Sunday, January 27, 2008

Obama wins in South Carolina, by Anne Davies, in Columbia, South Carolina - The Sydney Morning Herald - 27th January 2008

Senator Barack Obama has stormed to his second win in the 2008 Democratic primaries, winning Saturday's poll in South Carolina by a big margin.

With the first early results and exits polls clearly in Senator Obama's favour, the campaign manager David Axelrod declared victory.

With three per cent counted, Senator Obama had won with 53 per cent of the vote, after receiving strong support from the African American community, which makes up nearly half of registered Democrats in the state.

"This was a very strong message. It points to the future and not the past; to unity not division," Mr Axelrod said..

Senator Hillary Clinton was projected to gain 32 per cent of the vote, while former Senator John Edwards came in third with 15 per cent.

The win for Senator Obama - his first in a broader secret ballot - puts him in serious contention to become the first black president and will give him renewed momentum going into Super Tuesday, when 22 states vote on February 5.

Without a win in South Carolina, he would have battled the perception that his only other win in the caucus in Iowa was a fluke, achieved by organising students, rather than a true reflection of his popularity.

But the increasingly bitter battle between Senator Obama and the Clintons, spearheaded by the former president, Bill Clinton, has taken its toll.

Senator Clinton saw her vote slump during the week as the campaign turned nasty and the Clinton camp ran negative ads accusing Obama of praising Ronald Reagan and of playing on his racial background as an African American to win votes.

The Obama camp countered that the Clintons were trying to paint them as the campaign that is backed by African americans – a strategy that could playout next week in big states.

Mr Axelrod said the result was a clear rejection of divisive politics.

"Plainly the efforts to divide failed – you just need to look at the numbers," he said

In several big states, such as California and New York, the Hispanic vote will be crucial to winning and by marginalising Senator Obama, the Clintons may have boosted their stocks with this community and with Caucasians in southern and mid-western states.

Mr Axelrod said the race would now come down to a race for delegates, which are rewarded in proportion to the vote. He predicted the nomination would not be decided until well after Super Tuesday.

Over half a million people voted in the Democratic primary in South Carolina, a record turnout. This bodes well for the Democrats in actual election in November. The Republican turnout in their primary last weekend was down on 2000.

Over half a million people voted in. This bodes well for the Democrats in the actual election in November. The Republican turnout in their primary last weekend was down on 2000.

About half the voters were black, according to exit poll interviews, and four out of five of them supported Obama.

Black women turned out in particularly large numbers. Obama nearly got a quarter of the white vote, which was higher than expected, while Clinton and Edwards split the rest.

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Politics

'You can't get more Aussie than Bondi', Jano Gibson - The Sydney Morning Herald - 26th January 2008

Australia's most famous beach, Bondi, has been added to the National Heritage List.

The beach had been recognised for its role in shaping Australia's beach culture, said the Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett.

The listing provides protection, with criminal sanctions, for any damage to the beach under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999.

It means that no action can be taken that is likely to make a "significant impact on the national heritage values" of the beach without the approval of Mr Garrett.

"You can't get more Aussie than Bondi," Mr Garrett said.

"This one and a half kilometres of sand and sea is the quintessential Australian beach, a symbol of Australia around the world."

Bondi Beach joins 75 other Australian sites recognised for their heritage and cultural values, including the Melbourne Cricket Ground, the Sydney Opera House and Port Arthur in Tasmania.

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Politics

Peter Garrett

Bondi Beach

Monday, January 21, 2008

California dreaming, by Glenn Milne - The Australian - 21st January 2008

LOS ANGELES: The great thing about visiting California is that it gives you a sense of where Australia is probably headed. In the context of the climate change debate, this assertion stands, only more so.

So to come here and see some of the political and economic hurdles that are emerging out of the market forces unleashed by global warming, and the political response to it, is to understand that while Kevin Rudd still basks in the warm afterglow of ratifying Kyoto, just a little way down the track substantial domestic challenges loom.

Remember, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is something of an environmental pin-up boy for Rudd. During the election campaign, Rudd repeatedly used Schwarzenegger's embrace of an 80 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions below 1990 levels by 2050 to justify his own approach to target-based policy.

