Thoughtful articles not propaganda
On the ABC’s Q&A on Monday night Richard Di Natale railed against the alleged evils of the Murdoch press. The Greens leader wants to strengthen the powers of the Australian Communications and Media Authority to control what we read. Secure funding of a public broadcaster is one thing but believing the ABC should ignore its charter and be “a bulwark against News Corp” is another.
The Australian has rightly reported on the ABC’s lack of diversity of opinion and preoccupation with Green/Left issues. God help us if the Greens get to control what we can read. Paul Kelly’s thoughtful articles are not the hard Right propaganda Di Natale accuses The Australian of propagating.
Failing teachers
I have been a teacher unionist for almost 50 years and have taught in government schools only, yet I regard the Australian Education Union’s funding campaign as nothing more than an attempt to cover up for its failure as a union (“Union report ‘cherrypicks data’”, 14/5).
The AEU did not even put a funding model to the Gonski panel. For the past 20 years, it has been signing enterprise bargaining agreements that leave teachers with worse conditions than they had in my first school more than 40 years ago.
Teachers have two unions, one for teachers in government schools and another for teachers in non-government schools. Nurses, being clever, have one union for all nurses, irrespective of the sector they work in. The consequence is that the AEU spends as much time seeking to protect the market share of its members’ employers as it does in looking after its members’ conditions.
If the AEU had any sense at all, it would make common cause with the Catholic education sector and the low-fee independent schools, but, like the French in the 1930s, it is stuck behind the Maginot line, ready to fight past wars all over again.
Leave it to Caesar
It’s good that the Folau imbroglio has evoked some historical perspectives (“History on Folau’s side”, Letters, 14/5), but missing here is what a big leg-up the Roman version of Christianity got on February 27, 380 when the imperial Edict of Thessalonica made it the sole official religion of the Empire; this gave the bishop of Rome access-all-areas-with-benefits to political authority and military force, unleashing sectarian discrimination previously absent from this heterodox and multi-ethnic realm. Pagan religions and non-official Christians became targets for persecution by both secular and religious authority and, as those familiar with history know, religious wars, inquisitions, forced conversions and autos-da-fe followed. It took 14 centuries (and mass slaughter in the 1618-1648 Thirty Years War) for the Enlightenment to restore separating what is Caesar’s from what is God’s — recommended in all three synoptic gospels.
Jim Campbell should check the Bible — and history — before echoing Christianity’s tragically all too frequent anti-Jewish polemic. The carpenter from Nazareth was convicted and sentenced by Pontius Pilate, the Roman prefect, although at the urging of the chief priest and his associates. Not for religious reason but because Jesus was thought — wrongly — to be a security threat. The followers of Jesus, all Jews, led by his brother James, after his death continued to worship in the temple and to live freely in Jerusalem. Jesus did call people to “repent”, meaning to return to God, and to seek God’s kingdom — here and now on this earth. Those Jesus condemned were those who failed altogether to feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the poor or visit the sick and those in prison.
Gender intervention a betrayal of the nation’s vulnerable youth
Major policy statements from democratic institutions, led by the UK’s Cass Review and the US fightback for common sense, are dropping totally disproved medical procedures.
Food industry brings home extent of our energy crisis
With big increases in electricity bills leading to higher food prices, the conclusion is that by placing ideology over pragmatism, the Albanese government has failed us.