Gillard goes back to school
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What excitement there was this morning when Julia Gillard called a press conference. Climate policy, maybe? An election announcement even? We were rather crestfallen to find out it was about school uniforms. It was the sort of announcement that would in normal circumstances be made by Gillard’s replacement as Education Minister, Simon Crean, or Jenny Macklin, who presides over the welfare system. But there was the prime minister announcing the education rebate available to recipients of Family Tax Benefit A would be extended to cover half the cost of school uniforms. But if you unpack this otherwise-anodyne piece of pre-election bribery, you’ll discover some key election issues. The recipients of this handout, Family Tax Benefit A recipients, are a key constituency for Labor. My colleague Possum has explained this in detail previously, in the context of Labor’s introduction of a $150,000 threshold for means-testing Family Tax Benefits A and B and the private health insurance rebate. Essential Research’s raw numbers suggest low and middle-income earners swung away from Labor in big numbers in May (raw numbers are prone to volatility, so it’s best not to make too much of them, unless there’s a clear trend). While a lot of us were focused on the switch of progressive voters to the Greens, voters earning between $31,200 and $83,200 appeared to shift to the Coalition, occasionally in sufficient numbers that the Coalition was actually outpolling Labor, which was previously very strong with those voters. They shifted to the Greens as well, but not as consistently as they shifted to the Coalition. Their subsequent return to the Labor column has partly driven the recovery in the Labor vote in June and July, so that it now once again has a primary vote lead. Today’s announcement is prime pork-barrelling aimed at keeping these voters with Labor — although it’s testament to how comprehensively middle-class welfare is entrenched in Australia that the government had to conjure a ‘school uniform allowance’ as the rationale for it. But the government is also keenly aware of cost-of-living issues for low and middle-income earners. Like ‘mortgage stress’, so-called ‘cost of living’ pressures are mainly self-inflicted and reflect household consumption and lifestyle choices. But voters don’t want to be told that. They want to be told governments will subsidise their high-consumption lifestyles and efforts to keep up with their neighbours. Labor adeptly exploited this at the last election, painting the Howard government as out-of-touch with the cost-of-living pressures and offering a suite of vague commitments to address them. Now in the aftermath of the GFC, low and middle-income households are again seeing rising costs, particularly mortgage costs. It’s an issue Labor in government now has to make more than positive noises on, though it can never be seen to declare the battle won — that’s why this financial year’s tax cuts were portrayed as a small contribution to offset against rising costs, and why Gillard was stressing today’s announcement as similarly limited, but helpful. It’s also why Gillard last week announced the child care rebate would be paid fortnightly, “making it easier to manage the out-of-pocket cost of child care”. A similar nuance informs Labor efforts to make sure voters understand just what an important role the government played in propping up the economy through the GFC — without striking any kind of triumphalist tone. Telling a middle-income family that Labor saved the economy is likely to be met with the response that if things are so great why are interest rates high and petrol so expensive, even if the counter-factual is that both income earners might have been out of a job. Thus the line, near the top of today’s announcement: “Not everyone is seeing the benefits of a strong economy.” Expect to hear more of that. But linking the handout to school uniforms also enabled Gillard to discuss her favourite topic of education and yet again engage in what is clearly a key strategy of emphasising how in-touch she is with Australian values. Gillard likes school uniforms, thinks they help kids — and ‘kids’ is the operative word in today’s announcement, not ‘child’ — learn how to present themselves properly, thinks they stop kids engaging in expensive attempts to out-do each other. Gillard seems almost obsessed at this point with reflecting mainstream values back at the community. It started right from the beginning of her first media conference as prime minister, where she spoke of people “who set their alarms early” and has continued right through to yesterday’s ‘Moving Forward’ speech in Adelaide, which was an extended homily on the fairly conservative values Gillard claims to have acquired from her parents. But there was another reason, a more practical one, why Gillard made today’s announcement. For all the constant allegations of spin, the Rudd government communicated poorly. One pollster told Crikey that he was surprised to discover in focus groups that ordinary voters had virtually no idea that the government had suspended the processing of Sri Lankan and Afghan asylum seekers. That was a key announcement in Labor’s attempt to toughen its image up on the issue, and one that had cost it votes among more progressive-minded, politically-informed voters — and one that had been communicated so poorly that average punters weren’t even aware of it. Today’s piece of pork-barrelling — at a cost of $220 million over four years, according to the government’s estimates — was too important to be put at risk of slipping through the news cycle cracks. Thus the prime minister herself launched it. |
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Historically Hung Over: The Crikey Guide To The 2010 Federal Election
92 Comments
Oh, its going to be a long second half of the year with a looming Federal election and a state election (Vic) in November. The pork barrels are everywhere!!!! Is this the return of the ‘working families’ mantra? If it is, does anyone mind if those of us who do not fit this convenient slogan tune out till its all over?
