The Book Bank Project at La Perouse Public School

It was a pleasure to revisit La Perouse Public School in my old electorate of Maroubra on Wednesday to load up 47 students with wonderful books as part of the Book Bank Project. Also there to distribute books were 702 ABC Breakfast Radio host, Adam Spencer, and my successor as Member for Maroubra, Michael Daley.

The Book Bank Project is an initiative from Dymocks Children’s Charities and is undertaken in the context of the success of the Premier’s Reading Challenge. The Project provides schoolchildren with one book they have chosen from the Reading Challenge every term. Students are encouraged to share and swap their books with their classmates after they have read them, creating, as a result, a ‘Book Bank’ within the classroom.

Currently, the Project is being trialled with 1, 200 students in five schools in NSW, including Condell Park Public School, Fort Street Primary School, Ettalong Public School, Toormina Public School and Nyngan Public School. A roll out of the Project in many more schools across NSW is planned for next year.

Labor Leadership

Every now and then The Furies take hold of the Australian Labor Party and give it a good shake.

This episode is different in being entirely about personality with no policy content. On the other hand, the issues of personality are pretty substantial!

It is also different in that it comes at a time of historic challenge for labor and social democratic parties through contraction of the industrial base, globalization, the limit of public sector spending and so on. This party crisis – for once the word not hyperbole – erupts when the party is struggling with 30 percent support. In the 50s and 60s outbreaks of self-indulgence occurred when the party could routinely claim 45 percent of the electorate. Perilous times, indeed

I have declined about 20 requests to talk because I think it unseemly for me to become another commentator on the party predicament, feeding off its temporarily disabled body.

I will say that alone of Australian institutions the ALP conducts no systemic training for its personnel, no mentoring, no coaching, no management of high potential talent. And we pay the price with spokespeople thrust into jobs with no preparation and no support or guidance. Good cases are lost because nobody can articulate them, our debating prowess has leached from the organization. So has personality and color, as ministers end sentences with rising inflections sounding querulous and timid or just read scripts in monotones, misuse language (say “myself” when they mean “I” ) and talk jargon. For Godsake, we saved Australia from the GFC and rebuilt the schools! Yet since 2007 we have lost the capacity to use persuasive, concrete, uplifting language to talk about our achievements.

A change of party culture is more vital than any rules change to rescue the old party from flatness and mediocrity.

Oh, and don’t overlook this: if Abbott, Turnbull and Hockey were kidnapped by Martians who would take over on their side?

The thinness of talent is even more obvious with the conservatives.

Country NSW: Libraries and History

With Mayor Mathew Dickerson (right) and Councillors

In Dubbo I launched 2012 National Year of Reading at the Dubbo branch library with Mayor Councillor Mathew Dickerson and former Independent State Member Dawn Fardell.

I spoke on familiar themes about reading enabling one to live other lives, to stretch one’s consciousness. I referred to some of the books that have lived in my imagination, some for decades.

Naturally, it was great to spend some time with people who love reading.

John Bayliss, Macquarie Regional Library Director, took me to the Museum and Art Gallery. I saw with Museum Director Andrew Glassop an exhibition called Space Invaders, which began with the National Gallery of Australia, of street art.

A big contrast with the paintings of the Venetian Renaissance. I liked the art. It’s part of the art of our times.

In the adjacent local museum, I was captured by photos of Dubbo’s streets in the early years of the last century, by the Federation Era bullock-drawn wool-cart and by a red coat that may have been worn by Australian volunteers in the Sudan War.

Looking at the record of recent exhibitions. I’m sorry I missed one called On the Sly which took three women with criminal stories related to Dubbo; and an exhibition about Bathurst migrant camp 1948 – 1952 called A Place for Everyone – once again I was reminded of how tough and crude and hard life had been for many in early post-war Australia.

Leadership Polls and Four Corners

As a journalist from The Bulletin in 1982, I sat in Bob Hawke’s room in the The Boulevard Hotel in Sydney as he rang members of the Federal Labor caucus urging them to switch from Bill Hayden. He quoted official ALP polling, from the ALP National Secretariat, on his popularity compared with Hayden’s.

It is hardly a revelation that Julia Gillard or her supporters did something similar, although the Party should cease the practice of circulating National Secretariat polling in the context of leadership challenges. Polling is a matter between the National Secretariat and the Leader’s office.

Four Corners had no revelations, only gossip.

What purpose was served by Gillard making an appearance on the program is, of course, another matter.

Uranium Mining in NSW

Of course the O’Farrell Government is right to attempt legislation to permit uranium exploration in NSW. I said this two months ago.

The Federal Government has expanded uranium mining and opened exports to India. South Australia boasts what will become the world’s largest uranium mine. The ban for NSW reflected the anti-nuclear sentiment of the 1980s and it is irrelevant today when to beat global warming we urgently need every available source of carbon-free energy.

Shooters Party MPs and the Christian Democratic Party would be well-advised to vote for this legislation on common-sense grounds.

Prime Minister Gillard and the First Week

Prime Minister Gillard and Treasurer Wayne Swan won the first week.

