The Guardian 14 September, 2005
Dingo bytes
The former Queensland chief magistrate Di Fingleton has decided not to write a tell-all book about her dismissal from her post and her time in jail. Fingleton spent six months in Brisbane Women’s Prison after she was wrongly prosecuted on a charge of threatening a subordinate. Did she decide not to write her memoir out of a sense let bygones be bygones? No. She changed her mind after being given $475,000 and a new job as a magistrate. Did I hear the word "bribe"?
The election of new NSW Liberal Party leader Peter Debman is bad news for women and gays, warns Greens MP Lee Rhiannon, who points out that his surprise appointment was only possible with the backing of the religious right in the party. "He is now indebted to these deeply conservative forces that are working to wind back the clock to the days when abortion was illegal and gay people faced daily discrimination", said Ms Rhiannon. "These are worrying times. It is very serious that the second political force in this state has been captured by the religious right."
The Victorian Independent Education Union has warned its members that the Howard government’s moves to scrap unfair dismissal laws will mean that two thirds of teachers and staff in Victorian non-government schools will lose their protection from unfair dismissal. This is because all non-government schools in the state are stand-alone employers. Almost 65 percent of independent schools would not be covered by unfair dismissal laws, said VIEU general secretary Tony Keenan. "These changes will make it even harder for smaller and poorer schools to recruit and retain teachers."
CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is Federal Education Minister Brendan Nelson. Nelson has called for "true" Australian values to be taught in Islamic schools. In particular he wants their pupils to be taught about that Anzac legend John Simpson, who earned his fame at Gallipoli moving the wounded to safety on a donkey. It turns out that the Minister for Education’s knowledge of history may be a little weak: John Simpson was in fact Jack Kirkpatrick, a Geordie and a staunch trade unionist who came to Australia as a stoker in 1910 and jumped ship. He worked as an itinerant labourer and a miner before enlisting, using a false name, with the 3rd Field Ambulance and was killed by machine-gun fire after just 24 days. In a letter to his mother in England he suggested that revolution was the answer to the problems of the working people. So it appears this "true aussie" was in fact the Howard Government’s worst nightmare: a queue-jumping immigrant and a unionist who gave false and misleading information to the military, as well as being an advocate of the overthrow of governments.