Decrepit old truss-wearing backbencher Wilson Tuckey reckons deputy PM Julia Gillard sounds like ‘Kath’ from Kath and Kim:

Tuckey has yelled “Look at moi” across the chamber at Ms Gillard every day this week… Mr Tuckey, who was thrown out of Question Time yesterday over an unrelated matter, vowed to keep up the interjections. “If you want Kath to run the Government, you should vote for her,” the West Australian backbencher said.

For the life of me I just can’t work out which TV comedy character Wilson Tuckey reminds me of. Oh, hang on…

The Rudd government, through education minister Julia Gillard, has flagged a strong policy focus on LOTE (Languages Other Than English) in primary and secondary schools.

THE Federal Government is moving to significantly increase the number of students graduating with foreign language skills by pushing the states towards a nationally consistent language curriculum.

New government research to be released tomorrow has found that students are being turned off languages because they believe the subject will affect their university entry scores or because they are told by parents and career teachers that language skills are not relevant to their future.

Gillard says that Australian students need second language skills to remain internationally competitive — and this is true — but there are other major advantages to learning foreign languages in school.

1) Learning another language improves one’s English skills.
Getting your head around the grammar, sentence structure, spelling, punctuation and formatting rules (and contradictions!) of a foreign language makes you pay attention — perhaps for the first time — to the same rules that you use intuitively in the English language. However, to use a language well you’ve got to do more than just use it intuitively. A lot of people can write and speak seemingly sophisticated sentences in English with fancy words and complicated structures, but are relying on reciting them from memory without a basic understanding of the underlying rules that govern the language they’ve just used. Learning another language from scratch helps you learn how to better use the building blocks of your native language that allow you to “play” with words, get creative, and better communicate in a range of genres and situations.

2) Learning another language improves one’s thinking.
More to the point, it improves your metacognition — thinking about thinking. The process of forming connections between foreign and native vocab gives you an amazing insight into the way your brain ticks. People who understand the way that they think, and can manipulate their thinking and actions while engineering situations to best match their thinking styles, are better overall learners than people who have poor metacognition.

3) Learning another language improves one’s cultural understanding and relations.
Pretty obvious this one but very important. Language is a window through which you can understand a culture and its history. Everyone’s heard the story about how Eskimos have forty words for snow or something like that, but there are less obvious ways to read history through words. The literal English translation of a foreign word may reveal a between the lines truth about the way other people think. Also, what are the first words you learn in another language? Foods and other interesting cultural tidbits.

When we travel overseas we expect practically everyone to speak English and, lucky for us, they usually speak enough for us to communicate. Just because English is basically the universal language of travel isn’t an excuse to get lazy and refuse to learn anything else. Making an effort to learn another person’s language shows respect — even if your efforts to hold a conversation fail and you both need to default to English.

4) Learning another language increases one’s sense of the world and decreases one’s insularity.
This is especially crucial for Australia. We’re a young country and rather isolated and insular in our corner of the world. With our close cultural ties to other English speaking countries, and English one of the “global” languages, it’s easy to forget that it’s not the mother tongue for the majority of Earth’s citizens. By failing to force students to learn another language at school, combined with the fact that we can generally get by with English alone when travelling, we reinforce the false primacy of English and a lack of need for other language skills.

Overall, it’s hard to justify the current attitude to LOTE in schools. We should really be requiring primary and secondary school students to study at least one language up to grade ten. Western European languages are most commonly taught at schools but the focus in future should be on south-east Asian languages as they will become increasingly relevant to our lives. Oh, and there are dozens of live Aboriginal languages that exist within our very own country. What about some of them?

Meet the Liberal candidate for my own electorate, Pastor Peter Curtis:

If Pastor Peter’s jolly photoshoot persona isn’t enough to scare you, check out his views on homosexuality:

“As a Christian, I do not agree with the idea of homosexuality. That’s the reality. I can’t put it any other way,” Mr Curtis told The Sunday Age yesterday. “I certainly could never change my views that homosexuality is a perversion, because it is a perversion.”

Mr Curtis said his view that gay men were many more times likely to die from disease than heterosexuals was supported by several passages of scripture, and that he was simply stating the truth. “Homosexuality certainly does open up the door to things that are not helpful,” he said.

He’s also up to date with trends in education and science, and if elected may move to supplant Julie Bishop on the front bench:

He said that, if elected, he would be urging the Liberal Party to introduce intelligent design to state school science classes. Intelligent design is an assertion that certain features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, and not by natural selection.

