Comments on: Wow! Measles outbreaks eliminated in Australia!

By: Samuel Jenkins

Samuel Jenkins — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 16:30:11 +0000

This is sheer nonsense, blaming tourists for measles- did they bring you some sort of plague? You fail to report the truth about vaccine damages to the body’s own immune system, heck in north america- they have measle parties!!! Your people down under are Under the Influence of Drug Companies Peddling Dangerous Vaccines.
Perhaps you think it is healthier to have a brain damaged kid?

By: Lee Harrison

Lee Harrison — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 02:09:27 +0000

Creationism is definitely on the rise here in Oz, but they have learned a lesson from the court debacles in the US and aren’t pushing it in the public sphere. I regularly visit a lot of schools through my business (science communication) and I’m seeing more and more straightforward creationism taught as science in the private schools.

Unfortunately, screwing with kids’ minds and teaching them to believe in fairy tales seems to be a parental ‘right’.

By: Joanne Mullen

Joanne Mullen — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 09:07:00 +0000

It’s clear that a lot of those fires were started deliberately, it wasn’t an act of nature so much as mass murder. Such deliberate firesetting is hardly new though, the aborigines often hunted by torching vast swathes of forest and picking through the charred carcasses afterwards. That’s why Australian’s megafauna were destroyed. So much for living in harmony with nature.

Don’t assume that Australia is a bastion of clear thinking. I live in a rich suburb of Sydney and there are more ‘alternative’ therapy shops and adverts here than Indian Mynah birds, and there are a lot of those. Australia is actually the most suburban population on earth, almost everyone lives on the coast, mostly in one of the big conurbations, they like to think of themselves as frontiersmen in their adverts, but it’s just not true. It’s no hotbed of scientific curiosity either. The combined science budget for the three main commercial TV stations is precisely zero.

As for creationism, it strikes me that those surveys showing how ’stupid’ Americans are are seldom replicated for other countries, mainly because it doesn’t play to the usual lazy media stereotypes. If you asked a representative sample of Australians, or anyone else, to place Iran on a map, account for the development of life on Earth or explain what an eclipse is, you’d probably get a shockingly bad result. There would be no easy ‘Americans are stupid’ headline in it though, so it doesn’t happen.

By: Sundance

Sundance — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 00:24:43 +0000

Phil, I’m curious about where you get the info suggesting creationism is on the rise in Oz. There has certainly been a shift away from traditional churches to the evangelical “happy-clappy” McChurches run by multi-zillionaires, but there’s also a pretty strong public view that religion has no place dictating what gets into the school curriculum. I remember a few years back our (former) conservative government started making “Let’s teach intelligent design in schools, they’re doing it in the US”-type noises, and there was such an immediate negative response from both the academic community and the general public that the whole idea was dropped almost immediately.

By: CJA

CJA — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 10:48:53 +0000

Yep – no one ever says ‘Bonza’ here. We do say ‘Yep’ though, and ‘Nuh’.
The whole issue of bushfire management is pretty complex. But, if you want a tragically funny story, apparently there’s a guy who cut down all the trees around his house (I think you’re only allowed to take out 4/year). His council fined him $30,000, he took it to court, lost and it all ended up costing him $96,000 just for chopping down the trees around his house. It’s the only one still standing in his area.

By: LukeL

LukeL — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 21:52:58 +0000

To add, in the past forests were thinned out all the time because of wildfires and no one to put them out. Now we do such a good job of stopping little fires and disallow clear cutting that we have super dense forests with decades of dead dry underbrush. One spark and millions of acres can go up.

By: RL

RL — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:03:20 +0000

ncc1701: I was referring to the blog entry with the headline that was titled “Measels are on the rise in Australia and Switzerland, too.” Thanks for the geography lesson, anyway.