Look at the indicators. Slipper is performing in the chair. Wilkie is voting for removal of the private health insurance rebate for well-off Australians. So are the Greens. With all the constraints of a hung parliament, the government is continuing to get its program up.

It is also continuing to stay on message: focusing on the economy and jobs. The troubles of a two-speed economy are actually helping Labor. The troubles of the car industry, for example, cast the Labor government as the defender of manufacturing jobs through “co-investment” and “job support”. By contrast, Tony Abbott has to enter his party room and order his team to stop speaking out and broadcasting their differences on industry policy.

Moreover, the Opposition’s three spokespeople were caught with different lines on how quickly they could bring the budget into surplus. I’m waiting for the Opposition to address this question: will they reinstate the middle-class welfare removed in Labor budgets, such as dependent spouse rebate and vehicle fringe benefits?

The Coalition will abolish the carbon tax. The Coalition will abolish the mining tax. The Coalition will find room for income tax cuts…and close a $70 billion black hole.

How? Not the old staples of cutting advertising and consultancies. And not simply declaring that government will be smaller.

Gillard was relaxed and authoritative on the 7.30 Report last night, delivering one of her most persuasive interviews. At the end of the week, she can breathe easy. The Australia Day embarrassment is now behind her, as is the issue of Wilkie and poker machines. The biggest step towards securing a surplus – abolition of the private health insurance rebate – is going to pass Parliament.

To the Water Scientists

Speaking to 300 water scientists from around Australia at the 6th Australian Stream Management Conference in Canberra

Before this audience I had a chance to relive some of the climactic battles over water policy during my time as a Minister for Environment and Premier. I recalled my decision to ban canal estates which were so destructive of river quality. I relived the battles to deliver environmental allocations valley by valley, for the first time allocating water as a right to great inland wetlands. I also gave them an account of the 1999 Sydney water crisis.

I told them that when they argued the case for environmental reform, they needed to settle on the killer facts and use concrete language. Talking about “sustainability” was jargonistic. Better to be concrete and say precisely what you mean.

The dinner was in honour of the late Professor Peter Cullen AO, a leading Australian scientist who made a great contribution to natural resources management, especially to the management of freshwater systems.

UNSW Canberra at ADFA

This Tuesday I visited the UNSW Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra to inspect their special collection. It’s an honour to join the Advisory Council of the Academy. I have always believed military history to be a major strand of Australian history. After all, we are more inclined than most other nations to enter wars! (As the SMH’s Peter Hartcher pointed out on Phillip Adams’ Late Night Live on Monday night). Gallipoli occurred only 14 years into Australia’s national history and was seen as our first national test.

There was some Civil War material in the Academy’s collection. Yes, I only had to see General Longstreet’s memoirs, with their famous chapter allocating responsibility for the Gettysburg disaster, to feel the tug of the Civil War all over again.

As soon as I can, I plan to read two of their publications, Zombie Myths of Australian Military History, a book devoted to myths of Australians at war by different contributors, and To Long Tan by Ian McNeill, a history of the Australian commitment in Vietnam.

Constitutional Amendment: Anti-Discrimination Won’t Make It

Nobody in Australia can write an interesting article about federalism – except Greg Craven, vice-chancellor of Australian Catholic University. He also produces refreshing good sense when it comes to constitutional reform. His article in today’s Financial Review is no exception.

His counsel is that we simply “forget the one-line Bill of Rights against discrimination.” That is, the proposal from the so-called Expert Panel that we lift anti-discrimination laws that affect indigenous Australians out of statutory law and plant them in the constitution.

The people are not going to vote for it because they will see straight away it raises too many questions. As Craven says, “the sweeping guarantee against discrimination on the grounds of race, ethnicity or colour is a one-clause Bill of Rights.”

He says:

At the crudest level, what on earth does it mean? The answer is, whatever the judges say. The examples of negative potential that will be used by the “No” case are so hideous they cannot even be responsibly canvassed, but they will be deployed to devastating effect.

If the Australian people have doubts about what it means and, more specifically, how judges might interpret it, they will vote no. As Craven says, that would be a tragedy because “it will look like a repudiation of every step of progress over the past 50 years. It will be the final insult to our indigenous people.”

He says “this is not some Carlton cocktail party debate, where the ultimate prize is to call your opponent a racist but no one actually gets hurt.” It’s more serious than that.

Sartre and Federal Politics

He wrote the play in 1944 (I reviewed a London production last month – see below) and somehow Sartre captured a perfectly enclosed world offering NO WAY OUT, three antagonistic characters who have been shown by a valet into a drab room with tattered Second Empire furniture. It dawns on the audience that the players in this short drama are in hell, enclosed in this room for eternity. The bell chord will not summon anyone, the door remains locked – until it blows open and they are too intimidated to run for it. And the more they find out about one another’s sins and characters the more they are locked in conflict, left to probe one another further, and glare and snarl.

BUT THERE IS NO WAY OUT!

“L’enfer, c’est les autres,” said Sartre. Hell is other people.

So it must seem, with no exit. In this trap despair is natural.