Oh, and I totally agree with your comment Bernard that cost of living pressures and mostly self-inflicted and are a product of the ‘keeping up with the Jones’ syndrome that is so boring.
If I need to buy a house, and have to borrow seven times my income (because that’s how much an average house costs in Australia nowadays), how can that be ‘self-inflicted’? The buyer simply has to pay the market rate. Bernard, you’re sounding increasingly unhinged of late.
Troy, its not so much that - buying a house is tough. But its all the other stuff people feel they need to have to go along with the house - brand new furniture and whitegoods, the ridiculous 4x4 etc etc. I understand what Bernard is getting at (I don’t always, but this time I do!!!!).
Troy C, do you need to buy a house? You need shelter, but there are other options beside an unaffordable mortgage. No one inflicts an unaffordable mortgage on you except you.
WEll gee, why the hell would anyone know that “processing” Sri Lankans and Afghans have any effect on anyone and why would they care? Of course the three stooges who got up and said it looked so embarrassed they should hang their heads in shame.
I wonder though if even Crikey bothers to find out what this “processing” means.
It is nothing more than an interview where asylum seekers ask for protection, are allowed to apply for a protection visa if they have a prima facie case, are interviewed again and granted protection if they have a well founded fear of persecution.
Most countries do this work in a week, we decide we need 90 days but that is only so we can try and find more interesting ways to say nyet.
There is not some grand procedure that happens, chest xrays and health checks take 30 minutes and that is all she wrote.
Susie, With the high cost of housing as a starting point, one has to borrow more. That means your interest payments are higher. Because the mortgage is the first thing you have to pay, it leaves less money for everything else - utilities, fuel, groceries. Everything. They used to say Canberra is its own spaceship, and Mr. Keane is doing his best to prove it.
Jason: No, I don’t need to buy a house. But then, what do we need apart from oxygen, shelter, food and water?
Bernard sounds like far too many left-wing whingers in Canberra, dispensing advice on situations he seems to know little about.
Perhaps he might try moving back into the Sydney housing market, with several kids in school or daycare while both he and his partner both work to meet the bills.
@ Jason Wilson, obviously you haven’t tried to rent a house or unit in Sydney lately. The rental costs are up there with the costs of servicing the mortgage. Thank NSW Labour’s social engineers in charge of planning who have spent years limiting supply to meet demand, trying to force people into high and medium density houseing either through rezoning or refusing to provide basic services such as adequate transport to the north and southwest of the Sydney metropolitan area. All in the name of trying to force people into their pre-conceived notions of how Sydney will look.
Maybe if they opened up the vast swathes of land currently not planned for release for the next 2 decades, people could buy houses and land at reasonable prices, rather than being forced to pay stupid rents or mortgage themselves to the hilt for an exceptionally average dwelling on Sydney’s fringes.
Troy, Michael, others…
The objective facts spell it out clearly. The number of people per household keeps decreasing, and the total dwelling area per person keeps increasing, even in the Sydney housing market.
This means compared to the past there are less people living in larger dwellings, even given the much increased population. This contrary to your claims of being forced into smaller and smaller dwellings.
This is not because of ‘NSW Labour’s social engineers’ this is because of societal choice. This choice will bring a higher cost.
As a whole we are continue to choose to pay this cost, therefore in order to do what everyone else is doing, it is expensive.
Dispite the illusions which you refuse to see through, there is actually a personal choice available to not spend so much of your income on your dwelling (be in via mortgage or rent). You can live in a smaller place, in extended family or community groups, as was more common in the past.
As a whole we are choosing to live with greater privacy, which is fine, as long as we acknowledge it comes at a greater cost.
If your mortgage or rent is too high, move to a cheper, smaller place and share with friends and/or family. If you choose not to do so and genuinely cannot pay other bills because of your mortgage or rent, stop blaming everyone else for your choices.
I’m saying this from the perspective of a decade renting and a few months mortgaging in Sydney, on a low to approaching middle income. The options are always there get by, you just have to weigh up whether you want spare cash or a nice place. Such choices aren’t dire, it’s called Life.
