Category Archives: politics

China's stolen children

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I thought I was beyond being shocked, but this engaging and secretely filmed documentary was shocking to us in the West. It isn’t about the treatment of Tibetans, but about the effects of the One Child Policy.

It was aired on the Australian ABC 4 Corners program tonight (21 April 2008)

I’ll just quote here how it is written up:

By one estimate about 70,000 children are kidnapped and sold on the black market in China each year.

Untold thousands of other people are tragically affected by the trade… this film features remarkable access to those at its core: desperate parents searching for a stolen son; a trafficker who brokers deals and who sold his own child; a young couple having to give away their newborn daughter; a private investigator who hunts for stolen children; a boy rescued from traffickers.

In modern China, baby girls can be sold for as little as $500. Boys cost $1000-plus. “China’s Stolen Children” intimately reveals the depth of this tragedy and explores the connection between child trafficking, an alarming shortage of girls and the country’s stringent birth control policy. It’s a link the Chinese Government rejects.

I always disapproved of the idea that the Chinese only wanted boys, thinking that was just a sexist practice, but this program explains why. Given that a married couple can only have one child (and they have to get a permit to do so) and there still seems to be no social security in China and no old age policies, the male child is preferred because the female child, when she gets married, goes to live with the male’s family. Hence if you have a female you have no support in old age.

People must be married (and to get married they must be over 20) and then must apply for the permission to have their one child. Of course, many children are born without those protocols being met, in which case the child will be a non-person. So the parents of those children must pay a large fine. What if they can’t pay it? They can find themselves in a situation of having to sell their child. And there are many couples who can’t have children. Supply and demand realizes the need for traffickers, who make a large cut for themselves of course. We see all this in the film.

There are other consequences of the One Child Policy. The detection of the child’s sex by scanning is illegal in China, but of course ignored for the reasons I just gave. Female foetuses are regularly aborted. Hence, there are now millions of men of marriageable age who will never find a wife.

I’ve never been a supporter of Communist China in that (though I’m a Marxist), I never considered that Mao was anything but a dictator and not the product of a socialist revolution. Mao was a Stalinist and got rid of millions of people, who might have threatened that dictatorship. The “Free World” has us believe that all Communist countries will inevitably be run by a dictator. I reject this notion.

Anyway, I was shocked because you don’t get to see much that really goes on in China. Of course, trafficking of women and children go on in other countries, but the government doesn’t seem to be addressing this problem in any way. Is the One Child Policy still viable? Is it still necessary? Why not educate the population out of the old customs of the female bride always having to go to the males family to live?

My heroes: the reporters and the Chinese people who allowed this film to be made.

SES volunteers finally came

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If you read the post before this one, you will have read about the windiest day in Melbourne ever. In fact, we had a cyclone, although Tasmania caught the brunt of it.

I rang the SES (State Emergency Services) all day on Wednesday 2nd April when this event happened. That is, next door’s huge gum fell on our roof. It could have been a lot worse. The tree trunk hit the corner of the back of the house and I have a tin roof. I’m told if the roof had been tiles, most of these would have collapsed into the house.

The SES uses voluntary labour. I think some of the people who turned up tonight (Friday 4th) at 7.30pm had worked all day, during the day, before coming out to participate in the dangerous work they do all night.

It was very interesting to learn how they had to approach the tree which had fallen like this.

It was still attached to the trunk in next door’s yard, so it couldn’t be cut just any old way. The workers had to very careful that the part still attached to the tree trunk, remained attached for as long as possible, which meant cutting (I mean chain sawing) all the smaller limbs first on both sides of the fence.

Here is a picture of the workers contemplating how to cut the branches on my roof so that the whole thing didn’t collapse.

Here you will see my roof again with most of the smaller branches cut.

Then for the final cuts done in some way I didn’t quite understand which would minimise any further damage to the roof, weather boards and the fence.

Amazingly when the tree branch finally fell there was only a minute amount of damage and not even the fence was effected.

So 3 hours later they were finished and I promised to send my photos to the SES, which I have already done.

Every Australian loves the SES. They are used during bush fires as well as storms and floods.
But I think the government should be contributing a lot more money than they do which isn’t much. Apparently the SES began in 1935 ish as a Civil defence force.

The SES volunteers have to train and raise money for the equipment to their trucks by themselves. I certainly recommend that you donate to them.

I appreciated their work because they put themselves into possibly dangerous situations and work long hours just to help the community out. It is something I like about Australians, how they do help out in an emergency, but we should not take that for granted.

