Oh what a difference a day or two (doesn't) make in the media

The Daily Examiner Letter to the Editor on 11 May 2012 alerted regular readers to a problem in the veracity of its reporting:

Too much info is barely enough

IT WOULD appear that too much information is never enough for some in regards to the Education Tax Refund (or the new Schoolkids Bonus).

It has been reported (DE 8/5/12) that some families will be worse off under the new scheme, however, this is difficult to reconcile with the information provided regarding both the old and new scheme. Under the old scheme, parents were able to claim 50% of eligible expenses, irrespective of how much they spent during the year. For a primary school student, this meant that in 2011/12 under the ETR a parent could claim a maximum of $409 in rebate, which would mean they had incurred $818 or more in eligible expenses. If Ms. Franklin-Hentscher intended to claim 50% of her $2100 in expenses, for a single primary school-aged child, she would still only have received $409, which is the maximum allowable refund. She also suggests that tuition fees are claimable, which according to the ATO website is also incorrect.

Under the new scheme, Ms. Franklin-Hentscher will be eligible for $410 in rebates, and will not have to produce a single tax receipt to do so. Unless there is more information regarding this individual situation that has not been reported, to suggest that this change is "a kick in the teeth" is quite bewildering.

Michael Clark

Grafton

Editor's note: We acknowledge an error in reporting of this story and issued a correction in our online version. Mr Clark is correct and the error was based on an assumption during an interview that was not checked properly, needless to say the reporter in question was a little embarrassed.

The Daily Examiner 8 May 2012 article in question:

Not all parents better off with Schoolkids Bonus

SOME families will be worse off under the Government's proposed Schoolkids Bonus which promises an annual payment of $410 (for primary students) and $820 (for high school kids).

Those who spend more than $820 on their primary school child's education or more than $1640 on their high school child would be better off under the existing Education Tax Refund which gives parents 50% of costs back through the tax system.

Maclean mother Nicole Franklin-Hentscher, who worked out yesterday she claimed half of the $2100 she spent on claimable education items this year, described the policy change as a kick in the teeth and "the last nail in Julia Gillard's coffin".

Nicole's daughter Indiana attends St James Primary School, Yamba, and while her school fees were not claimable, tuition fees, uniforms, books, internet and other resources were.

"Julia Gillard has lied to us and given us a mining tax that wasn't meant to be there and a carbon tax that wasn't meant to be there, why not kick us a little more," she said.

She said parents who could prove they were spending the money on education were being penalised and this new handout method removed that incentive.

Others, including South Grafton mum Amy Morgan, welcomed the news.

"This seems to be great considering how much cost goes into uniforms each year and by doing it twice a year helps parents with summer and winter uniforms," she said.

Ms Gillard said the ETR had not been working as families were forgetting to keep receipts or could not find the cash to buy necessary equipment in the first place.

About 1.3m families will benefit from the bonus which will be introduced in parliament next week.

Sources in Canberra said the Schoolkids Bonus would be paid for out of the 2011/12 budget alongside the ETR.

The online ‘corrected version as of 5.06 pm 11 May 2012 differed only in the headline,
Bonus doesn't benefit everybody (which continued the published untruth), and rider at its end:

Terry Deefholts has taken responsibility for an error in reporting above. The Education Tax Refund can be claimed for 50% of specific education costs and is capped to a maximum of $794 for primary kids and $1588 for high school kids. The article above suggests that larger amounts be claimed therefore parents would be worse off under the new Schoolkids Bonus - this is incorrect. The Examiner apologises oversight.

Further information: http://www.educationtaxrefund.gov.au

Unfortunately both the letter, www.educationtaxrefound.gov.au and the 2012-13 Budget Papers clearly demonstrate that the online ‘correction’ itself is misleading in that there is still an implication that large amounts had been claimable in the past - without pointing out that the cited $794 (primary) and $1,588 (high school) caps only ever resulted in tax refunds of $397 and $794 respectively in 2010-11.

Because the federal government website states; The Education Tax Refund provides up to 50% back on a range of children's education expenses.