“I would be very much in favour of intelligent design being taught in public schools,” Mr Curtis said. “Just as the theory of evolution is taught as well — in my view regrettably taught in science classes, because I think it’s a theory and not a science.”

Pastor Pete is running against Julia Gillard in Lalor. The Herald Sun told us earlier this month that Gillard is a baby-eating Maoist who wants to nationalise oxygen and force us all into gulags where the elderly will be pitchforked to death with rolled-up copies of Das Kapital. It neglected to mention that her direct opposition for the seat of Lalor is a bigoted homophobic creationist nutjob with a stark resemblence to the clown on the cover of Stephen King’s It. Purely an oversight, I’m sure.

I was delighted by Bill Heffernan’s comments last week on Julia Gillard. It was refreshing to hear a politician refusing to veil his deep-seated misogyny and archaic views with words like “family values”, “Christian ethics” and “decency”. More please. Say it like you see it, you old dinosaur.

I couldn’t agree more with Catherine Deveney’s comments about the need for more honesty in politics. Wouldn’t it be fantastic if politicians, and all those in public life, spoke their true mind rather than disguising true thoughts with weasel language?

Steve Fielding would justify every opinion by referring to the bible rather than the bullshit concept of “family.” Tony Abbott would do the same.

Julia Gillard would say that proposed Labor changes to WorkNoChoices are in response to union demands rather than pretending they’re not.

Steve Bracks would admit that he’s unwilling to tackle problem gambling in Victoria because his government is utterly reliant on the revenue rather than mumbling incoherently and ignoring the topic completely.

All politicians should look to those patriots at A Western Heart who lead the way in honesty. It’s just a simple tale of bitch meets pig:

Last night A Current Affair had the story of a stupid bitch who married a muslim pig, had a child with him, and then watched as said muslim pig kidnapped her daughter and stole her away.

Of course that begs the question of what the fuck is wrong with you women? Why the fuck are you still marrying these muslim savages and then wondering why they ‘change’ on you. Here’s a hint, you stupid molls – THEY DON”T CHANGE! That is how they really are and you are either too fucking blind to see through their bullshit act or you are too fucking stupid to understand what islam really is.

I propose legislation that any non-muslim woman converting and/or marrying a muslim should be stripped of her citizenship and deported to a muslim shithole of her owner’s…sorry…. her husband’s choice. That way there is no need to steal any children because they are already there.

Now that’s telling it like it is.

“In short, we simply believe in individual freedom”
– Liberal party website

This guiding belief can be clearly seen in much of the federal government’s legislation over the years, such as penalties for not buying private health insurance and the ultimate clanger: WorkChoices.

The Editor: I’m nearly 30 and I’d like to purchase private health insurance.
The Liberal party: Great! We’ll support you in your decision.

The Editor: I’m nearly 30 and for the time being I’d like to remain within the public health system and pay a Medicare levy.
The Liberal party: No worries. We’ll just wait patiently and then slaughter you when you do decide to take out health insurance.

The Editor: I’d like to sign an AWA please.
Liberal party supported employer: Great! We’ll support you in your decision.

The Editor: I’d like to sign a union-negotiated collective agreement.
Liberal party supported employer: No.

As the weeks roll on I see more and more parallels between the Liberal philosophy of individual choice and the classroom management strategies employed in a primary school. In my first month of teaching I’ve tried hard to emulate the minister for industrial relations and avuncularity, Joe Hockey, by providing my students with Liberal style choice. I’ve found myself saying things like:

“I think you need to make a wiser choice about where you sit, student.”

“It’s time you thought about the choices you make in this classroom with regards to distracting other people, student.”

“You can choose to be an active member of this class and learn or choose to sit outside staring at the wall for the rest of the year, student”

It’s blindingly obvious that I’m not offering any real choice to the students but am trying to soften the command by giving the illusion of choice. Joe Hockey demonstrated this very philosophy in his “debate” with Julie Gillard last week:

JULIA GILLARD: I am happy to see workers sitting around and working out how they want to deal with their industrial arrangements.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Without a union, if they don’t want one?

JULIA GILLARD: If that is what they choose. And, to take an example, let’s look at the Queensland netballers, that’s been a big issue today. 20 women on the team, they play as a team, they want to negotiate their employment conditions as a team, and they can’t under the Howard Government’s legislation. Now, I don’t care whether they want the union involved or whether the 20 of them want to sit around and do it themselves, that’s entirely a matter for them, but if the 20 of them want to do it together, then they should be able to do it together, and they can’t achieve that under Mr Howard’s laws.

KERRY O’BRIEN: Joe Hockey?

