The Age from Melbourne, Victoria, Australia • Page 5

THE AGE, Wednesday 16 April 1980 -5 SCHOOL HIT BY $500,000 FIRE cliool Education office accused of job bias Rhodesia will quit Sydney out 0 From MICHELLE GRATTAN, chief political correspondent fljjlij i If more on way About 170,000 Victorian high school students will be affected today as teachers strike over the The State Education Department has been accused of discrimination in job interviews. In a report to Parliament released yesterday the Equal Opportunity Commissioner, Mrs Fay Maries, cited cases where women were asked about their domestic situation. The Labor MLA for Co-burg, Mr Gavin, said outside the House that he had heard of cases where an education department selection panel had questioned potential primary and secondary teachers about whether they used contraceptives and what type. Mr Gavin said this raised serious questions about invasion of civil liberties. He suggested the department was trying to discover if a married woman was a poor long-term employment prospect because of the possibility of her becoming pregnant.

Mrs Maries said the most common problem during job interviews involved the employers' own pre-concep-tions about the domestic roles likely to be performed by male and female candidates. She had also received complaints from women about the allocation of domestic chores in office jobs. PAGE 15: Workforce issues CANBERRA. The controversial Rhodesia Information Centre which Labor and Liberal governments failed to- shut will close on 31 May. The North Sydney centre's director, Mr Greg Aplin, said yesterday the new Salisbury Government had recalled him and the centre's other staff member.

The newly-independent Zimbabwe did not" plan to open a high commission in Australia for the time being because it had limited manpower and money, he said. Mr. Alpin who is an Australian citizen, said he expected to work for the new Government in Zimbabwe or abroad. The Rhodesia Information Centre remained open in defiance of the United Nations' sanctions against the former illegal Rhode-sian regime. The Whitlam Government tried to force the centre to close by attempting to cut off telephone and postal services.

But this was overruled by the High Court. The Fraser Government declared it would legislate to shut the centre but the legislation was never put through Parliament. Mr Aplin said the centre, which will become the "Zimbabwe Information Centre" on independence at midnight on Thursday, would continue operating until the end of May. It began in 196(5 after the Rhodesian 1965 unilateral declaration of independence. Mr Aplin said the centre woi in regular contact with Salisbury.

The Prime Minister. Mr Fraser, who left for the Salisbury independence celebrations yesterday, will promise the new Zimbabwe Government generous aid. Australia is expected to announce a two -year aid programme. Details of what forms the aid will take are to be decided after an Australian aid team has talks with the new Government. Mr Fraser said Zimbabwe had potentially "one of the best futures of all the countries in Africa" if the Prime Minister.

Mr Mugabe, successfully persuaded all the people of Zimbabwe to work together to build one nation. Mr Fraser said he believed Mr Mugabe wanted all the citizens of Zimbabwe to stay and help build the new State. Mr Fraser and his party, travelling in the VIP Boeing 707, spent last night in Mauritius. Mr Fraser will spend two nights in Salisbury and return to Australia at the weekend. Education Department's disciplinary action against high teachers at Seaford-Carrum and Warragul schools.

The striking teachers are likely to vote for another stoppage next Tuesday. lapsed," sending firemen scattering for cover. A meeting of the school's council ended only 10 minutes before the blaze started. Cause of the fire is being investigated. Children have been asked not to go back to school until were gutted.

The fire is thought to have started about 10.30 pm. A school spokesman said scientific equipment worth thousands of dollars had been lost. At the height of the fire the roof of the science wing col Firemen fight a blaze which last night did damage estimated at more than $500,000 to FawTcner Technical School. About -50 firemen and 15 units took almost an hour to bring the blaze under control. The science and arts wings SUPREME COURT WORKERS REBEL The secretary of the Victorian Secondary Teachers' Association, Mr Brian Conway, said last night the union would ask members to take pan in State-wide two-day or three-day strikes for the rest of this term.

And industrial action could spread throughout the Victorian school system. The VSTA plans to discuss the issue of limited tenure later today with the Victorian Teachers' Union, and the Technical Teachers' Association. Thirty-four VSTA members at Seaford-Carrum have been charged with failing to obey an instruction on visits by inspectors. Another 17 at Warragul face charges before the Teachers' Tribunal over class sizes. eace talks involving the union and the Minister for Education, Mr Hunt, yesterday ended in deadlock.

HVIr. Conway said the Minister was hrjding the charged teachers to ransom. "'Mr Hunt will only drop the charges I and the associated dismissal threats if the VSTA abandons, for the rest ofj the year, the right to take direct aqtion. j'No union could ever bow to this sort of blackmail and the VSTA will not," Mr Conway said. Mr Hunt said last night the union had asked the department to drop action at Seaford-Carrum, Warragul or under consideration elsewhere in return for a limited undertaking to seek to avoid strikes on working conditions.

impressive ieasing wmmm RMEfflOIOTIIJMffi ME MffiCMMEBI 280SEI Amnesty By DAVID WITHINGTON, chief law reporter The stonemasons have been chipping away at Melbourne's rambling 96-year-old Supreme Court building for years, leaving a patchwork of stone ranging in color from sand to filthy black. Like the painters on the Sydney Harbor Bridge, their job is never-ending. Inside the building, which is classified by the National Trust for its historical and architectural importance, is a labyrinth of passages, staircases and lobbies around a towering central dome. Justice is dispensed in awesome courtrooms with high, decorative ceilings and ornate woodwork. There is a maze of administrative offices on the ground floor and judges' chambers above.

