learned this much so far, it makes me wonder what kind of people we have elected to run this country. I only hope that the facts are uncovered publicly and that whatever wrong doing has occurred is uncovered, and those responsible punished accordingly.

In the coming day’s I’ll draft up some letters to the relevant people and see if we can move things along.

It seems that Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s vision for an education revolution starts not with Math or English, not with reading or writing, not even with science or technology. No, it start with learning a foreign language.

I’ve spoken to educators in the past, and they assure me that learning a second language has positive effects in all areas of learning. But still, I can’t help but ask a few hard questions;

Why is it that at my local primary school, kids attend a class they refer to as "German", but almost never actually learn any German language? For the most part, the class is more about world culture than about learning a second language.

What is the government going to do about the appalling level of education our kids are getting through primary school? Why are kids who can’t read being allowed to graduate primary school and move on to high school?

And if kids are getting to High School not being able to read english, what good would it do to try and teach them Mandarin?

1.6 Million computers are dumped into landfill every year in Australia. So called “e-waste” is growing at 3 times the rate of general waste. Much of this waste can be economically recycled, and yet, Federal Minister for the Environment Peter Garrett says he has no proposals on how to fix the problem.

Environment groups are demanding the government implement a mandatory deposit scheme like the bottle recycling scheme in South Australia (which begs the question why Minister Garrett isn’t looking to federalise that either!), and I can see some merit in that proposal. Still, its odd that he isn’t pushing for it now, as he when he was the head of the ACF, he was pushing hard for the scheme.

WSN Environmental in Sydney recently offered to collect e-waste for recycling, staging a 2 week trial to see how it would go. They collected a staggering 17 Tons of e-waste in just those two weeks. The fact is that the public wants to recycle, and government only needs to help make it easier.

Then there is Free Collect, based in Toowoomba, who are trying to build a recycling business and clean up the e-waste problem in South East Queensland. But startups like these are running into ridiculous government red tape. One local council, for example, after being offered the Free Collect service (which is to pickup all their e-waste and recycling it at no charge to the council), demanded that Free Collect pay thousands of dollars in licensing fees. Seriously. The council wanted them to pay for the privilege of taking council waste away.

Then we have other problems. A lot of the recycling could be done in Australia, however to do so requires building plant and equipment to process the waste. Small startups like Free Collect don’t have the capital to make that happen, so they are shipping the waste overseas for processing.

Here’s an idea; how about Mr Garrett funds programs with local councils to provide e-waste collection services? Provide the infrastructure to support the collection and consolidation of this waste, so that recycling firms can concentrate on what they do best?

Further to that, how about we offer grants to these startups to setup the plant required to recycle the waste here? Surely that is in the best interests of our local economy, as well as the environment?

If you’d like to add some weight to the call for government action on the subject of e-waste, you can just download my form letters; I have sent them on my own behalf to the relevant ministers, and you can just insert your details and mail them off. Feel free to change the text if you think differently than I do on the subject.

Letter to Federal Minister for the Environment
Letter to Queensland Minister for Sustainability, Climate and Innovation

Here’s something to puzzle over. I was just searching the Queensland ministerial directory to figure out who I should write to in regards to an upcoming post here at Cranky Queenslander, and I discovered that the Queensland Labor Government does not have a minister for the environment.

I guess Andrew McNamara, Minister for Sustainability, Climate and Innovation, will have to do the job, although I think I might fire off a letter to the Premier and ask her why the environment is nobody’s responsibility.

I’ve written to Premier Anna Bligh asking for clarification on this issue. Perhaps I have misunderstood. I’ll wait for her reply before drawing conclusions about what this means for the Queensland Environment.

I was just watching Channel 10 news, and Paul Bonjiorno asked Prime Minister Rudd if he agreed with many people who are saying the government should be getting on and doing something about things and not still talking about them.

Mr Rudd listed three achievements his government has managed to knock over during the four months they have been in office;

1. Signing Kyoto
2. Finalising the agreement over the Murray Darling
3. Planning for a withdrawal from Iraq

Seriously? Mr Rudd is proud of taking four months to sign a document, give Victoria a chunk of money and choosing a date to withdraw some troops from Iraq?