The thrust of Rudd's argument was that if California, one of the biggest and most successful economies in the world, could adopt such an approach, why couldn't Australia?

That line got the Prime Minister through to election day. But to watch the energy debate first-hand here in Los Angeles is to recognise that it is precisely because California is the world's eighth biggest economy, with a population of 37 million, that it can adopt such ambitious targets.

Schwarzenegger's policies and those of his Queensland-raised environmental adviser Terry Tamminen were the subject of much discussion at an energy and climate change symposium, The Road to Renewables, held this week in LA as part of the Australian government-sponsored trade and investment promotion program, G'day USA.

The Road to Renewables policy menu was heavy and so were the players involved. Tamminen moderated a number of the panels. The symposium was sponsored by Chevron, FedEx, Geothermal, Holland & Knight, Macquarie Bank and Woodside Petroleum. The keynote speaker was the Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles, Nancy Sutley, who also heads the city's Energy and Environment Department. The idea behind the symposium was to put Australian companies in touch with some of the cutting-edge environmental technologies and thinking in the US. But what also emerged was a recognition of the rationale behind Schwarzenegger's environmental crash-or-crash-through crusade.

Schwarzenegger's thinking is crudely simple and effective. He believes that Californians want urgent action on the climate-change front and he feels compelled to respond to this democratic impulse.

The strategy is to set mandated targets and then for the Government to simply get out of the way.

In other words, Schwarzenegger is using the sheer mass of the Californian economy and, critically, its venture capital base to crash through any resistance on the climate change front.

In the process he's convinced he will drag George W. Bush and the rest of the US along with him.

The inevitable question that arises in the Australian context of proposed greenhouse cuts is this: do we have the mass, the capital, or the technological know-how to avoid the crash scenario? The American experience suggests Rudd's approach, after the Garnaut report, could face significant difficulties.

Take coal. In the US, more than 50 proposed coal-fired power stations in 20 states were cancelled or delayed last year because of concerns about climate change, construction costs and transportation problems.

Coal is used in 600 US power stations and produces more than half of the country's electricity. The industry has now been gripped by a crisis of confidence. Once again it is California that is setting the pace in rattling that confidence.

Sutley told the G'day USA renewables conference that two years ago the city announced it would not be renewing its long-term contract for coal power with the Intermountain Power Project in Utah.

Other southern Californian utilities immediately followed suit. While Labor's wall-to-wall governments in Australia talk the talk on climate change, the fact is there are right now more than 20 coal-fired power stations that are either in the pipeline or have been approved by state premiers.

In NSW, Morris Iemma has been trying to sugar-coat his proposed privatisation of the state's electricity industry by telling his Labor base in the Hunter Valley that their power jobs will be replaced by new ones made available through the construction of a coal-fired power station.

The signals out of the US are that these sorts of economic and investment certainties are gone as part of the post-Bali climate change dynamic.

Altered consumer behaviour by ordinary folk anxious to do their bit to combat global warming can also throw up some pesky anomalies.

In California, legislators are now forcing through new regulations because of the consumer switch from oil and gas-based heating systems to the renewables-friendly technology of what are known here as outdoor wood boilers. At least seven states and dozens of towns in the north and midwest have passed or are considering measures to ban, restrict or monitor these OWBs. It turns out emissions from these are much worse than anybody assumed.

There are reports of fights between neighbours over air quality and migrations to towns with boiler bans.

The quaintly named Hearth, Patio and Barbeque Association, an industry group, told USA Today that while wood may never burn as cleanly as natural gas or oil, it was an important renewable fuel that reduced dependence on fossil fuels.

No doubt we can look forward to many of these same dry-gully debates as climate change policy begins to have an effect in Australia.

California's lead, meanwhile, does present Rudd with one political opportunity: whatever interim 2020 emissions target the Australian Government sets after receipt of Garnaut report, it's bound to look conservative by Sacramento standards. Consider some of the statistics presented to the G'day USA symposium by Sutley. Under the Green LA climate change plan, the target for the city's emissions reductions is 35 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020. This 35per cent goal is the most ambitious of any large city in the US. It will exceed the target set by the Kyoto Protocol for 2012 (7 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020). Not only that, LA plans to get 35 per cent of its public utility from renewable sources by 2020.