For the 2010–11 tax year refunds may be as much as $397 for every child at primary school, and up to $794 for every child at secondary school. The amount of the refund increases each year by the Consumer Price Index. In the 2011-12 tax year your refund could be as much as $409 for primary kids and $818 for secondary students.

While Budget Paper No. 2 states; From January 2013, every family with a child at school will be guaranteed $410 per annum for each primary school student and $820 per annum for each secondary school student. All eligible families will receive the full rate of payment and will no longer need to keep receipts as proof of expense, or wait until tax time. Eligibility for the payment will remain open to families with children enrolled and attending school who are in receipt of Family Tax Benefit Part A (FTB A) or other qualifying income support payments or allowances under a prescribed educational scheme that precludes the family from receiving FTB A. [my red bolding throughout]

What is clear is that the entire premise of both these articles in The Daily Examiner is incorrect and should never have been written and then published under those headlines. Both types of rebate rise and are to be paid at the maximum rate for each child attending school.

What makes the situation worse is that an opinion piece in the newspaper's 11 May issue appeared to assert that although the journalist could be trusted to spend the Schoolkids Bonus wisely, others might spend some of it on "booze, pokies, plasma TVs, remote control cars - anything but education" and that this bonus was "not healthy". Effectively dumping on at least a million families across the country. One could almost believe that APN's Grafton masthead belonged to the Murdoch media stable.

In all fairness, the erroneous premise of the original story should have been questioned from the start by the newspaper's editor and the blame lies squarely in that quarter when it comes to allowing publication.

As for Ms. Nicole Franklin-Hentscher who so unreasonably feels cheated by the Gillard Government - there are no words to describe the level of silliness being displayed.

Unfortunately bungled reporting has a life of its own and the Internet now owns this misinformation in all its glory.

No one publishes obituaries for junkies

The October 10 - 11 edition of Brisbane's Courier Mail carried an obituary in Kathleen Noonan's "Last Word" column. It appears below:

MOST of us make mistakes and survive. We pick the wrong car to get into, go to the wrong party, kiss the wrong boy or girl, drive when we should have walked, walk when we should have caught a cab, say yes when we should have said no, try things not worth trying, trust someone not worth trusting, wake up in dumb places.

Most of us make mistakes and get away with it. We survive with no awful, lifelong consequences. Not wrapped around a tree at high speed. Not overdosed on the bathroom floor. No fatal outcome.

Robbie Edgar didn't get away with his mistakes. He paid for them. He died recently because of them.

No one publishes obituaries for junkies. That's what his sister Rosey wrote to me. You usually have to be a fine upstanding citizen, sportsman, businessman, dedicated Rotarian or notable academic.

Junkies, really, don't rate. Once we see the word junkie, it sort of makes all the other words in our head disappear. "Junkie" negates everything else. It makes a big, complex, sometimes beautiful, life disappear into one small judgmental word.

"What of someone who did not rise high above his demons, from whom others might feel entitled to withhold their respect? Who will speak to keep his name alive? I will," writes Rosey.

"I will write of Robert Edgar, born 17 May, 1954, to Thomas and Eileen Edgar in Brisbane, precociously interested in the sciences, with a voracious appetite for knowledge and a sharply detailed memory."

He left school early, started an apprenticeship with an optician, but threw that in to come to northern NSW for the Aquarius Festival and the blossoming of the emotional, intellectual and spiritual freedoms promised in the counter-culture.

Robbie embraced transcendental meditation, became vegan, practised yoga, grew organic vegetables, his evenings glowed under kerosene light, he rose early, was fit from long walks, swam with platypus, found glow-worm caves, sought enlightenment.

"He created food gardens at each place: Nimbin, Tuntable Valley and Jiggi," writes Rosey. "He lived by his belief in karma. He did not steal; neither did he drink alcohol nor smoke. He abhorred hard drugs.

"His passions were for food, knowledge meditation and women.

"With the smooth golden skin, a ponytail of long wavy black hair to his waist and a beautiful face, he was a hippie heart-throb."

So what went wrong? One morning Robbie was arrested for possession and supply of drugs – LSD. By his standard, these were not hard drugs. His logic differed from the court's. He was jailed. By the time he was released, he smoked cigarettes, he ate meat and had developed a bad habit that he never came clean of – heroin.

