“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen” (Orwell, 1949). The opening lines of 1984 have passed into the collective consciousness, gathering the familiarity that is reserved for great works of literature. The ‘Ministry of Truth’ was Winston Smith's employer and the name is now applied by journalists to the Victorian Government's media unit.

Much science fiction has been treated with condescension and the label of approval, ‘literature’, has been applied sparingly, if at all. I have enjoyed the genre since reading The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells. The terror and adventure of the story of the invasion by Martians held me enthralled, but the real thrill for me as a schoolboy was that much of the early action took place where I lived.

Thank you for the invitation to address a session of your Conference on the topic “Future Trends in Education”. I am not sure of the basis of my expertise to address such a topic. It is a topic normally reserved for the gurus of academia and of educational bureaucracies. Perhaps, however, the invitation is in relation to the role of the College with which I am associated in being at the “leading edge” of developments in post-compulsory education in Australia.

Perhaps before I say anything, I should direct attention to my belief in the capacity of people to respond to need. Yesterday, I sat with two of our teachers who had taken themselves off to help the centre develop their “detention activities” into credit courses associated with courses at our College and then provide completion experiences on Saturdays and at the end of children's sentences. There is hope.

In the first month of life, prematurity and congenital anomalies account for the majority of deaths to children. Between one month and one year of age, the still unexplained Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) or cot death remains very much an unsolved problem causing untold distress and grief to parents.

If, however, we consider the childhood commencing at one month of age and carrying through until the completion of at least primary school and possibly secondary schooling, then accidents cause over a quarter of the deaths and, in considering those deaths in the first five years of life, drowning constitutes the number one cause. If we are looking at a spectrum from birth to fifteen years, deaths from motor vehicle accidents, whether as a passenger, pedestrian or bicyclist, are responsible for 50% of the deaths. Drowning features second on the list whilst such things as burns, poisoning, electrocution and suffocation now constitute a very small percentage of the deaths in childhood.

Lifeline Brisbane has a team of professional family therapists who provide family therapy services from 3.30p.m. to 10 p.m. on four nights each week. The team consists of a full-time coordiantor (40 hours per week) plus five part time therapists, who between them work 48 hours per week.

The Unit uses a systems approach which assumes that the behaviours of individual members of a system are the invevitable response to the behaviours of the other members of the system. Hence, for example, a child's stealing behaviour, is seen as inevitable when the child is viewed not in isolation, but in the context of the system within which the child exists.

Many people believe that top sportsmen earn far greater sums than they deserve. It is certain that there is much envy in this. Why should someone be paid millions of dollars for doing something he enjoys?

The justification, to me, lies not so much in the proper appreciation of genius or talent, but in the recognition that sportsmen have the highest responsibility to young people.