And this is not pie-in-the-sky stuff. According to Sutley the city is on track to meet the 20 per cent renewables goal by 2010.

Committed and existing projects in the city represent almost a 13 per cent cut by 2010.

But once again Sutley's impressive stats sheet is a reminder of the vast horsepower of the Californian economy compared with Australia.

The state's venture capital base means there are a number of viable - and giant - renewable energy projects on foot.

They include a 125-megawatt concentrated solar plant in the high desert area, a 265MW geothermal power station in the Salton Sea area and four waste-to-energy plants totalling 100MW of power that will convert LA's municipal solid waste into power.

A case of garbage in, energy out.

Schwarzenegger believes clean technology, along with biotechnology, will be the next wave in California's economic growth. In a recent speech, he said: "Right now, in California's university labs, corporate research parks, even plain-looking offices in strip malls, something very, very exciting is happening.

"The nation's brightest scientists and the smartest venture capitalists are all racing to find the new technologies for alternative energy.

"Capitalism, interestingly enough long the alleged enemy of the environment, is today giving new life to the environmental movement.

"We have proven in California that we can protect both the environment and the economy."

Rudd will be hoping something very similar is happening in Australia. For the country's sake, it has to be.

Glenn Milne is in Los Angeles as a guest of the G'day USA program.

Media Man Australia Profiles

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Kevin Rudd

Politics

The Environment

Monday, January 07, 2008

Pro-whaling vid slams 'racist' Australia, by Reko Rennie - The Age - 7th January 2008

A Japanese pro-whaling video that denounces Australia as a racist country has received over a 100,000 hits on a video sharing website.

The 10-minute video on YouTube shows images of the cronulla riots, dead dingoes and shows various men killing kangaroos.

One part of the video also shows a child holding a baby kangaroo by the tail and then repeatedly bashing the baby kangaroo into the rear of a ute.

The video plays English and Japanese subtitles over images including anti-whaling protester and founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, Captain Paul Watson who is called a terrorist.

A Greenpeace spokesman said the video highlights the need for the Australian government to do more.

"Being anti whaling does not mean being anti-japanese and the controversial YouTube video is acting as a diversion from the real issue that Australians are concerned about - that minke whales and endangered fin whales are being killed in the name of fake science," Greenpeace Australia Pacific whales campaigner Rob Nicoll said.

"The Australian government needs to get its planes in the air and its ship, the Oceanic Viking at sea as soon as possible," he said.

Media Man Australia Profiles

Politics

Whales

Visit Down Under, ex-rocker minister says - The Fiji Times - 7th January 2008

AXED interim Minister for Labour and Industrial Relations Bernadette Rounds-Ganilau has been invited to visit Australia.

The invitation was made by her Australian counterpart, Peter Garrett, during the United Nations climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia.

Mrs Rounds-Ganilau had invited Mr Garrett, the pop star turned politician and Cabinet member in the Kevin Rudd Government, to Fiji and he reciprocated with an invitation for her to visit Australia.

Mrs Rounds-Ganilau said the former Midnight Oil frontman had been an advocate for the environment for many years and used to sing about the environment and make contentious comments about Australia's treatment of the environment as well as human rights abuses.

"It was very uncommon and unfashionable to do this going back 25 - 30 years, but he did it because he could see the way we were all going," she said.

"That's commitment and advocacy for you — so I have respect for him in that area," she said. "We talked about building bridges between our countries as we both felt that the environmental issue was very important to us all. Then at the end of the lunch I invited him to Fiji, and he responded by inviting us to Australia."

Mrs Rounds-Ganilau said spoke about looking forward to the future and where the two countries were going.

"Adaptation and mitigation measures were high on the agenda and he felt that adaptation had to be the way to go," she said. "In my statement at the plenary, I charged industrialised countries with the crime of climate change devastation demanded reparation financially and technically.

"The fact that Australia signed the Kyoto Protocol was a huge step forward for not only Australians but for the Pacific region as there can be commonalties in our stand against industrialised countries," she said.

Saturday, January 05, 2008

John Fitzgerald, by Rebecca Ovenden - The Gold Coast Bullentin - 5th January 2008

It's extremely rare for John Fitzgerald to feel unprepared or even out of his depth but last year he was both.

