This Perfect Day

Queensland Education Minister Rod Welford rips into parents here:

...blasted parents for failing to socially educate their children and has ordered teachers to pick up the slack. ...said today's teenagers were the most "under-parented generation in our history" and dramatic changes were needed to stem bullying, drug and alcohol abuse, depression and other youth behavioural problems. "Parents have dropped the ball," Mr Welford said.

Queensland Police Minister Judy Spence tears teenagers a new one there:

"CRAZY and stupid" is how (Spence) has described the drunken and high-speed behaviour of several young drivers nabbed by police since the start of the year. "...young drivers don't seem to care that they're endangering themselves and others."

And Queensland Transport Minister John Mickel flicks it all straight back to parents:

...to take greater responsibility for the actions of any of their teenage children who drive.

All three throw up their hands in despair and say 'no wonder we have to take responsibility instead':

Announcing a controversial "social and emotional" education strategy to start in state schools this year, Mr Welford said teachers would be asked to play a bigger parental role... to help schoolchildren cope with anxiety, failure and bad behaviour – lessons, he says, many no longer get at home.

and:

It totally vindicates the Government's decision to introduce tough new restrictions on young drivers."

No mention of the fact that it is precisely the liberal socialist policies of the last 40 years supported even today by Welford, Spence and Mickel that have created these problems.

Moves such as this represent a grab by the Left for a long-envied prize - total control of the raising of children and it is achieved in the standard socialist manner with a proclamation that 'it's for your own good'.

-- Nick

Old Blighty

It's would seem that England's green and pleasant land is neither green nor pleasant, nor for the home owner, their own land.

Clive Aslet, editor-at-large of Country Life gives a bleak view of life in the UK. It's a long piece but worth reading all the way through and wonder if such plans are in the works for Australia.

One might feel differently if one believed officialdom truly had the interests of the planet at heart. But green idealism has become a fig leaf to conceal the bulging organ of revenue increase.

The London congestion charge started off, as the name implies, as a means of unjamming traffic. Like the HIPs, it is changing its spots to become a beast for savaging families, often with young children, who have the temerity to drive seven-seater cars. From 2009 they face a charge of £25.

Outside the zone, the Lib Dem Richmond upon Thames council wants the owners of such vehicles to pay whopping fees for parking outside their own home. It is a convenience that the money raised from motorists goes straight into the council coffers, for councillors to spend as they choose, thereby escaping control-freakish capping by the Treasury.

And so it is with rubbish collection. Don't tell me that councils were principally motivated by reducing greenhouse gas emissions when they halved the rate at which they emptied bins and introduced compulsory recycling schemes. They want to save money and damn the rats.

You have only to look at Southwark. It has retained the weekly bin round precisely because it will help promote sustainability. What? I see your puzzled look and furrowed brow. Weekly collection from the doorstep, as it explains on its website, will allow bin snoops to see more easily who is recycling and who isn't. "If residents are not taking part, a member of the recycling team will visit."

Presumably, there will follow the sort of knock on the door familiar to East German dissidents in the days of the Stasi. More information is being collected through microchips installed in rubbish bins - oh, and they will be fitted with a lock to prevent neighbours using a bin that isn't theirs.

Are these the reasons why England is called Blighty?

-- Nora

On Your Marx, Get Set...

What's the difference between Mohammed and Karl Marx?

No, it's not the beginning of a joke but rather a very insightful piece by author Theodore Dalrymple.

Here's a taste:

Curiously, though, Qutb’s thought has many parallels with Marxism. Where Marx has Historical Inevitability, Qutb has God‘s Law. Marx, you remember, envisages a time when the state will wither away and history will end. In Marx’s vision, political power will have dissolved, and the exploitation of man by man will have ceased, to be replaced by the mere administration of things. (How anybody of minimal intelligence could have believed such a thing beats me.) In Qutb’s vision, all political power will have dissolved, replaced by man’s spontaneous obedience to God’s law. Just as the administration of things in Marx’s utopia will not confer power on the administrators, presumably because everything will be so plentiful that no one will be tempted to appropriate more than the next man, so in Qutb’s utopia no one will have to interpret the law and gain power from doing so. God’s law will be as evident as thing will be abundant in Marx’s classless society.

-- Nora