Give me a break Kevin, and actually do something to improve the lives of your constituents.

Local residents and business owners in the western suburbs are probably aware by now of the plans by our State Government to close the Bullockhead St entrance to the Sumner Park Industrial Estate.

I don’t normally have much sympathy for people who have a whinge about new and improved roads, (which reminds me, I should have a go at the whinger on Ipswich Road) but in this case I think the locals are spot on.

I have friends and clients with businesses in that area, and having only the entrance on Spine St to get in and out will be a bad thing for traffic congestion in the area. There is a planned exit to be built onto Wolston Road, but this is not scheduled until 2010!

State member for Mt Ommaney, Julie Attwood, reckons the solution is an urgent upgrade of the Spine St & Sumner Rd intersection, while Main Roads claim they are "working with council to fast track the second exit project"

Instead of all this talk, Julie should get her government to do something about this right now.

Here’s a corker; Race Discrimination Commissioner Tom Calma wants the burden of proof in cases of racial discrimination to fall on the alleged offender, instead of the person making the complaint. [via The Age]

I shouldn’t have to go into too much detail to explain why it is utterly preposterous to think that anyone believes that people should be found guilty until they can prove their innocence.

Andrew Bolt went as far as suggesting we all make complaints against the commissioner himself, and see how he likes being guilty of racial discrimination with no way of proving otherwise. How exactly do you prove a negative anyway Tom?

I’m having a hard time believing that a national "fuelwatch" system would benefit motorists. Our governments plan to introduce a system where all petrol retailers need to register their price the day before, and are not allowed to change the price for 24 hours, seems to me, stupid.

The plan is to model it on the W.A. scheme. The ACCC looked into that scheme, and while they found an average of 1.9 cpl drop in fuel prices in WA, they also pointed out that the drop occurred quite some time after the introduction of the scheme, suggesting that perhaps other factors could have produced the price drop.

They also only tested it in Metropolitan areas. In smaller centres, where there is much less competition, the ACCC worry that the system will drive prices up by giving retailers an easy mechanism with which to control prices.

Service stations under this type of scheme are not going to be able to offer really low margin prices on petrol like they can now. Today, a service station can sell petrol at cost or even below, for a short term boost to turnover. Those prices will never occur within a fuel watch system, as the station cannot afford to sell at those prices for long.

The simple fact is that there really isn’t a conspiracy at the pump on petrol prices. If there is a scam going on, its happening at the refinery. The more we punish service station operators, the more we punish hard working small business owners for trying to make a living.

If the government wants to help motorists, then remove some of the tax on fuel. If it really wants to help, then why not legislate tougher fuel economy standards? How about doing something to get hydrogen powered vehicles on Australian streets? What about flex fuel vehicles? There are plenty of options, but they aren’t being explored.

I thought I would kick off this new blog with a foray into the world of the Labor Party and its plans for broadband in Australia. Today I think I’ll go over the main points of contention as they stand, and over the coming months, will delve a little deeper into some of them as things develop.

Open Access

The only way Labor’s plan has any hope of achieving a positive result for Australians is if the network is open and available to retailers on fair and equitable terms. Senator Conroy’s call for proposals clearly states this as a requirement, but doubt remains as to the seriousness of the government’s commitment to open access.

The reason is twofold. First, Telstra had the capital and the will to build a FTTN network some years ago, but when told they would have to provide open access to that network, Telstra simple said no, and did nothing. Second, the recently scuttled initiative from the OPEL consortium would have provided what the government is currently wanting to provide, and yet they cancelled the contract, which would only have cost 1 Billion dollars. OPEL / Optus and perhaps the G9 are the only groups likely to be able to mount a serious effort to build a national network.

As the goverment is clearly pro Telstra (for reasons I have yet to fathom), it seems a foregone conclusion that Telstra will eventually win the bid. And with Telstra already on the record as being against open access, the public is left wondering how we will get the open network the government has promised us.

Add to that the fact that the Senator has also called for submissions on regulatory changes that may help facilitate the network rollout, and you start to wonder if the master plan is in fact to legislate against forced open access provisions, and to allow Telstra to build its FTTN network, shut out competitors and pocket the $5 billion.