Fitzgerald who channels a large chunk of his property-derived fortune into educating teenage boys no longer welcome in mainstream schools had been invited to attend the Clinton Global Initiative, a mammoth event gathering 1200 of the world's most influential people in a bid to tackle the big issues associated with education, health, global warming and poverty.

Celebrity publicist Max Markson Clinton's representative in Australia invited the vibrant young Gold Coast businessman believing the valuable insights he had gained running his three Toogoolawa schools at Ormeau on the Coast and in NSW and Victoria would `offer a different take to the whole initiative'.

``Everyone who goes makes a pledge on what they're going to do in education, health, global warming or poverty,'' explains Fitzgerald. ``There were 57 heads of state, hundreds of billionaires, actors, Nobel Peace Prize winners, people like Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, Al Gore, the guys from Google and YouTube and ... they had breakout groups and I spent most of my time in education.

``The journey to get there was funny because (while in India) I read this piece in the Vedanta about there being `no progress without regression' and I thought when I do my pledge that's what I want to talk about but I was trying to think about how I could get that across.''

From India, he travelled to Africa for a bike ride to raise money for Tanzanian schools and while walking into a village one afternoon with a Maasai leader to buy food he saw a woman carrying half a goat.

``It's head and shoulders had been ripped off and he said `we have big problems with baboons here they just tear away at things' and I said `have you been able to control it?','' says Fitzgerald.

``He said `yeah' and told me baboons are really fearful animals and they're particularly fearful of snakes so one day they put a dead snake in a hessian bag, the baboon walks up, puts his hand in, pulls out the snake and then just faints on the spot.
``They got some spray paint, sprayed the baboon white and some time later it wakes up and immediately runs back to its tribe of baboons but the tribe sees this white thing coming towards them and they start running so for days and days he's chasing the tribe.

``I thought `that's what no progress without regression means' that it's great to make progress in your personal life or with your family or your business or even the world, but we've got to continually look at ourselves and ask the basic questions are we happy? Are we doing something that's good for all rather than just for us? And that was the story I was going to tell at the Clinton Global Initiative.

``I got there and why I felt out of my depth was because I just wasn't prepared. The education people were not so much high-powered academics, but they were very well researched and they knew the implications of education in all areas.

``People were getting up making pledges saying `we're going to set up 1000 schools in Africa' and `we're going to set up 500 schools in India' and we're going to do this, this and this and then the head of education said `John, are you going to make your pledge?' and I said `look, I'll be honest with you, I'll have to go home and think about it' and he said `haven't you got ANYTHING?' and I said `look, all I've got is a baboon story'.''

Fitzgerald, 43, who today heads Nerang-based JLF Corporation, a property investment and finance company which turns over about $280 million a year, is relaxing on an elegant cream lounge in a light-filled corner of his palatial riverfront home complete with clipped green hedges, trickling fountains, tennis court, pool, gilt-framed original art and the smooth curves of exquisite sculpture.

Sipping water in casual shorts and a T-shirt that reveal his perfectly chiselled biceps and calves, he describes his daily routine: up at 5.30am, an hour of exercise, shower, an hour of yoga and meditation, time with the kids before they go to school, breakfast, work (which might include time at Toogoolawa, meetings and site visits) home, another 45 minutes of exercise, dinner, book (usually an autobiography), bed by 9pm.
He is spiritual, disciplined and detached, a man who can instantly make you feel dishevelled, disorganised and directionless simply because he has that calm, knowing look of someone who has their life beautifully in order, a state that would remain unchanged even if all of this the big house, the shiny, expensive things that scream `serious money' were suddenly taken off him.

Could you live without all this? ``Yeah, easy,'' he shoots back.

In a box? ``Happily.''

In a box on a highway? ``Yep.''

Without air-conditioning? Fitzgerald laughs his beautiful laugh; the perfect white teeth and the crystal clear eyes are sparkling, the calmness and control fleetingly disappear as his smooth, tanned face bursts open like a sunflower.

``I'm one of those people who's self-competitive,'' he says. ``So I'll always work to better myself and the environment around me. You could put me anywhere and I would make something out it, out of anything. Put me in a desert and I'd work out a way to survive, or in the jungle and I'd survive and I'd enjoy the challenge of actually doing that.''

