Primary Schools for the 21st Century: NSW North Coast schools come up trumps in funding round

The Rudd Government's Education Revolution program is now in full swing and (despite contentious issues surrounding proposed publication of school league tables, teaching skills assessment and alleged bad planning/contractor rorting of the associated Round One building program) it is delivering results on the ground when it comes to funding for NSW North Coast primary schools.

In Round 2 P21 local primary schools are amongst the 3,716 Australian schools getting sometimes much needed cash injections for construction and refurbishment of major infrastructure, including libraries and multi-purpose halls.

Here are a few of those North Coast schools:

Albert Park Public School Lismore, Classroom facilities upgrade $150,000/New library $750,000
Alstonville Public School Alstonville, New hall/COLA $3,100,000
Ballina Public School Ballina, New hall/COLA $2,350,000.00
Bangalow Public School Bangalow, New hall/COLA $2,000,000
Banora Point Public School Banora Point, New class room facilities $3,000,000
Barkers Vale Public School Wadeville, New canteen $600,000/New COLA $300,000
Baryulgil Public School Baryulgil, New library $250,000
Bellingen Public School Bellingen, New hall/COLA $2,000,000
Bilambil Public School Bilambil, New classroom facilities $2,500,000
Boambee Public School Boambee, new administration facilities, $2,000,000
Bonalbo Central School Bonalbo, Hall/COLA upgrade $850,000
Bowraville Public School Bowraville, New library $250,000
Brunswick Heads Public School Brunswick Heads, New hall/COLA $2,000,000
Burringbar Public School Burringbar, New library $850,000
Byron Bay Public School Byron Bay New Library $3,000,000
Casino Public School Casino, New classroom/SPED facilities $3,000,000
Cabbage Tree Island Public School Cabbage Tree Island, New classroom $250,000
Coffs Harbour Public School Coffs Harbour, New hall/COLA $2,000,000
Coraki Public School Coraki, New library $900,000
Corindi Beach Public School Corindi Beach, New classroom facilities $850,000
Coutts Crossing Public School Coutts Crossing, New classroom facilities $850,000
Eltham Public School Eltham, New classroom facilities $907,000
Empire Vale Public School Empire Vale, New classroom facilities $907,000
Evans River Community School Evans Head, New classroom facilities $2,057,000
Iluka Public School Iluka, New library $900,000
Lismore Heights Public School Lismore Heights, New classroom facilities $2,057,000
Lismore Public School Lismore, Classroom facilities upgrade $800,00/New COLA $1,700,000
Palmers Island Public School Palmers Island, New classroom facilities $907,000
Rappville Public School Rappville, New administration facilities $370,000/New library $281,000
Southern Cross School Ballina East, New COLA $350,000/New library $2,200,000
St Andrew's Christian School Clarenza via Grafton, Construction of a COLA $250,000
St Carthage's Primary School Lismore, Construction of multi-purpose hall $3,000,000
St Joseph's Primary School Grafton South, Construction of Multi-Purpose Hall $1,200,000/ Refurbishment of administration $800,000
St Joseph's Primary School Woodburn, Construction of Library $850,000/Refurbishment of classrooms $2,150,000
Vistara Primary School Richmond Hill, Construction of library/Multipurpose hall facility $850,000
Wardell Public School Wardell, New classroom facilities $907,000
Wilson Park School Lismore, Classroom facilities upgrade $150,000/New COLA $100,000
Wollongbar Public School Wollongbar, Classroom facilities upgrade $1,700,000/New COLA $300,000
Woodenbong Central School Woodenbong, Library upgrade $600,000/New COLA $250,000

Full alphabetical list NSW primary schools receiving second round funding here.

National Wattle Day 1 September 2009

Wattle tree at night from Photography Tips

The first day of September has been National Wattle Day since 1992, but Australians has been celebrating the wattle somewhere around the country since as early as 1838 and 1899 and it became our national floral emblem in 1988.

There are at least 900 wattle species found on this continent and there is always a little wattle flowering somewhere.