By the way, they are not all men and the work was hard. Those logs they threw off the roof were pretty heavy. There was one woman on the crew but they all helped each other and kept up safety standards.
The SES was ringing them to see why they were taking so long but as one of them said, “it was a mother of a tree.”

Housing crisis in Australia

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It has been predicted that the building of new houses will fall short of demand by 20,000 houses until 2010. With an increase of about 1/4%  in the cash rate imposed by the Reserve Bank, almost every month for the last 8 or so, people with house mortgages are defaulting on their loans. These owners go back into the rental market.

The population of Melbourne, where I live, is also growing steadily, so that Melbourne has reached the lowest rent accommodation availability in the country. Only about 1% of all housing is available for rent.

Recently, I became acutely aware of the problem when my son and his girlfriend were looking for rental property. They were having extreme difficulty in getting anything. At the same time, I heard on 774 am radio that the Drive program were doing a piece on the housing crisis and were asking for emails from people, so I emailed the program. My email got read out and it went something like this.

” My partner and I have a fully paid off house and have had one since we were in our mid 30s. We were very lucky. We were baby boomers.
Our problem now is accommodation for our son and his girlfriend. They have been living in a one bedroom flat for a year. They are now looking at 2 bedroom flats but they were too expensive or 80 people applied and some were prepared to pay more.
They have noticed since last year that the rents have gone up $20 a week for similar flats and if they stayed where they are which is no longer an option, that rent would most likely go up too.

They have a car so they are looking for a flat with car access to one of the universities and transport to the other. They go to different universities. They say, the closer to transport you are the more the rent is.

They cannot get accepted for a flat and will most likely have to return to one of their parents’ homes. You can imagine how much stress this is causing for all concerned.
They do not want to return to their parents’ homes and this parent doesn’t want them to return to this home after so much emotional adjustment to her son leaving in the first place, but of course it will be available”.

The next night the 7.30 program addressed the rental property market showing many professional couples and singles not being able to find a place, let alone those who do not have as much disposable income.

[As it turned out, my son did get a house to rent for 9 months. He and his girlfriend knew the real estate agent from school. This is why they got the house.]

I worry, of course about the next move.

In the past the State governments have erected huge towers of flats for public rental, but now these are impossible to get. The government also provides some public housing which are houses and not flats.

The house idea worked with no-one else needing to know that their neighbours are renting at a lower rate due to it being a public house, but the high rise towers brought with them ghetto type living standards, with all the expected social problems.

We need more public housing immediately because otherwise parents and children will be living with each other for the foreseeable future, except for the rich who can afford to buy flats for their offspring. That might apply to kids who get on well with their parents. Otherwise I can see homelessness increasing astronomically.

I do wish I knew too how owners and investors decide on their tenants, because there seems to be no rhyme nor reason for their decisions.

"The Age", a Melbourne newspaper's, RSS

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What is my life coming to when I don’t read newspapers anymore. Of course one reason is that there is only the usual non-investigative journalism in them or that the opinion pieces are so right wing that they aren’t worth reading. But I guess being a Melburnian I’ll always check out “The Age”. I’ve just discovered a loophole here too, electronically. As a librarian, I know that old Ages cannot be accessed without paying, but if you subscribe to the feed, some articles remain.
You can subscribe to about 6 different feeds.

http://theage.com.au/rsschannels/

Sex between teachers and students

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A few years ago, the talking point on radio was about two different cases of teachers having sex with underage school kids.

This happened in Victoria, Australia.

One case was about a man who was married and a PE teacher in a school. He was charged with sexual penetration with a minor (a girl). He was sentenced to 2 years minimum in jail.

Then there was a female teacher who also had sex with an underage student. She was charged and got a 3 year suspended sentence.

Both of them will never be able to work with children again and both are on the sex offenders list.

So, much was made of a seeming contradiction, with radio presenters saying that in her case if she’d been a man she would have been sentenced to jail.

I don’t agree.

I might add here that as a teacher I knew of both male and female teachers having sex with their students and was appalled by both genders involved in this sort of activity.

None of them ever got caught or were charged. The “victims” never brought charges.

I’ve known a male teacher who ended up marrying one of his students.

Are those “victims” traumatized. I guess they weren’t. They were usually in their final year and about to leave school.

But I still disapprove.

So back to the female who only got a suspended jail term. Her lawyer said there were lots of extenuating circumstances, one of which was that the boy initiated the relationship and said he never felt like a victim. But there were clearly others which we as the public don’t know about because we were not at the court case.