History dictates that what he is saying is true. At 17 he began working in Gold Coast real estate after hitchhiking from Melbourne in 1980 with nothing but a backpack slung over his shoulder, $200 in his pocket and a goal of becoming a millionaire by the age of 25 set like stone in his troubled mind.

Fitzgerald had `a true gift' for making money. By trial and error he developed a successful property investment formula and by 23 he had the million in the bank. At 26 he had enough money to retire and realising there was no purpose in `building wealth for wealth's sake' decided to commit some of his wealth to assisting homeless and `at risk' children.
Initially he provided residential care for them, but shifted the focus to education after realising a major stumbling block to them advancing in life was their inability to function in the mainstream education system.

Today Fitzgerald ploughs $800,000 a year of his own money into his three Toogoolawa (Aboriginal for `a place of the heart') schools and in truth, he had gone to the Clinton Global Initiative ready to pledge a fourth school next year, followed by a fifth the year after.

``That was the pledge. I just saw it as four, five. I just saw it as that and that. I thought if I can get that next year to $1 million and then to $1.2 million, that's efficient.''

But there he was, the lone Australian armed with his baboon story, surrounded by people pledging $50 million here and $10 billion there, people thinking `on a much grander scale' and suddenly he realised what he was doing was all wrong. At least, the scale of it was all wrong.

``I thought that if I had five schools I was doing my part, but I came back and realised it was not about me doing my part, it's about me pulling my weight and doing whatever I can, committing myself passionately to doing whatever I can to help these kids,'' says Fitzgerald who has a 14-year-old daughter and a son, 12.

``I came back and immersed myself in research on Australian schools and education and it became quite confronting because between 8 and 15 per cent of kids under the age of 15 just don't attend school on a regular basis that's 100,000 kids (excluding Aboriginal and Islander children) and about 35,000 of them are Queenslanders,'' says Fitzgerald.

``On top of that and even more alarming and connected are the number of violent assaults by 10 to 14-year-olds. There were 16,414 last year. There's one every 32 minutes. It's as much as adults, it honestly is. We've got a group of kids we're just leaving behind.

``I came back from America realising probably more than anything, that I'm in the position to ring the bell on this. We're at a good stage now because (Prime Minister Kevin) Rudd is passionate about his Education Revolution. So the letter I'm writing to him basically says `okay, love the Education Revolution but there's 10 per cent of our kids that we're leaving behind'. It's like bringing 90 per cent of our troops back from battle and leaving 10 per cent over there and there's nothing more un-Australian than that.

``I've named it the Silent Crisis. It's silent because no one seems to be recognising there's a decay of truancy, expulsion and suspension in these kids under 15, how it's related to violent crime, and how it's going to affect our society.

``Probably every classroom of every public school would have one or two kids on constant suspension or expulsion for destructive behaviour and I'm not blaming the public school system. What I'm saying is, it will only go so far.

``When I talk to politicians they say `look, our hands are tied because the unions won't let us take the kids who are destructive or potentially threatening' and parents at public schools have a right to protect their children from those sorts of kids and I understand that.

``What we need is another type of school. The Government needs to partner with groups such as mine because these kids need that sense of belonging and a different curriculum, an alternative curriculum.''

Fitzgerald believes he can lead the charge.

Why? Because over the past 10 years he and his team including eminent psychologists Ron and Su Farmer and the dedicated Toogoolawa teachers who have accepted massive pay cuts to work there have developed a blueprint that can be replicated to help these children. He can find the sites, he has developed the procedure manuals, he can train the teachers (he's already building a 300-seat auditorium at Nerang to do this), recognise the children who will benefit the most, get them back into mainstream school or a job and he has the profile and the money.

But to get the scale right, to make it more far-reaching, the Government needs to contribute.

``At the moment, for every dollar they put in, I'm putting in four or five dollars. If they match me dollar for dollar I could quadruple the number of schools I've got.''

John `put me anywhere and I'll make something out of it' Fitzgerald recognises these children have been left stranded in a desert, a debilitating place where the constant winds of anger, fear and violence have whipped their little minds to a pulp and the fervour in his voice suggests he will stop at nothing to ensure they survive.