Bogdanovist: Australian houses presently cost about 7 times income. They are currently in a bubble. This is much higher relative to other advanced countries (typically 3 to 4 times income). You’ve not commented on population increase - which taken with the lack of new supply coming on stream - is a major driver of the recent increases. This situation should be addressed by reducing immigration.
@TroyC, so live in an apartment. Which will cost about 3 x your annual salary. Or less, if you don’t choose to live in inner suburbs. Oh, and it’s time you lost this massive chip on the shoulder about ppl that live in Canberra.
Troy, will a McMansion really solve your problems? 7 times annual salary is a huge amount of money to commit to only one of life’s necessities and is quite likely to lock you into a debt-filled, no-holiday lifestyle in featureless suburbia for the next 25 years.
Meski and Bogdanovist have pointed out the options, but your starting pint appears to be an assumption that, as a basic right, you and your family are entitled to a million dollar home. Is that how you grew up, or have you decided that your needs are greater than those of the family of your childhood? Of your grandparents? Were their health and happiness crippled through living in a 20th century house rather than a 21st century McMansion?
There are accommodation choices, but the first step towards considering them positively is realisation of just how little your domestic shelter actually defines the things that matter about you and yours. You do not have to go the whole hog and become a green tree-changer, but at least consider the available what else can be achieved by that last couple of hundred thousand dollars and a smaller, less-desirable form of shelter.
@Troy, Meski has already pointed out what I also noted already, if house prices are too high for you, make the choice to live in an apartment. If the nice big ones in the suburb you’d like to live in are too expensive, get a smaller one in a less expensive suburb. It that choice is available, and you don’t take it, don’t complain to everyone else that your housing cost that you chose to incur is too high.
Contrary to your claim, I most definately commented on population increase and noted that the living space per person is increasing even though population is as well. This is at least as strong a driver of prices as immigration.
Not withstanding the increase in *the price we choose to pay*, the affordability of a dwelling that 30 years ago would have been considered perfectly adequate is still reasonable. Many people choose to live in much better places than this, and it shouldn’t be unexpected that this will come with a higher price.
If you think house prices are in a bubble, you’d be mad to buy at this time right? And if you did buy when you thought prices were too high, you wouldn’t turn round and then blame someone else for having to pay so much, right?
House prices are simply driven by how much people are willing and able to pay. If prices are high this shows people are willing and able to pay these prices. If we cut immigration and/or opened up more land prices would still be high because fundamentally people have that much money free spend on housing. Because of our desire to live in big dwelling with few people, we’d soon fill up the newly opened land even without any new Australians arriving. We would still pay the same, we’d just get a bigger house and land for the price, and we’d still all whinge that it’s everyone else’s fault that we paid so much.
Yes, you lot, I know I can go slumming and find accommodation at a lower price. I can also give up any number of things in life. My phone, my hot water, my fridge - all can be sacrificed to save money. That is not the point. I maintain that Australian houses are expensive relative to other developed countries (7 times here, versus 3 - 4 times elsewhere) and therefore cost-of-living pressures are exacerbated in Australia. Why? It is the product of high immigration levels prior to the necessary infrastructure being put in place. So yes, it is self-inflicted - by our government.
Slumming, no. You can find good apartments at far less than the figures you’re quoting. In good areas. And yes, they have hot water, and I don’t think it’s ever run out (try saying that in a house)
As far as your notional high house prices being caused by demand caused by immigration, seems to me I saw a pass-in figure of around 50% being quoted recently. That doesn’t sound like high demand.
We seem to have slightly gone off topic here, but Troy, I do agree with you on one thing - the price of houses is expensive here compared to other countries, although I will admit to having no idea why this is so.
At least, if you have kids, their school uniforms will be subsidised!!!!! (said with a smile….)
No Troy, you miss the point. It is basic economics. We wouldn’t be paying those high prices unless we could afford it. If we really couldn’t afford it everyone would default, flood the market with cheap fire-sales and prices would come back to Earth.
If more houses came available, or less people entered the market (i.e. from less immigration) the current crop of prospective home owners would still have the same cash available to bid each other up with and hence end up paying the same, they’d just have bigger houses to show for it.
When people are buying a house, generally speaking the process goes “I can afford this much, what can I buy for it?”, rather than “I want to buy that place, what does it cost?”. There is always a better place available for just that bit extra, so most people end up stretched to whatever financial limit they imposed on themselves.
