Big news during the week that four State and Territory Governments joined forces to commission a review of the national system for measuring schooling standards across Australia, NAPLAN.
The four Governments – NSW, Victoria, Queensland and the ACT – welcomed the findings of the review which they said included efforts to ensure the nation’s schools continued to become better and better
The group of four even came up with a wise new system to replace NAPLAN, the name of which would be the wisely named the Australian National Standardised Assessment.
And, according to those in support of change, the proposed new system would go by its official name, or even better, its acronym.
That acronym is pronounced ANSA, vocal evidence if ever there was any that the rogue Governments expect their questions to be ANSA-ed!
Plants up!
To Western Australia now where the month-long 2020 Kings Park Festival is in full swing, featuring more than 25,000 wild flowers showing off the capital city, Perth’s, ‘Green Heart’.
And just to make sure everyone knows the festival is a goer despite the world of pandemic pandemonium, the PR promoters took it personally on themselves to be witty and wise and clever and creative by inventing an intelligent headline to head all lines.
Their reactive result?
“Wattle you be doing this September?”
Very clever – just ‘acacia’ we had something else planned!
Near enough
And while all this was going on, NSW police were busy clamping down on cattle rustlers in the southern region of their State launching a new operation to prevent livestock theft.
And if there is any suggestion the operation would not be performed with the ultimate of exactitude, the Police published plainly and publicly that their perfect preciseness would be prominent in pursuit of the perpetrators, pointing out there had been a total of 406 incidents of cattle theft in the region in the past three years.
“These figures include the theft of approximately 20,354 sheep and 864 cattle,” the police proclaimed proudly.
PS-sssst! is so impressed that the police precision identifies 20,354 sheep as the approximate number, presumably rejecting one higher 20,355 as too many and one lesser, 20,353 as too few.
Just another example of the many skills that make Australian policepersons much more creative than mere supermans.
As a bonus, the official police announcement of the operation was blessed with a headline that put mundanity out of its misery by declaring: “Police moooo-ve on livestock theft”.
Simply brilliant!
The free corner
To another fine giveaway from Rama Gaind now in which yet more lucky PS News readers stand to win yet more free goodies by answering yet another of Rama’s simplest of quiz questions.
This week’s prizes are three copies of Western Australian Suzzanne Laidlaw’s book of wisdom What’s Your Plan? in which she at sets out how to turn our lives around with heart, vision and purpose.
To secure a place among Rama’s winners, all we needed to do was name the month and year that was significant to Suzzanne and then have our correct entry among the first three to shoot out of the PS News Barrel of Booty and the book will be ours.
The answer was May 1988 and the winning readers are Kate D from the Federal Department of Education, Skills and Employment, Maree L from Victoria’s Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning and Christine C from the NSW Department of Communities and Justice.
Congratulations to all the winners and thanks to everyone who took part. The winners’ prizes will be on their way very soon.
For another chance to win simply try your luck on her current DVD Think Like A Dog at this PS News link and her book giveaway of Work Wellbeing: How to Lead Thriving Teams at this link.
Hitting links
And finally, It will be a rare reader unaware of the uniquely useful “PS News links’ that PS News pops up at the end of many news stories offering to connect an interested reader with the original sources of the stories so they can find out for themselves how accurate the PS News story or journalists are.
With a big number of PS News ‘Linkers’ taking the plunge each week and putting the PS News links to the test, PS -sssst! has delved into their popularity by seeking the help of our creatively mathematically webguru to scour the stats and report back on the top 5 links that have attracted the most readers since March.
Affectionately known as Dr Inconsequential, our webster reported the linky ranks as:
No. 1: The Australian Public Service (APS) draft Style Manual: 629 links completed;
No. 2: NSW offer of fee-free TAFE courses during the pandemic: 505 links;
No. 3: APS’s temporary mobility arrangements for returning to work: 460 links;
No. 4: Victoria directing the PS return to offices: 456 links; and
No. 5: APS Commission setting the scene for the return to offices: 405.
And finally, finally, before leaving this week’s PS-sssst! a warm welcome is in order to the 895 new subscribers who chose to sign up and join the PS News subscription family during August.
Each one of you will soon be joining the most informed, interested and involved group of dedicated public servants in the nation, and if you’re like thousands of others you’ll have the pleasure of maintaining your interest all the way through your public sector career until you leave or retire. And even then you might remain connected.
And it will be PS News’s privilege to make sure you do!
Till next week……
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