There’s no doubt that I became attracted to many of my older male students and they may have been attracted to me also, but I just had that ” taboo ” thought in my head all the time.

But do I think jail is appropriate? That depends on the age of the victim and the nature of the sexual relationship. Was the victim way too young, making it pedophilia, or was the older girl really touched in very unwanted ways. That’s different from consensual sex between older and younger people.

As for being in a position of trust and abusing that trust? They should be sacked for doing so. But not all cases can be equated with pedophilia.

Interested in your view however….

Reading and education

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Brendan Nelson who was the right-wing Minister for Education in Australia, stumbled on the most surprising fact : not all students learn to read well. Brenden Nelson is no longer the Minister for Education. He is the Opposition leader in the parliament.

Having been in the education and literacy field all my life, I am totally appalled by this man’s ignorance and spin. I heard him on the radio being very arrogant saying something like “I’ve met students who don’t know that it is the black part on the page that you read” Yes, very amusing.

Australia and the rest of the English speaking world has been switching from the whole word approach to reading to the phonic method for 40 years or more. Nothing new there. What I found as a remedial English teacher was that there were all sorts of different reasons students fail to learn to read, which have nothing to do with the teaching or the method used.

How to remediate here? One on one for intensive periods. Each student can be diagnosed as to what they are missing in the reading process. There are many tests to do this. Some will be dyslexic, some will be deaf, some will have learned at a time when they were not literate in their first language, some will be able to read but not comprehend, some have blanks about a particular process in reading and so on, but all of them will be desperate to be able to read.

They will not admit this until they have your trust.

I have improved the reading of many students with the appropriate testing materials and the then appropriate teaching method. No one student learns reading in the same way. Sometimes the whole word reading method will pass one student by completely and sometimes the phonic method flies over the head.

It is a mixture of the two which has proven to work best, not one or the other. One or the other assumes that one has 30 students which will all be taught in the same way at the same time.

With reading and literacy in general, we need to put far more resources into schools.

But all Nelson does rather cynically, is make it sound like he knows something about education, a fact that is clearly incorrect.

Sorry day in Australia, 13th February, 2008

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Jenny Macklin (left) at the apology for the st...
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Today, the 13th February 2008, Prime Minister Rudd moved a motion in parliament which was to record an apology to those aborigines who had been removed from their parents in order to assimilate them into white society. They are called the Stolen generations.

As I was listening to the radio most of the day, I heard that this apology has induced much emotion and reflection round the country. It has also induced hostility from both sides with white people saying there was no need to say sorry and with the aborigines who attended the parliament in Canberra turning their backs on the leader of the Opposition, who, when in government, refused to say sorry.

Today was a bi-partisan apology though.

My father was  involved with the aborigines in the 50′s and 60′s and he fought with others for the aborigines to be included in the census. They were now people, not animals. The referendum was held in 1962 and 92% of Australians voted for aborigines to be included in the census.
Much has happened since then – the Mabo agreement, the Wik agreement, land rights and so on. We thought that the land was the most important cure. And the land is important. But the stolen people were taken off the land and removed to urban areas, mostly.

The apology is very historic and important because most of those aborigines might have been loved by their adoptive parents and got a better education, but being torn from your mother and/or father at an early age must be horrific. The unconditional love one receives from one’s biological parents is irreplaceable.  Your life is ruined without it. The aborigines found it extremely difficult to find their biological parents and siblings again later as records were not kept very well and many of the parents had died. In 2001, the life expectancy at birth for an indigenous male was 56 years, and for an indigenous female, 63 years. Comparable life expectancies were experienced by males in the total population in 1901-10, and females in 1920-22. Today males in the total Australian population have a life expectancy of 76 years and females 82 years.

Also the adoptive parents were not told these children were aboriginal. These children were ‘whiter’, usually of white and black descent. Many of these children were brought up white and never knew of their aboriginality or the adoptive parents lied about it. Many were never placed with adoptive parents but were sent to Homes. That’s an identity stolen.

I’m glad this has happened. The UN has been at Australia for so long about our treatment of aborigines. People have wanted to apologize for so long and the new government has finally done it.

There is still much to do however. But that was not missed in the resolution.

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Wikipedia edits

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We all know that we can’t rely on wikipedia as an authoritative site because anyone can edit it. Imagine all the political figures and political groups which are described in different ways.