JOE HOCKEY: You need to have flexibility in the workplace, Kerry. Flexibility can include individual contracts. Again, under the Labor Party, individual contracts were essentially based on the award system, they were a bolt on to the award. What we are saying is, there has to be freedom. If individuals want to negotiate individual contracts, that is great.

KERRY O’BRIEN: What about if the individual doesn’t want to but is intimidated into?

JOE HOCKEY: What choice does an individual get if they are thrown a collective agreement?

KERRY O’BRIEN: Well, which is worse?

JOE HOCKEY: I would say it’s worse to have a collective agreement thrown at you with no choice, or an award thrown at you which is negotiated by lawyers down at the Industrial Relations Commission in Melbourne, I think that is far worse than having an individual contract that you can tailor in negotiations with the employer…

JULIA GILLARD: Look, Joe has just tied himself up in a logical knot and I don’t think he’s ever going to get out of it. He is saying people should have choice, but let’s take the actual example of the Firebirds, the 20 netballers. They want a choice. The choice they want is they want to work together and have their own collective agreement. Under Mr Howard’s laws, what is getting thrown at them isn’t a collective agreement or an award. What is getting thrown at them is individual agreements they don’t want. So the Howard Government is actually saying, “You don’t really get a choice. If you choose a collective agreement, too bad.

But at least my teaching style will directly contribute to a stronger economy, less terrorism and more values.

Peter Garrett is the ALP’s new shadow spokesperson for environment and climate change. I have to say, I didn’t see it coming. I thought they might give him arts, or maybe indigenous affairs, but would shy away from giving the formerly outspoken president of the Australian Conservation Foundation the actual environment portfolio. I guess he might win back some of the people who vote for the other tall man of politics, Bob Brown, and all that he stands for. He might also attract a crowd to the Rudd and Gilliard “listening tour” of Australia (On a side note, this was my favourite quote from K Rudd broadcast from Bundaberg today: Interviewer: “Why are you doing this tour, Mr Rudd?” Mr Rudd: “One word: to listen.” Do you think he said it like that in order to sound less intelligent? I reckon he might have.)

I have to say I am a tiny, grain of sand amount excited at the prospect of the new ALP team. I mean, they are mainstreaming green issues and playing on people’s fears for their children and Rudd doesn’t gross me out if I avoid tv and photo images of him, and today I just listened to the radio so I am feeling more positive. Mr Climate Change only made a few inarticulate responses on air and Rudd is cleverly taking him under his wing on his first big tour of the People whilst cashing in on his rockstar appeal to attract the People in the first place. Could this be the beginning of something worth voting for?

Here’s the thing. I will probably vote for the ALP my whole life. So anyone out there who is volunteering in a local ALP member’s office and is responsible for keeping a finger on the pulse of the blogging community, you don’t have to read past here. Your vote is safe with me.

Or I should say - your preference vote. I have taken to giving my primary vote for the Greens or Democrats in the last few elections and preferencing ALP as my version of a protest within the ranks.

Here are some of the things that piss me right off about the Federal ALP and which I do not expect to change:
1. The factions.
It is unbelievable but appears true that the ALP factions would rather lose election after election than sort their shit out.

2. The dominance of beery and outspoken older blokes.
Where are your bright and feisty women in party leadership positions? Hurray for Julia Gillard but surely there are others? If New Zealand has had a female PM for almost ten years than we must be about another ten years off, I guess.

3. The snail pace of realising that climate change might be used as a real vote winner
You could really hit those middle Australians for all their worth - get them in the fear joint, hit them with the risk to their future livelihood, the jobs of their children - whatever it takes, but use it.

4. Kevin Rudd.
He just makes my skin crawl. I can’t explain it, but I know I am not alone.

The absence of actual policy
Whilst my skin was crawling, I heard Rudd say something about providing ‘a real alternative government,’ not just shadowing Howard. I hope he does what he says. I have to say though, the moment he was quoted as being in the business of ‘nation-building’ my automatic nervous system switched off my attention gland.

It’s for the reasons above that I am not a member of the ALP and never will be. I have card carrying members for friends who I wish would run for seats but I know they value their quality of life too much for that (damn you for your lack of total self-sacrifice - and you know who you are).

The take home message from this is not new - these same things piss off thousands of my dissatisfied, left-leaning compatriots. I am not going to suggest anything for the ALP to change because the ALP refuses to change any of these things in any active way. Instead I will enjoy observing the ALP as it is inexorably forced to change, as the Greens grow into a real left wing threat and my and others’ currently empty primary vote starts to mean something more than protest.