You can whine till your blue in the face about how unfair you think a certain house price to income ratio is, but you miss the point that this is determined by the level of disposable income, not by the availability of houses. What you get for that price is determined by the market, but the average house price is dictated by simply what people are prepared to pay for their mortgage, which is dictated by their disposal income and spending priorities.
This means that Australians, compared to people in those other countries, have more disposable income and/or value spending money on a house more than other things. This says that we’re generally pretty wealthy by world standards, and that we want to live in big houses. That says a bit about our governance and a bit about our culture but it has little do with whether or not we have high immigration levels.
Wanted to take issue with this sentence…
it’s testament to how comprehensively middle-class welfare is entrenched in Australia that the government had to conjure a ‘school uniform allowance’ as the rationale for it.
I’m actually strongly in favour of middle class welfare because it provides a secure safety net for those not in the middle class. It’s too popular to remove so it provides ongoing support for the less well off and doesn’t get squeezed by politicians responding to the electorate’s downwards envy (be it real or perceived).
Troyc , well just wait till % rates go back to normal rates and the dip in the market will speed up into a rollercoaster or move to the USA and grab a cheap big home.
Well John, I have to take issue with your comment, if you don’t mind. If the school uniform rebate is means tested (which I think it is) then at least its not going to the super rich, but seriously, if you have children you know that its going to cost you - simple fact of life. I would prefer, however, to see people on welfare and lower incomes being assisted more than the middle class, who, generally speaking, seem to be doing quite well really (and yes, I do consider myself middle class….). I think too often, governments have become focused on helping the great middle class and left out many other needy people, such as pensioners, the disabled, etc etc.
Troy
You sound like you want to park your population/immigration view on whatever is handy. House prices , in my opinion , took off on a permanent increase after the introduction of the GST. With the bungled introduction housing construction fell to parlous levels and the government introduced the first home buyers scheme even to million dollar homes. Instead of the rise and fall of previous years we have had houses 30% to 40% overpriced on the market. Howard used to say he increased peoples asset value but neglected to add that it of little value unless downgrade to a cheaper home when you sell. The Macmansion thing has got me baffled. Why pay so much for an ugly, by any standards, large house and no yard for kids to play or have a barbecue ?
Shouldn’t school uniforms be optional? Neat casual should do.
The Gillard government can shove their school uniforms where the sun don’t shine. Petty, pathetic distractions.
Just give us a carbon price.
Only the rich private schools adhere strictly to uniforms anyway.
TROY C: Is quite correct about the cost of Oz housing. Anyone who goes to their doctor/dentist and flips through a women’s magazine would find stories about celebs who paid three million $US for an ultra luxury house+garden+swimming pool+tennis court+servant’s quarters+garages for five cars+9 hole golf course.
This same set up in Toorak, Melb would cost a minimum $AUS 15-20 million.
Never-the-less Troy, many Australians haven’t the faintest idea of how to save money on the most obvious of things. Either, that or they are terminally greedy.
The typical young couple must have a cooling unit, new sitting room chairs, new dining table, new beds, new table for the living room, new carpets, new room furnishings for the baby that’s due in two months time, cutlery, couple of prints on the wall, and so it goes on.
During my pleasurable hunting through auction houses and Op shops, I don’t think I have ever seen a young couple. There’s all the things in the world to be had in these places. Fridges, heaters, TVs, the lot. Why can’t the newly partnered go to them? Yes, actually buy second hand furniture. Shock horror!
Why can’t they buy Persian rugs third hand? They’re cheap as chips. Far more so than wall-to-wall carpeting.
I have a desk lamp that looks perfectly all right. I got it at Joels about fifteen years ago for $5.00, and it hasn’t missed a beat.
WTF would anyone WANT to live in a tomorrow’s slum in a McMansion. Mind-bendingly tasteless, remote, no public infrastructure, no schools, no really fresh food, no coffee shops nada. Hell on earth for the person bringing up the kids. No one to talk to, nothing.
I’m sorry, but if housing is as expensive as it is, fit it out with second hand furniture. You sound like a ‘give it to me now Aust’. ‘I want it now, and second hand is tackee’ Australian. The sort of Australian who thinks it’s cute to live in a cardboard McMansion.
“Only the rich private schools adhere strictly to uniforms anyway.”
Not true, the public school I attended required you to wear a uniform top.