It's 9am on a Monday morning and a group of Toogoolawa students file silently into a room in the school's main building, a quaint heritage-listed Queenslander sitting in the middle of a peaceful horse paddock, lush and green after recent rain.

Fitzgerald and several teachers join the boys in a semi-circle for a quiet, calming session involving meditation and a story focusing on one of the five human values of love, peace, truth, right conduct and non-violence central to the curriculum.

Later Fitzgerald reveals this quiet, peaceful environment is so foreign to the boys many of whom have been shunted between multiple foster homes (one boy is on his 38th home) it takes weeks to teach them just to sit still for 20 minutes.

Gently, softly, he leads them in meditation `okay, picture red, feel that red going through your whole system, now orange, a beautiful orange ... and yellow, as bright as the sun come into your mind ...' and the giggling and shuffling and fidgeting finally dies until the silence is broken only by the faint `click, click, click' of a student tapping his tongue stud on his front teeth.

With the boys relaxed `you guys did really, really well', smiles Fitzgerald, `well done, the phone rang and you still maintained your silence' Gerry, a former school principal who accepted a $25,000 pay cut to teach at the school, tells a story focusing on the value of `truth'.

It traces the life of a dyslexic Gold Coaster who managed to graduate from primary and secondary school and then, amazingly, from university, to work as a teacher without being able to read a word. Feeling defeated and consumed by fear for years, he turned his life around after he walked into a library in his 40s, burst into tears and said `I can't read'.

``I suppose this story shows us,'' says Fitzgerald, ``that when you feel defeated and are consumed with fear there is always something else for you.''

The boys are a motley crew whose outward appearance of young innocence the downy hair, the skinny ankles, the dimpled cheeks, the shy, downcast eyes, the little voice saying ` 'scuse me John, can I get a tissue? My nose is runny' defying the anger and confusion that stabs away at their minds.

One of them, a short, chubby boy with fluffy brown hair, had been expelled after attacking a teacher and had not been to school for 18 months before he rang Toogoolawa they have to want to come and must make the phone call themselves.

``No school would take him and it's understandable. It's our job to get him back into mainstream school. I'd like to say by next year, but it's probably going to be the year after.''

Toogoolawa, which has a long waiting list, takes between 12 and 20 students and works on a teacher-student ratio of one to four.

``We know the type of teacher we need has to have a spiritual connection that's so important,'' continues Fitzgerald.

``We need teachers who love and care for the kids and do it unconditionally because the kids will often vomit that anger, and vomit that fear and vomit that bile they have inside them and the teacher's got to look back and say: ``That's just a beautiful work in progress seeing Davey vomit and throw desks, tomorrow I'm going to sit down with him and say `Davey, we're making progress here', rather than, `you can't be at this school, or I'm scared of you'.''

He feels he can `connect with all of the kids' because he has experienced some of what they are going through and openly admits he could have ended up like them except that there was something ticking in the back of his head saying `there is more'.

Fitzgerald, the third child in a family of five (two older brothers and younger twin sisters) living in middle-class Moorabbin in Melbourne, was just eight when he went to say goodbye to his father who was getting ready to travel to his brother's farm near Shepparton.

They were out by the garage and John remembers telling his father that he wouldn't be coming home.

As his father drove away, he ran to his mother, gave her a big hug and told her the same thing: ``Dad isn't coming home.''

The following day his father was killed instantly when his car was sandwiched between two semi-trailers and driven off the road.

The only way his mother could cope alone with five children was to ship her three sons to the Christian Brothers at St Patrick's College, Ballarat.

In his book, We Can Be Heroes, Fitzgerald describes how he became angry, abusive and physical and on school holidays would `buy a bottle of green ginger wine (foul-tasting, but a cheap way to get drunk quickly) and go out partying, often coming home with lipstick, vomit or someone's else's blood on me. All three, and I'd count it a particularly good night!

``Mum tried lecturing me. She tried grounding me. On the odd occasion, as I put the key in the door at 3am or 4am (still only 15 years old), she even tried taking a swing at me. Nothing really worked.''

He was expelled from St Pat's for sneaking out (he did it 15 times before getting caught) to a nightclub and spent the rest of the year in a co-ed school akin to `locking a dog in the butcher shop' before St Pat's took him back to finish Year 12.