World-wide it is probably the floral emblem to which the greatest number of people are allergic or to which they have developed a perfume sensitivity - according to hayfever and asthma suffers I know.

Some reports say about 5% of all Australian are sensitive to wattle pollen.

So happy Wattle Day everyone!

How to make money while living in Australia....

While wandering up and down the byways of cyberspace I've noticed a great many "how to" posts on various subjects.
For a bit of a chuckle I Googled the search term "how to grow money" and came up with 66,300 entries.
This set me wondering just how many queries this might represent, but Google Trends told me that not enough people asked that question for it to rate a graph.
Apparently the world knows that money doesn't actually grow on trees or under bushes.
However, when I Googled "how to make money" over 10 million entries turned up and Google Trends had recorded the main countries.
What was interesting is that while the world has been asking since at least 2004, Australians didn't really start asking Uncle Google about ways of making money until late 2006 to early 2007 and have been searching ever since - with Queenslanders heading the national list by a nose.
Are we all turning into backyard entrepreneurs or out chasing rainbows?
Are searchers mostly down on their luck junior merchant bankers and stockbrokers or frantic retirees watching superannuation funds disappear down the gurgler?
Is half of good old Oz now desperately seeking silver?
Or is everyone just out there surfing the web for fun?
What is very certain is the fact that the Australian rich list hasn't suddenly swollen with a crowd of names never heard of before - so I guess that nobody's really getting rich from all those "how to" web pages.

How many people won the James Hardie environmental health trifecta?

In the 1950s I grew up in the outer suburbs of Sydney in a house where the outside eaves, internal kitchen walls, all of the laundry additions and garage cum playroom were made of asbestos-based building material.

Later on I purchased a family home which had ceiling insulation made from asbestos and hessian carpet underlay which I learned last week may also been contaminated by this dangerous James Hardie product.

Thankfully I did not work directly with asbestos, but I'm not sure that the acoustic ceiling tiles above my head in the first office job I had did not contain this substance.

I feel as though my family has - without our consent - been made to run in a very dodgy three horse race so that a big international company could grow rich.

Hanging is too good for James Hardie directors - past and present - who knew and said nothing.

Mark
Tweed Heads

Perceived security threats and how Australians rate them

According to a 26 August 2009 Roy Morgan Research telephone poll; if you are a male living in Victoria who intends to vote Family First, then you are more likely than not to feel that there is currently no country which threatens Australia's security.

What is fascinating about this poll is the fact that Indonesia is still the biggest concern for the majority of Australians surveyed.

The countries that 55% of Australians feel threaten us are:




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Best political & intergalactic tweets seen recently and other stray thoughts

rod3000 Can I suggest NSW Cabinet have a caged death match? Last one standing gets to be Premier for 18 months. ....from Tweetie

Since when is dying at 77 years and 6 months of age considered an "untimely death", when average male expectancy in the United States is in the vicinity of 77.7 years?

A Scots farmer is now officially riding on the sheep's back as he took home a record £231,000 for a stud ram, named Deveronvale Perfection.

GODWIN Grech, the Treasury official at the centre of the fake email affair, proposed a fee deal to the merchant bank running the OzCar fund whose chairman was a key backer and personal donor to Malcolm Turnbull.The effect of the deal was to enable Credit Suisse, the bank hired by Treasury to implement OzCar, to maintain its $5 million in fees, despite the fund being scaled back from $2 billion to $1.3bn. The Weekend Australian can reveal that John O'Sullivan, the chairman of investment banking for Credit Suisse, donated more than $20,000 to the Wentworth Forum, the Opposition Leader's political fighting fund. According to The Australian on 29th August 2009.

Australia spammed outerspace on 28 August 2009 with 25,800 messages from Earth to Gliese 581d, a planet outside our solar system which may support life of some sort. These messages will take 20 years to reach this planet - at which time expect an intergalactic spam filter to activate.