It is rather depressing to read here that so many do not understand why housing costs are so high in Australia. And Troy it is not so much the government to blame but ourselves because anytime they attempt, or even hint at, changing law to counter the trend, we threaten to burn them alive. We have so relaxed bank borrowing that you need very little deposit and can borrow a large multiple of your earning capacity. We removed CGT from second homes (perhaps the dumbest thing of all but again, when Keating tried removing this idiocy he was crucified, and retreated; Howard & Costello made it worse). On top of all that is the ultimate in middle-class welfare, negative gearing on rental income on second, third etc homes. The outcome of this absurd set of laws was entirely predictable, but voters are vicious greedy swine, and governments have short terms in office and very short-term horizons. Voila.
In France, when I lived there you could only borrow 70% and there was (still is) a sliding scale of CGT that strongly discourages property churn (reducing to zero at about 15 years), even on your principle private residence. This is why even Paris looks affordable — and I mean true Paris “intramuros”, inside the peripherique, even cheaper in the banlieu. I lived in a 17.5 m2 5th floor walkup for quite a few years and loved it. Now, I am not saying I would have lived my whole life in such a place but Troy, get a grip.
Renting has always been a cheaper option. The average return for an owner of a house is at best 3 or 4%. He has to pay rates and maintenance and taxation on rental return. The negative is the 6 month lease for the renters.
Home owners rely on increased value , when that stops there will be a dearth of mortgage failures and renting will make even more sense.
Why can’t the young live on Home Brand no frills sardines and dated loaves of bread while saving for a deposit. We did and sat on paint drums while listening to Carole King’s ‘“Tapestry” and had three kids in between the fondu of meat, chocolate and camping at bendalong.
As for school uniforms. The notion that school uniforms make for better education is ridiculous. Take Finland, The Netherlands and many other countries with far better educational levels. No uniforms at all.
Uniforms means uniformity. Passive acceptance of what we are told. The exact opposite of what an education ought to be about.
Geez, I am getting pizzed off with our Harvey Norman culture.
This is the grossest type of middle class welfare - letting the poor darlings at their private schools tax deduct their uniforms. My kids go to public school - we spend about 100 bucks a year on uniforms, (make it 200 with shoes). Hardly worth keeping the receipts. But if I was spending 2000 bucks a year on uniforms….
Vote Green. One Nation. DLP. Anyone but the clowns who run the joint.
OK, a couple of recent contributors have come closer to the truth regarding houses. I know that it will sound like ancient historym but let me list a few things which drive up the prices of houses for everybody.
1. Death duty - no longer charged, due initially to Queensland’s doing away with this tax. The result: the relatively richer hang onto their dollars and no longer passsome to the state on their demise.
2. Probate duty - a previous federal duty payable to the Federal government based on the nett worth of the dearly departed. Same as above. In a way, you may not be able to take it with you, but your kids certainly can.
3. First Home Owners’ Grants - not available when I purchased my first little home unit in Neutral Bay for $26k in 1975. If the Government offered $7k FHOG, I expect that I would have had to stump up $33k o more, perhaps much more.
4. Banks offer loans on much more than 70% of the purchase price. Again, my first property required a 30% deposit with a record of saving that in the same bank I approached - the Commonwealth. If you are using somebody else’s monet for 100 or 105% of the purchase price, you are leveraging up your own property’s price by adopting a highter target purchase price. I had to demonstrate to the bank manager that I had not only 30% of the purchase price but the money to move in, for initial rates and charges, the removalists, phone connection, deposits for water and power, etc. In essence, the bank assumed that if I chose poorly, the unit would be worth at least 70% of what I paid for it. The money was reasonably cheap (peaked at 13.5% from memory because of the recession we had to have), but at least our gonads were not on the chopping block.
5. Capital Gains Tax. Lovely CGT. Why Australian family homes are exempt is an international anomaly. The taxation debate that will never take place because of the risk of the “have’s” voting against the party proposing to correct this anomaly to the detriment of the “have not’s” is a sad inditement of our country and our preparedness to allow our less fortunate citizens to pay tax on everything they earn, whilst permitting the propertied classes to gain from property without any tax at all. This is more than sad and unfair - it is a form of theft, of which I am as guilty as anybody who owns his primary residence. I play at making amends by donating crumbs to charities, but if I am fair, I would agree that I am benefit substantially from this eniquitable situation.
There are other benefits which attach to owning rental property and thus drive the prices of lower range properties up, but I will drop this subject now.
My closing remark must be - if you are able to benefit from even one of the above scams, be thankful, because in a most countries, they do not exist. These particular stars have aligned for the purposes of driving house prices up, driving interest rates up and diverting capital from more productive purposes.
