Bias is in the eye of the beholder

I was going to call the post “stupid f*ckers who wouldn’t know a fair question if it bit them on the bum”, but thought better of it… According to ABC News:

The Federal Government and the New South Wales Opposition have accused Labor and the unions of using yesterday’s Higher School Certificate (HSC) exam to indoctrinate students with left-wing ideologies.

The claim about a question in the industrial technology exam comes as almost 65,000 year-12 students in New South Wales prepare to sit the only compulsory HSC exam this morning: English.

The question asked students to discuss the impact of Government legislation on employees.

Federal Education Minister Julie Bishop says it was clearly about WorkChoices and was another example of how political views are being pushed in the classroom.

“You’d have to be naive in the extreme not to see this as a loaded question,” she said.

“It has been backed up by months and months of union campaigning in schools in NSW, pushing their political agenda.

“We’ve got teachers handing out anti-Government propaganda to school children and parents are complaining that their children are being used as political pawns.”

But state Education Minister John Della Bosca has described the reaction to the question as hysterical.

Mr Della Bosca says the question was set by independent experts in the field from public, private and Catholic school committees.

Guest entry. Country’s going to the dogs mate…

WARNING:

That latest figure is supplied as a public service in the spirit of the Prime Ministerial letter to all households of this week.

— The Management

Yea the great and terrible day of The Bush is nigh…

…and the Moon hath turned to blood seen even unto Surry Hills…

Surry Hills is a free speech zone? And the horsies have the lurgy…

Once upon a time they may have made something of the fact that a lunar eclipse will precede the arrival in Sydney of George W Bush. No longer, of course, are we so superstitious. But it does seem that eclipses of another kind will accompany his visit: Stand by for Bush’s travelling circus.

…advance teams will have been in Australia for months consulting NSW and federal police.

Their job has been to study the routes Mr Bush will travel, ensure bridges and viaducts are secure, and organise the huge secure zone. Each venue is meticulously assessed for security and to ensure there is an escape route should anything go awry…

Puzzled and grumpy old man…

Why don’t I rejoice as I am supposed to at the size of the government’s surpluses? Yesterday on Journalspace I posted Look, I know I’m dumb… in which I contrasted two stories from yesterday’s Herald, one about the oddities of accounting in spending on Indigenous programs, the other on the amazing billions in the federal piggy bank. I am dumb when it comes to economics, I admit it. But why do I feel there is something distinctly odd about eleven years of quite savage cuts in all manner of things and fire sales of this or that…

For example, just taken from a quick Google around:

That idiotic citizenship “test”

My impatience with this particular piece of gross idiocy has been made plain here often enough. So has my enjoyment of the magazine The Big Issue. Both came together yesterday as I read the new Big Issue (the annual short story number) where I spotted in the “Hearsay” column the following from writer, director, actor, teacher and former Young Australian of the Year Khoa Do.

“In the world I grew up in, a lot of people and their parents struggled to speak English,” he said. “Now they are successful in a whole range of fields. My parents are always learning and always trying. Asking whether people who don’t speak fluent English can contribute to Australia is like asking whether a blind or deaf person can contribute. Of course they can.”

I sourced that to an article by Jonathan Pearlman in the Moruya/Bateman’s Bay News. (Good to see regional papers running such stories, though it was in turn sourced to the Sydney Morning Herald.)