Student Work

Year 8 Food

During this time in remote learning I am so excited to see some of the Year 8 Food Studies students cooking at home. Each week we have attached the recipe they would have made in class and suggested they could make it at home for their family. 

Please see a sample of some products the students have produced. They are fantastic.

- Ms Julie Read

Year 10 Legal Studies -  Challenging a silly law

I’m transporting 51kg of potatoes in WA, and that’s illegal. 

- Kaitlyn Musumeci, year 10 legal studies. 

Yes, you read that correctly, in Western Australia, it is illegal to transport more than 50kg of potatoes.

It is unclear as to why this law is, or was a law, but it is indeed a law, and if you are caught transporting more than 50kg of potatoes, then you will be looking at a fine of anywhere from $2,000 to $5,000. Fortunately, you won’t be facing a prison sentence for carrying more than 50kg of potatoes. If you are planning some sort of potato party with some friends in WA, make sure you distribute the potatoes so nobody gets fined for disobeying the law. 

Why should this law be removed completely? Well, because it is quite a silly law, and looking at this from a legal perspective, completely useless. This law is dumb because potatoes are not exactly dangerous, so there should be no reason for a person to be legally incapable of carrying 51kg of potatoes. 

Nobody wants to pay a fine for carrying potatoes. As I mentioned at the start of this article, the origin to this law is unclear, so, if there is no reason for this law to exist, it should not exist in the first place. While this is not a law that impacts a lot of people’s everyday lives, it is a law that should be looked into. Either a reason needs to be made to justify the law, or it needs to be removed completely, and as there is no way that a law such as not being allowed to transport more than 50kg of potatoes, it should be removed, as it is deemed unnecessary. 

This law does impact Western Australia’s farmers with potato fields, though, as they can only transport 50kg of potatoes at once, so they would have to either hire more vehicles to transport more potatoes, or they would have to keep making trips to the store and back to their farm. 

Farmers hiring more trucks would also, while impacting the farmer’s money (as the farmers would have to hire the drivers and/or the trucks as well as pay to run their farms), hiring trucks would also impact greenhouse gasses, which come out of vehicles (as carbon dioxide) and impact the ozone layer, damaging it, which means that Western Australia and/or the rest of Australia would be left vulnerable to UV radiation, which is, while unseen and unable to be felt, quite dangerous and changes the chemical structure of molecules.