Regarding school uniforms, which is where we started…
How nice it must be for the children of the well-off and aspirational classes to be able to attend a private school of their selection. Leaving aside the actual funding of the bricks and mortar (no portables for these children), or the size of their schools’ budget on a per-capita basis, we have added another reason for the little darlings to be separate.
Public school uniform - as applies to everybody who is of the community and not above it - is probably about $150 per year. The $2000 figure is not an unreasonable amount when it has to cover summer and winter uniforms, standard sports kits including blazers, boaters, caps, ties, scarves, specified styles of shoes (say 3 separate pairs for different purposes), rowing kit, rugby gear, cricket whites, netball stuff, swimming togs and so on and so forth, depending slightly on gender. Great fun! And all on the public teat!
Add this to the coach to pick the darlings up and take them 60km (typical in my community) past the local public school. Again, all paid for by the State. Not even tax deductible - outright paid for!
None of this is available to the poorest kids of our country, including the majority of the indigenous Aussies, who may well not find food in the house for breakfast and go to school with nothing for lunch except hope that the P&C have a Vegemite sandwich or two somewhere for them.
I am, to put it mildly, pissed off that Julia Gillard or any other politician sees the cost of school uniforms as being so important as to sideline issues central to fairness and equity and the health of our youngest and most disadvantaged citizens.
Remember, every time a student is excluded from the public system by the wealth or aspirational nature or religiosity of their parents, the community as a whole suffers thorugh division and partisanship. What a shocking lesson to teach out young.
How sad this all is.
Good PR, but D- for integrity, Jules.
@ John Bennetts (11.59pm)
“Add this to the coach to pick the darlings up and take them 60km (typical in my community) past the local public school. Again, all paid for by the State. Not even tax deductible - outright paid for!”
Could you please explain this - it appears a perk may be going on of which I’m not aware.
What rarely seems to get going is a debate about the apparent need in having private schools and school uniforms in the first place.
We keep going around the familiar arguments without seeming to want to question the merits or disadvantages of those educationally imposed ‘extras.’ Is it because we feel that they are beyond ever changing or improvements?
I know that change in an Anglo world is by and large looked upon with suspicion. The saying, ” why fix something if it ain’t broke” is loved by a large proportion of us steeped in a culture of continuing on, ad nauseum, what has been done in the past.
In some countries, they do actually sometimes break something in order to change and, hopefully then, improve. Australia seems most reluctant in actively seeking change in order to try and do things better. Are we forever destined to ride along on some kind of societal carousel?
School uniforms are a good idea from the mother’s point of view. Especially if you have two kids of the same sex. When they can last for ages.
I fail to see that children are hurt by wearing uniforms. It gives them a sense of identity. Something which has gone right out the window, along with individualism which, paradoxically, a uniform enhances, not destroys.
Why do our kids dress in their own uniform? baseball caps on backwards, bum crack exposed, talking as if they have cleft palates, ‘ya know’ and ‘like’, and ‘umm’, ‘anyhow’, and this is just the male of the species. [Moderator — this comment has been slightly edited for inappropriate content]
It seems to be natural for kids to run with the herd, and to dress alike-so why not a school uniform?
MODERATOR: HTF could anyone introduce sex, swear words, and playing the man. Into a discussion about school uniforms?
“Two kids of the same sex” Is this what turns you on? Jesus!
John Bennetts:
Actually almost everyone avoids CGT on houses. If you go to your local bookshop and open any Australian book on real estate investment you will find the golden rule: Never sell a house.
The costs in loan switching, stamp duty, sales commission, lost rent are only small parts of it; the biggest cost of selling is Capital Gains Tax. And it’s entirely avoidable by holding properties indefinitely. In the new “Platinum Age” loan market, it’s easy to realize capital gain by borrowing against a home’s increased value. The borrowed money is typically used to buy more properties.
The result is a gradual depletion of available housing stock, as properties permanently leave the owner-occupier market and move into the rental market, from which the vast majority are never released for sale. That leaves home buyers fighting over a smaller and smaller proportion of available houses every year.
The solution would be to define reborrowing against an increased home valuation as a Capital Gains Event, incurring Capital Gains Tax. The revenue would be enormous. But as Michael James says, any politician who tries it will be crucified.
The second-best option is to scrap CGT altogether, restoring a level playing field between capital asset classes.
B-I-N-G-O
#
School uniforms are a good idea from the mother’s point of view. Especially if you have two kids of the same sex. When they can last for ages.
