It’s one of my few appearances on The Drum, but it’s got to be some of my most prescient writing – when Julia Gillard appointed Bob Carr as foreign minister, it was hailed by most commentators as a masterstroke, but I was among the few honourable dissenters.

Labor is seen as being desperately in need of reinvention. But does Labor really understand this when the best candidate that can be found for Foreign Minister is a 64-year-old former state premier who most people in his state regard as such a failure that they just turfed the last of his hapless line of successors out of office by a record margin? If he couldn’t save NSW Labor, what does he bring to federal Labor?

You really do need to regenerate when you have to reach that far outside your elected talent pool to find someone to fill a cabinet position.

At the same time they’ve forgone the opportunity to inject new young talent. While 64 is no longer old, it is fair to say that Bob Carr is on the home stretch of his career and will be unlikely to be in parliament in 10 years time.

Should Tony Abbott win the next election there is a good chance he won’t even be in parliament in two years time once the position of Foreign Minister is no longer available.

He’s a stop gap solution.

Labor should have been looking for a more durable solution. Gillard could have filled the cabinet position with an existing minister, like Stephen Smith and filled the Senate spot with someone who could look ahead 20 years or more.

They had at least one option to do that in the form of Warren Mundine. He’s nine years younger than Carr and not only would be seen as fresh blood, but would shift the public perception of Labor back towards its working class roots, as well as reaching out to Aboriginal Australians.

It would have had idealism, utility and regeneration written all over it. And he is an impressive performer who could have balanced out the strident left-wing voice of fellow New South Welshman Senator Doug Cameron.

Carr confirms the disconnect between Labor and its heartland. He is one of the Labor politicians least likely to connect with the voters Labor needs to win. He’s a bookish nerd who might be able to finesse the press gallery but holds no appeal outside elite circles.

A new British report pings the British education system for indoctrinating students on questions of climate change and sustainability. In this, Australia is no better.

Climate Control: Brainwashing in schools lays out in detail instances not just of bias, but active coercion, at a number of levels from core curriculum down to the choices that teachers make in the classroom.

For instance, despite a British court deciding that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was propaganda and had to be appropriately labelled before use in the classroom, it is still being recommended in the curriculum materials, without any counter recommendation to movies, such as the Great Global Warming Swindle, which could provide an alternative perspective.

To those of us who believe that educations’s function is to teach thinking and knowledge, this is deeply disturbing, but hardly surprising.

The current Australian Curriculum is full of references to “sustainability”, which is a concept without any intelligible meaning in most of the contexts in which it is used, apart from in the very short-term.

I’ve had personal experience of how the system works through the daughters of a friend who studied geography in a Queensland school. Their teacher, Ms P, was not just a global warming warrior, but also imparted valuable information to them over the course of the years, such as that only the Greens care about education.

At one stage, in response to a perception imported from the classroom that rainfall had decreased in Australia I produced a Bureau of Meteorology graph demonstrating that rainfall had in fact increased. I was told they weren’t interested in the facts, they wanted to pass the subject.

The teachers I had at school, who were Socratic in approach, and never ever gave me a hint of who they might vote for, would have welcomed the intrusion into the classroom of an unruly fact and the discussion which would have ensued.

If this approach has survived in any discipline in school you would expect it to be in philosophy. Alas, you would be wrong. Modern philosophy classes consist not of discussions of Socrates, Plato, Descartes, Hegel, Mill even Wittgenstein or Marx and what it means to be good or the nature of human rights, but pop-cultural tours of issues like abortion guided by bit players like radical utilitarian, vegetarian and eugenicist, Peter Singer.

They still teach them the logical concepts that underpin philosophy, but without seeing them applied by anyone with any skill, leading to lowest common denominator thinking.

There is hope.

A spokesman for Michael Gove [UK Secretary of State for Education], has said that teachers who do not offer a balanced view on issues like climate change are breaking the law.

Would be nice to think it could be the same here – teachers actually legally required to be balanced – but even better if there were no need in the first place.

Wind farms blight the landscape where they are erected, but apart from that, I was unsure whether they posed any real environmental, as opposed to economic, threats.

That includes environmental threats to humans.

Yet there has been a sustained campaign against wind turbines on the basis that they represent a threat to human health. In Australia this has been led by the Waubra Foundation and the Australian Environmental Foundation.

On Line Opinion has been happy to facilitate the debate and we’ve published  a number of articles suggesting detrimental health effects from turbines, including this one last week.

I haven’t been convinced by those arguing there are health issues. The research evidence is scant (which the AEF admits), and it is not unknown for people who oppose something on sentimental grounds to suddenly develop an ailment to bolster their case.

So I was interested to read this article on Principia Scientifica, a website offering open peer review: “Wind Farms and Health” written by Alun Evans, Professor Emeritus at Belfast University.

The article contains a lot of interesting links, including one to an experiment where the health of people living within 1.4 kms of a windfarm was compared to those living further away.

A recent case-control study conducted around two wind farms in New England has shown [2] that subjects living within 1.4 km of an IWT had worse sleep, were sleepier during the day, and had poorer SF36 Mental Component Scores compared to those living further than 1.4 km away. The study demonstrated a strongly significant association between reported sleep disturbance and ill health in those residing close to industrial wind turbines.

The discussion and the proposed mechanism for linking sleep disturbance to wind farms was reasonable. I was particularly impressed that rather than campaigning against wind farms altogether, Professor Evans merely suggested that they be sited further away from the nearest human habitation.

Evans also produces evidence of bad behaviour by wind farm proponents:

The wind industry has at times acted in a way that is reminiscent of the tobacco industry in the past. Recently a Vestas Powerpoint presentation from 2004 has surfaced [26] demonstrating that Vestas knew a decade ago that safer buffers were required to protect neighbours from wind turbine noise. They knew their pre-construction noise models were inaccurate and that “we know that noise from wind turbines sometimes annoys people even if the noise is below noise limits.” Some of this is due to the methods they use to measure noise. Presenting mean amplitude data means that 50% of the peak noise is disguised. In 2011 the CEO of Vestas wrote [27] to the Danish Minister of Environment admitting that it was not technically possible to produce wind turbines which produced less noise. Simiarly, we are repeatedly told that modern turbines are quieter and produce less ILFN which in reality is the reverse of the case [28].

One can compare these allegations to allegations of bad behaviour by anti-wind farm campaigners like the Waubra Foundation, contained in this Background Briefing program.

I’m not sure where this debate will end up, but there are definitely issues to settle. And in this context it is ironic to see environmentalists being accused of using the tactics of tobacco companies.