In the middle is a magnificent library, classified by the National Trust for its national importance, and to be preserved at all costs. It has red carpet, oval stain glass windows high in the dome (with floodlighting to highlight them on formal occasions), a cantilevered circular balcony with cast iron balustrade, and oil paintings and busts of former Chief Justices and judges. Yesterday 15 members of the Victorian Public Service Association held their first stopwork meeting over conditions in the building and demanded speedy improvements. Complaints include: cracked, waterlogged ceilings which dump chunks of dangerously heavy plaster into storage vaults where court files are kept; a gas leak in the main storage vault near the registry; overcrowded offices, poor lighting and a generally dirty and unpleasant environment; no female staff toilet and a male toilet with no hot water; inefficient heating and cooling; exposed electrical wiring, and no staff or lunch room. The assistant secretary of the VPSA, Mr.

Monty Burgess, told yesterday's meeting that conditions in most sections of the Public Service were adequate to good, but the Supreme Court was "one of the few bastions of the old The meeting resolved to put work bans on the storage vaults if the gas leak and dangerous ceilings were not fixed. This action would cut off access to court files. During a tour of the building, the story was told of one staff member who refused to venture down into the old ceils, a trip someone had to make several times a week ro fetch pre-1966 files. The last time he went down there, he claimed, he removed a file from a shelf and found himself eyeball-to-eyeball with a large rat. He said the proposal provided no guarantee of peace on other issues, or for any realistic period.

Mr Hunt said the Government believed a request for a general amnesty should be-backed by a moratorium on strikes. He had offered the VSTA an agreement that there should be a two-way arrangement to avoid confrontation and any differences should be submitted to arbitration. "It is tragic that the union had rejected this approach which would have avoided detriment to the children," Mr Hunt said. The VSTA is confident all its 10,000 members would take part in today's strike. It also believed a high proportion of the 5000 other teachers would go out.

Mr Conway said a meeting in the Dallas Brooks Hall at 10.30 am would be asked to support another strike on Tuesday. He said the issue of limited tenure which could result in joint action by the State's three teacher unions had flared again with a report that the department planned to employ a teacher on limited tenure at Westmeadows High School. "This deed and its careful timing indicate how set Mr Hunt is on a course of confrontation," Mr Conway said. "As recently as 12 March he gave the VSTA his undertaking that there would be no limited tenure appointments in a secondary school without further communications with the union." The dispute over Thomastown High School teachers failing to teach a timetable assigned to them was settled yesterday when withheld pay was given to them. safety features The 280SEL reveals itself as a superbly equipped long wheelbase over twice as many luxury saloon with all thesuperb handling perform ance you expect of Mercedes-Benz as the law requires but no less than Mercedes-Benz engineers Test -tube guidelines consider necessary to 'S' class.

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There is no limit to the value of the car that may be-leased for business use and lease payments are tax deductible. For full details contact your Authorized That performance, for example, is achieved by a highly fuel-efficient six cylinder engine with advanced twin-overhead-camshaft design and mechanical fuel injection. Unlike other luxury cars these features endow it with a fuel efficiency which renders itsowner relatively immune to recurrent petrol crises and -escalating costs. The elegant body is a product of wind tunnel research and integrates 120 separate 'Electric sunroof shown is optional. One of the pioneers of the test-tube pregnancy technique in Australia last night called for public debate on the ethics of the treatment.

Professor Carl Wood -said the community, had to lay down guidelines for future research in the ffeld. He said technological advances in fertilisation would not only have the potential to help people, but also to produce changes in society. "It is important that the medical community and society In general are aware of these changesrand that the ethics are properly considered," he said. "A human embryo is not the same as a person but must be considered important in its own "Guidelines for scientific work in this, area need to be delineated by the society consistent with th6 cultural, religious and ethical standards of the community," Professor Wood said. He said he did not agree with criticism of test-tube pregnancies by an American doctor which was published in the 'New Scientist' journal last year, but the community should note it.

The Harvard University doctor said researchers did not know what they were doing, the offspring of in vitro fertilisation did not give consent to the procedure, the workj was meddlesome, and the money wo'uld be better spent on contraception. Distributor or Dealer today. Professor Wood was delivering the annual Tracy-Maund lecture at the Royal Women's Hospital. He said the eventual success rate for test tube pregnancies may be no higher than 25 per cent. Last year two pregnancies resulted from the 101 women treated at the Royal Women's Hospital and the Queen Victoria Medical Centre.

Both pregnancies occurred at the end of the year at the Women's Hospital where a total of 12 embryo transfers were carried out. Professor Wood said that if the success rate was expressed in terms of the number of embryos transferred at the one hospital, it was 16 per cent. But if it was expressed as a percentage of all the women treated, it was only two per cent. "It is uncertain what the final cess rate for in vitro fertilisation and embrvo trance1- will be." he said. "But in view of the frequency of abnormal oocytes (primitive egg-cells) and failed fertilisations in the natural system, and technical difficulties in the procedure, it may not exceed 25 per cent.

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