I fail to see that children are hurt by wearing uniforms. It gives them a sense of identity. Something which has gone right out the window, along with individualism which, paradoxically, a uniform enhances, not destroys.
Why do our kids dress in their own uniform? baseball caps on backwards, bum crack exposed, talking as if they have cleft palates, ‘ya know’ and ‘like’, and ‘umm’, ‘anyhow’, and this is just the male of the species. The females all appear to wish they were ‘here, come and get it’ bait.
It seems to be natural for kids to run with the herd, and to dress alike-so why not a school uniform?
Venise Alstergren
@ zut alors
Posted Wednesday, 14 July 2010 at 8:23 am
I speak for NSW experience. The school buses which take kids to school, provided that the school is beyond an age-related distance from home, are what I am talking about. When Mum and Dad decide to send Little Tommy to a distant school, the travel to this school becomes a cost to the state, even though there may even be a comprehensive public school right next door.
My direct experience includes: Coach loads of children heading from Singleton and even Muswellbrook to Hunter Valley Grammar School, east of Maitland (70/120km). Also coach loads of children from Merriwa to Scone and Aberdeen to private and catholic schools, essentially denuding the school in Merriwa of talent.
Now, this is no cheap exercise and it happens in every town and suburb in NSW.
The State of NSW, perhaps with Commonwealth assistance - I do not know - goes even further. If your Little Johnny needs to be carted down to the highway to meet the bus, there is assistance for this. You may have a substantial disposable income, this whole thing may essentially be a lifestyle choice akin to owning a trailer-sailer for use at the weekend, but at least you pay for the sail craft and transport to the coast. The State subsidises (I have heard two acquaintances say $600pa pa $800 pa) the morning and afternoon trip to the bus stop, perchance past the front door of an existing school or two.
This is a waste of NSW and Commonwealth funds for the aspirationals and others who choose not to mix with their fellow community members and, to this end, are training their kids from an early age to consider themselves to be Special, Not One Of Them, Deserving, Takers.
It is a sickness worthy of public exposure and deliberation.
@ James McDonald, Posted Wednesday, 14 July 2010 at 12:37 pm:
Re CGT on property: No argument. I was quite possibly incorrect, in part because I am not a buyer or seller of property - last time was about 25 years back and I still enjoy living here.
SICKOFITALL: “Vote Green. One Nation. DLP. Anyone but the clowns who run the joint.”
Don’t even joke about the DLP. They are an amoral, immoral, fundamentalist Catholic Party, who know nothing but the destruction of this country. Google Bartholomew Augustine Michael (Bob) Santamaria to find out about the evil the DLP did in the 1950s. They are a national disgrace. And ‘the clowns’ were the people who voted for them.
Their idea of a good voter is one who has left his logic at the front door of the polling booth. If you want Australia to become a theocracy with the Catholic church running everything then do so. But don’t do it before studying up on it.
@ Venise Alstergren, Posted Wednesday, 14 July 2010 at 11:52 am:
Humans have have gender. It is essentially best used as an adjective. To avoid confusion, I suggest that sex is a noun, meaning a procreative (or not) sport.
It is much safer to refer to children as having gender than having sex. Moderators, I suspect, would tend to agree.
JOHN BENNETTS: By a process of elimination I discovered it wasn’t SEX that was moderated.
It was the ‘r’ word for when a man screws a women, and the woman doesn’t want to be screwed.
If you can think of a short word to replace the ‘when a man screws a woman, and the woman doesn’t want to be screwed’ I would be very grateful.
Cheers
Venise
DLP not to be confused with the LDP (Liberal Democratic Party). They are opposed to the mandatory internet filter, pork barrel spending and excessive taxes.
Speaking of pork barrels (eg school uniform subsidy), I wonder if Crikey would care to start a Pork Barrel Watch, a worthy counterpart to the federal Register of Lobbyists.
There’s taxcheck which collates figures from the federal budget and estimates your share from your income tax (an oversimplification, since income tax is only about half of the real tax you pay).
But what we really need is a billboard where people can record pork barrel spending that they become aware of. Each one could have its own thread where people add information or dispute whether it’s a pork barrel. As Pork Barrel Watch grows, a true picture of the scale of pork barrel spending would start to emerge.
I think you would get a lot of visitors and advertising on such a website.
