Age bin

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When it comes to services for people with communication handicap, Vicki Gibbs and Autism Spectrum Australia have it precisely backwards. The problem isn’t that some children who had been diagnosed with autism have now been reclassified as having a social communication disorder and don’t get funding for therapy.  The problem is that children with autism get services that aren’t available to people with identical needs whose communication handicaps spring from other disabilities. Funding should be on the basis of need, not the basis of diagnosis, and people with cerebral palsy or Down syndrome or diagnoses of intellectual disability need communication therapy just as much as people with autism do.  The correct remedy is not to reclassify a few but to include the many.

Crossposted from John Quiggin

1) Bearing in mind that the decline of professed Christianity, of whatever description, from 90% to 60% took place in a much more explicitly christianised educational/legal/social system than we have today, there's little reason to believe that what comparatively little Abbot & Pyne can do to the schools will do anything at all to reverse the trend. My school, for example, mandated compulsory church attendance eight times a week; the effect was a general conviction that we'd had enough of it, at the Australian average of 7 church visits a year, to last us for 222.85 years if we never went again, so in the main we didn't.

2) Pyne thinks that children are being led astray by Marxist teachers and we should go back to having them led astray by religious teachers; but as the marxist teachers were themselves taught by the religious teachers, this seems doomed to fail.

3) The Australian drift away from religion isn't a movement to atheism, it's to Who Gives a Fuck, which is a much, much more attractive standard. Going to church is work; 8.8% of Australians do it once a week, 19% once a month, the rest weddings and funerals (and perhaps Christmas or Easter).

4) Just about the least believing nation on earth is England, which still has an established church.

5) Forty years ago Edna Everage was making jokes about catholic-protestant rivalry. That's now a good deal deader than Sandy Stone.  Fifty years in Australia and Sunni and Shia will have a hard time remembering which is which, or at least have a hard time thinking worse of the other sect than they do of Collingwood supporters.

Abbot and Pyne's views on this are certainly evidence that they're malign clowns, but we already knew that, just as we have lots of evidence that their policies tend to fold catastrophically because they have a firm belief that firm beliefs matter more than lots of evidence. If militant atheists were smart, they'd be supporting daily compulsory religious instruction in schools run by young-earth creationists.

Hey, isn't that

Bender again?

Hey, isn't that

Bender?

The odd thing

about this is that I would have thought it impossible that such a sayable combination of sounds wouldn't have already been taken up for a word.

"He even flexed its handle because his handles have a special flex and, being the bat nuffy he is, he then peeled the grip at both ends"
''I have always been a bit of a bat nuffy. Ricky hasn't influenced me in that department, but I probably challenge him as far as being a bat nuffy.'' 
"I'm a bat nuffy, I pick up everyone's bats. I go through everyone's cricket bats."

One of Sydney's leading lepers

In The Age, in an article on ASIO - 

Defence specialist Professor Des Ball learnt: "ASIO identified me as someone who is involved in the supply of drugs to the deaf and dumb fraternity in Canberra."

I suppose it's progress to have ASIO concerned with disability issues, even to the extent of noticing......

Not, of course, that Des ever did, but even so. 

 

Age bin

After the fall of the Howard government the Rudd government was pressed to set up inquiries on (a) how Australia had been dragged into an unnecessary war against Saddam Hussein that let to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and (b) who in the government had signed off on breaching Australian law and United Nations sanctions against selling wheat to Saddam Hussein.  Rudd refused, wanting to seem impartial and bipartisan. Having seen how quickly Abbot has descended into partisan witchhunts over the pink batts issue I hope that Labor politicians have learnt their lesson and after the next election will immediately move to expose the errors, misjudgements and who knows, crimes of the present cabinet.