Best intergalactic tweet from the Hello from Earth project:
"Yidigunmardin nuruku yajingewa wuremulu jandange. Our dream, we're telling to them young kids. We're talking all this dream for the future.
Yidumduma Bill Harney
Wardaman people, near Katherine, Australia"

Senator "Barney Rubble" Joyce (playfully rewriting history) reduces investigations into Australia's breach of UN sanctions against Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq to merely a matter of; "The main issue with AWB was there was a concerted effort, a political motive to get rid of Australia's single desk".

Amusing DIGG cover headline for article in the Seattle Weekly, USA; Gays Too Late To Ruin Marriage, Straights Beat You To It

The UK Telegraph posed the question last Saturday; "It's a question that all animal-loving Christian evangelicals must address: who will look after their pets on Earth when the Rapture comes and they are taken up to heaven?"

The Australian says general public won't find new Telstra CEO's email address easily. Really, truly? ROFL

This morning I read an online James Jeffrey snippet in The Australian which ended with:

In the meantime, Strewth's inbox has been on the receiving end of an avalanche of Telstra customers who are exceptionally keen to be given Thodey's email address. All we can say is, good luck.

All I can say is - really?

I suspect that all one has to do is use the Team Telstra email address and render it as David.Thodey@team.telstra.com .

This was a functioning e-address at time of writing this post.

So if you have a complaint or two..........

Heard about Mischief the foul-mouthed feline?

A bloke in the Northern Territory reckons his pet cat Mischief can speak English and has a vocabulary of seven different words.

The Northern Territory News reports that ex-boxer Robert 'RJ' Duncan, of Palmerston, claims his cat can say seven words: mum, no, now, what, f**k, pr*ck and why.

"He can't say 'dad' yet, which is a bit of a pr*ck. That's how he got the word 'pr*ck' I reckon, because I say it a lot."

When the Northern Territory News first visited Duncan, 34, and his wife Sandra, 32, at their Gray home, the house-bound moggie grumpily declined to comment.

Instead, he scratched Mr Duncan a few times before bolting to his bedroom and barricading himself in his cupboard.

During a second visit, Mischief was much friendlier - and more talkative. All gathered heard him speak to Sandra, calling her "mum".

Mr Duncan said the two-year-old cat - which he and his wife adopted from his feral mother in Katherine - was most vocal at night.

The Shooter's Party and hunting in NSW North Coast national parks

Borsak post-coital in Zibabwe from NitroExpress

The Shooter's Party is not playing well on the NSW North Coast where the natural environment and diverse flora and fauna are still our biggest tourism draw cards and, where residents appreciate their contact with wildlife.

I haven't yet spoken to anyone who favours allowing gun-toting hunters into national parks or the creation of private game reserves stocked with exotic or feral animals.

This 25 August 2009 The Daily Examiner letter to the editor expresses a common view:

Political shenanigans

THE media has had a field day of late reporting on the political shenanigans that the State Labor Government has been resorting to in order to get its legislation through the State's Upper House.

It is their cosy relationship with the Shooters Party and Fred Nile that has culminated in the controversial bill being proposed that will allow sporting shooters to hunt and kill feral animals and a range of native fauna on public land, including national parks, under the guise of conservation hunting.

That political bond saw the creation of the NSW Game Council whose current chairman, Robert Borsak, has political ambitions of his own, and apparently dreams of joining the former council chairman as an Upper House Shooters Party representative.

Last Friday, the ABC's Stateline program reported the scandal and alerted the nation to a website which contains Mr Borsak's account of an elephant hunt he undertook in Zimbabwe.

His gleeful description of the poor animal's screams and subsequent death throes (he had only managed to break its spine with his first shot, so inept are his shooting skills), is sickening indeed.

However, I urge any doubters as to the real motivation behind the Shooters Party move to log on and read that story so as to fully comprehend the implications of allowing the Shooters Bill to progress.

I believe that the majority of those that read and understand the blood lust that is clearly conveyed in the article, would not only refuse to countenance recreational hunting in national parks, but would support moves to put a stop to this barbaric sport altogether.

JOHN EDWARDS,

South Grafton.

Robert Borsak bragging about his kills in Africa.

Shooter's Party list of Robert Borsak forum posts.