Who too is a terrorist group and who are freedom fighters?

Well there is a site which lists the pages in Wikipedia which are receiving the most edits per unique editor over various periods of time. Popular people in the news, the latest fads, and the hottest video games can be quickly identified by monitoring this social phenomenon. Mouse over items for edit statistics.

http://www.wikirage.com/

Blog action day on the environment

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Today is Blog action day on the environment. Where to begin? In Australia it is getting hotter and much drier. Old growth forests are still being cut down for wood chips. The soil is saline. Our greenhouse emissions are the most per capita in the world. The conservative government is still full of climate change deniers as is also the top Catholic Bishop.

But the people are very well aware of the problem and many are creating grey water systems for gardens, tanks for gardens and there are many methods being thought about for water recycling.

Energy is still basically oil and fossil fuels. The coal industry has always had a lot of lobbying power. They talk of clean coal but what on earth is that?

At least, since Gore’s film, people are very worried and want action from their governments. They try to do what they can in their own homes if they can afford it. But turning off electricity at the power points and getting the new fluorescent lights isn’t going to change much. We talk of carbon neutral homes.

We are just at the start of an election campaign now for the federal government. Many will place climate change action high on their list. I certainly will be. I’m going to buy some big thick outside blinds for this summer too. The heat in summer in my wooden house can be absolutely stifling. Houses were never built for Australian conditions. Styles came from Britain. I’d love a sustainable house. The people over the road have one, but they also have a lot of money.

My son is doing Physics Honours and many of his lecturers think nuclear power is the only way. I can’t agree. It is still too dangerous. My son says that the technological improvements are now much better. Very safe. I do not have enough science knowledge to debate him.
So what are you doing to save the planet or don’t you think it needs saving?

Australian Federal Government demands that schools teach Australian history

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There’s nothing wrong with teaching our own history, but whose history and in what teaching format? History teachers have been using a pedagogy which asks it’s students to inquire and research, not learn dates in a rote fashion. That sort of teaching went out in the 60′s.

Howard (our PM) has announced that unless history is taught with his list of milestone dates, federal funding will cease for all schools who do not employ what he is asking. States are responsible for education, but the federal government has traditionally provided such things as libraries and science blocks. This is what I would call arrogant, ignorant, bullying and extortion. Because what sort of history does Howard want taught? What he sees as important in terms of dates. Like Gallipoli, the Gold Rush, settlement of white people, cricket facts, for God’s sake, Burke and Wills travels, settlement of Port Phillip Bay, rail line constructions, the great depression, Korean war, Australian led intervention of East Timor are just some of the milestones he wishes our students to learn. There are 70 of the dates to include and given that there are only 150 hours to be spent on Australian History in the curriculum, it looks like we are back to learning dates and not understanding the context of anything.

Who was on his study team? Why Geoffrey Blainey of course, someone who denies the genocide of Australian aborigines. I do notice that one of the genocides is on the 70 dates to be learned, but as for the Port Phillip settlement, I very much doubt that what my father studied about that will appear as it factually was.

It all sounds like boring sludge to me. Teachers are constantly working out new and better ways to educate their students. That is their job. The History teachers federation of Australia exists as the peak body for history teachers.

The other members of the team, apart from Geoffrey Blainey, who worked out this crazy scheme were the conservative journalist Gerard Henderson, a PLC principal and an ANU academic. Sorry, but I can’t see any on the ground teachers in that group.

Years ago, the VCE (final 2 years of high school) instituted a study called Australian Studies. It didn’t last long. Finally it was so unpopular that the subject has been dropped.

I’m not of course opposed to the teaching of history. In fact it is very important for people to know their past and to know their mistakes, thereby and their successes. But it seems to me to be a very biased and conservative set of history dates to learn and a backward step in pedagogical theory. And it comes from a conservative view of society.

Where do women fit into this history? What is important? Whose history is it? Is it taught from the victor’s standpoint or the victims?

Our PM is notably not a multicultural supporter. He never uses the word. He only uses the word “Australian”. But many of our citizens see themselves as dual identities. Greek and Australian, for example. And now, in Melbourne, the second most spoken language is Chinese. There seems little in the milestones to investigate in terms of the immigration and refugee status of this country.

Well, like many of you in the USA, many of us want to rid ourselves of this very right wing conservative PM. Elections are due soon, so let’s hope that his new initiative does not get through without consultation with the states and the teachers who teach history.

Note: since I wrote this the newly elected Labor Government has rejected this idea.

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