Around this time, he acquired the hepatitis C virus. He continued to live in northern NSW, a junkie. His health suffered from his lifestyle.

But, says Rosey, his humour was resilient and as dry as the dust that swept over Lismore the afternoon of his death. Wicked sarcasm, misquotes, deliberate Spoonerisms: "Time wounds all heals" – were things Rosey loved about her brother. And always pertinent facts, a snippet of history. "Did you know that Pope Leo VIII died of a stroke while committing adultery?" he'd ask.

He made his mark in the community, with well-written and wry articles and letters to various magazines and newspapers.

"He would decimate prejudice with logic and facts," writes Rosey, "and lambast and enlighten with irony and history and humour."

His last article was published posthumously in The Northern Rivers Echo. He wrote, in part: "Greedy people smugglers . . . sneaking unwashed, unwanted aliens with a very different and foreign religion, with superstitious dietary rules and modes of dress . . . incapable of assimilation and as part of a world-wide creed bent on the destruction of our way of life. None but a soft-headed government or left-wing intellectuals would hesitate to intern, in the remotest possible location. Welcoming these illegals and queue-jumpers would open the floodgates to millions of their brethren . . . Ideally, they could all be returned immediately to where they should be waiting, in an orderly manner to be properly and legally processed.

"From a press release from the Swedish Nazi Party, late 1941, in response to the arrival of 90 per cent of Denmark's Jewish population on Sweden's shores, aboard Denmark's fishing fleet.

"Signed Robert Edgar, Lismore."

When Robbie wasn't being Robbie the junkie, he sounds like a bit of a ratbag. Back a couple of years violinist Richard Tognetti, director of the Australian Chamber Orchestra, spoke on ratbags and why we need them in society. "The ratbag is one of the essential bacteria in our culture . . . By breathing in ratbaggery, we become less likely to fall to the illness of moral hypocrisy. Ratbags have no moral agenda; they have a hyperactive bullshit detector; they cannot be entrusted with money, for if they are given money, they will use it on valueless things, such as adventures and storytelling; and the ratbag should confound, astonish, query and disrupt, rather than confirm and soothe."

I think of this reading Rosey's words about her brother. "So much knowledge, such a beautiful, perverse, sharp, contradictory mind. Such a placid nature. He was not demonstrative; he never yelled or lost his temper (except that one time when the Nolan's cow gorged on his vegie patch). His laughter was a chuckle, his rage was a scowl, and his retaliation was a roll of the eyes. And grief did not fall in tears but was breathed as a sigh. Except for that one time, two weeks ago when told that he had terminal liver cancer."

Robbie died on September 22 aged 55. I spoke to Rosey the day after she and her father Tom had seen his body for the last time. Grief threatened to shipwreck her. She spoke of the waste of her whip-smart brother and the care the doctors, nurses and other staff of the Lismore Base Hospital and community nurses who cared for him with non-judgmental respect and loving kindness.

Coming home late the other night, I turn the corner near South Bank and there's a young man near the train station, too drunk or off his tree on something to be a threat. He's thin, that dry, papery Yellow Pages-thin of the addicted. I watch him shuffle off through a dirt-filled empty block, his feet breathing dust in the moonrise.

Many families have a Robbie, someone who makes mistakes and doesn't get away with them.

They don't publish obituaries for junkies. Rosey, you're right. They – we – don't usually see past the word "junkie". It's like the moon blocking out the sun in an eclipse. Everything else they are and they have done in their lives is hidden by the dark side. So let's make the exception. Just because we got away with our mistakes, doesn't make us better than anyone. Because we all make mistakes and we are more than our mistakes.

AND ANOTHER THING

Noonan had this piece in her column the following week:

Last week's obituary for Robbie brought such a strong response from readers, who emailed, wrote and phoned, stopped me in cafes and in the street to say thanks to Rosey and her family for sharing his life. Which makes you think that in this crazy world, there are deep pockets of tolerance and gentleness and open-mindedness. "It made me believe a little more," wrote Ben, who spent a year in jail for something stupid when he was 19 and is now a fine upstanding citizen, putting his kids and two foster kids through uni.

Source: The Courier Mail