Says Fitzgerald: ``I say to the kids, you know, when I was 14, 15 I was angry and scared probably like you, but there was something ticking in the back of me that said `there is more, there is more'.

``I think I was angry and scared and insecure because after Dad died, being sent to boarding school, being sent away from home was the most frightening time.

``It was the days of the strap and I got the strap 60 out of the first 90 days I was there and I remember calculating that at this rate, over the next six years, I'm going to get the strap like 600 times! So what's going on?

``When you have fear, you have this deep insecurity and one way of dealing with it is anger because it's an expression that tells everyone `back off!' and it starts as a bit of a game but becomes something you get good at.

``It wasn't until I was 15 that I realised that anger wasn't a way to live your life and I expressed myself therefore with sport, yoga and meditation.

``It's a better way to deal with things internally and you realise that there's a pragmatic reason to even think, well, everything happens for a reason, and if everything happens for a reason and I've chosen it to happen, then this is potentially the beginning of my greatness as a human being and that's why at 16 after all the things that happened to me when I was eight, nine, 10 I left home and hitchhiked to Queensland.

``Now I wouldn't have done that had I not had all that behind me, had I been attached to living at home, had the security and comfort, so those six years were great preparation years. I wouldn't change a single thing. Even the fear.
``Education provides you with the options. You go into a (mainstream) classroom and say to kids, `what do you want to be' and the hands shoot up, `I want to be this! I want to be this! I want to be this!' and that's what education provides an opportunity for you to be something, to do something whereas kids who haven't got it, they won't see that opportunity.

``Ask them what they want to do and it's `oh, I want to survive until tomorrow, or I want to rob this or do that'. It's nothing about their future. It's about destructiveness. We just see that evolution from destructive behaviour to a constructive behaviour.''

Fitzgerald describes the case of John (not his real name) who was born to a heroin addict and after being taken from her when he was two, was shunted between seven foster homes where he was abused. He was expelled from 17 schools and when he arrived at Toogoolawa aged 11 and by then being cared for by his grandparents he had not been to school for three years.

``The kid was probably bordering on psychotic and probably for good reason so we said to the grandfather `look if you want John to stay with us you're going to have to be the safety net. He's going to muck up and we are going to send him home because he's going to have to realise there are immediate consequences'.

``We said `we need you to stay in the car when you bring him to school because if he mucks up you have to take him home'.''

The first day, John lasted an hour and home he went. Second day, one hour and 20 minutes. The next week he lasted two hours a day. Within three or four months he was doing full days at school, then he'd miss a day, then another full day. Within six months he was doing three consecutive days and within a year he was doing five consecutive days.

``He spent three years with us. He's a bright kid and we graduated him at the end of last year and he did Year 10 (in a mainstream school) and he's just finished Year 11 and we've got him some work experience at a courthouse. He wants to be a solicitor and that kid will probably make it. Great story and a great kid who I can honestly tell you, without Toogoolawa, would be in jail; absolutely in jail and in jail for a very violent crime.

``I'm not going to justify violence but he was violent for reasons that were possibly understandable because that's the only thing he'd known. He'd only known abuse and violence from the people who were supposed to care for him.''

Fitzgerald will open a fourth school his largest in Sydney next year and over the next three years will work on developing a joint venture with the Government.

Ultimately he sees himself devoting much more time to working in the schools.

``The business doesn't really interest me that much and it hasn't interested me for quite some time. I like it but I just don't have any huge business ambition. I've got thousands of clients who are on their way to building a lot of wealth (through his Custodian Wealth Builders Group) and I will see that through and it's really satisfying to see that clients who signed on to build wealth for themselves and now have 12, 15 homes are coming back and helping out with Toogoolawa,'' says Fitzgerald.

``I'd like to think in a perfect world, if I can show you how to make money and you do make money, a lot of money, that you'd put a little bit back. Some do, some don't and that's fine. It's fine either way.

``But there's one thing I won't do. I won't die with any money. I think the most disgraceful thing someone can do is to die wealthy.
``I'll die flat broke. I'll give it all away and therefore I'm just building the business to really fund Toogoolawa, to fund the schools, to open up the avenues so we can really make a dent in education.''