Venise,
From Wikipedia:
Rapeseed (Brassica napus), also known as rape, oilseed r_pe, rapa, rappi, rapaseed and (in the case of one particular group of cultivars, canola) is a …
I have not arrived at an answer to your question, however “canola” seems to me to be a less ambiguous word than “rapeseed”. Is there a seed (!) within this?
It has me screwed.
@ John Bennetts
Thanks for the explanation, I had no clue. What a ludicrous waste of money.
@ James McDonald
Pork Barrel Watch - a marvellous idea to provide much needed public awareness.
If school uniforms are such a good idea then why not go the whole hog and have the same uniform for all schools? This would save mothers a lot of bother when changing schools or addresses.
For kids to grow up running with the herd is bad enough without also dressing them up like Belted Galloways.
Venise,
This isn’t an ideal substitute but it’s better than nothing & conveys the meaning: ravage.
Private schools should be abolished.
ER, that’s a bit extreme. As ethical black holes, they should be asked to pay their way and to get off the public teat, at the very least.
After that settles down, we can review their funding methologies, including trusts, tutoring their pupils how to wriggle into higher education living allowances, etc etc.
John, yeah ok - maybe a touch extreme.
Public funding of private schools should be abolished.
Why? Just to force them to close, when most private-school parents can’t afford as much in fees as the taxpayer pays for each public school student? The result would be even more cost to the taxpayer, when all but the wealthiest of people are forced to use public schools.
It’s like the private health insurance rebate: at first glance it seems like the poor subsidizing the rich, but it was brought in to save the taxpayer money and it worked.
Unless you want to means test everything so that people over a certain income are not eligible for public school or Medicare … but then you’d be creating a huge class divide, causing more polarization in quality between the public system and the private ones, with teachers and healthcare workers deserting the public systems.
The way it is now, the taxpayer provides a higher level of support for the lower priced product, and a lower level of support for the higher priced product. What’s wrong with that?
PINS: Read all the posts. I know this thread isn’t really about private schools, but the monkey is out of the bag now.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that private schools are a net plus in our society, unless you happen to have a certain window of perspective. I am not in favour of means testing everyone, just making those who want to drink deeper pay for their extra. Same rules as at a pub. You pays your own way or gets out.
In fact, I would go a bit further, in order to redress the social imbalances left to the schools of last resort which have been hollowed out and treated as dumping ground by the elitists, religious bigots, would-be’s-if-they-could-be’s and just plain filthy rich.
I think that these categories pretty well cover the whole range of those who steer their children into these facilities. Given that private education facilities are, indeed, a blight on society, the least you could do is to support the notion that they pay all of the additional costs which accrue to society as a result of their operations.
Please start by forcing the selfish, anticommunity parents do pay for their own choices of transport. That’s where this started. Millions of dollars of peak hour shuttles full of snot-nosed kids being carried across town or from town to town for no better reason than that their parents think that this is a good thing - AT THE GENERAL PUBLIC’S EXPENSE!
Oh, and another one, PINS:
You conclude by comparing the prices of the various “products”. Spare a thought for all of those cast-off students which are excluded from the “Higher Priced Product”. You know - the less gifted, the lame, the sick, the needy. Folks not to be mixed with by members of polite society.
Well, they are entitled to education too, and their needs are quite demonstrably more complex than the uniformed, coordinated, selected teams which queue patiently for their additional dose of daily transport fix. Of bloody course the cheaper product should really become the dearer one, because it is so very much more complex.
But never mind… justice and equality of opportunity and community values don’t matter to a pig with its nose in a trough, or to a row of identically uniformed pigs likewise engaged.
JOHN BENNETTS: That’s not at all bad. In fact it is witty and good. But is it a trade name?
John Bennetts, what I’m asking you to appreciate is that these things are all compromises. How much do those school buses cost in total? Is it really more expensive than the cost of every parent driving their kids to school? Usually in a 4WD, because parents these days think they owe it to their kids to have a bigger battering ram than anything they collide with, save their own hides and bugger the other guy (or the kids they run over in their own driveway). Those taxpayers who don’t own cars subsidize those who do. (Why do you think there’s no money for trains?) I don’t know the figures, but it may actually be cheaper just to shout them a bus.
If we’re looking for a perfect world, personally I would prefer an entirely private school system, with the taxpayer providing education vouchers, to a standard value for most people and a premium value in disadvantaged areas. I don’t like a few bureaucrats deciding the curriculum of half the state at the stroke of a pen, and I’m really worried about the federal government deciding it for half the country. Parents have no leverage in such a system, it’s just take it or leave it.
But I’m not pining for a perfect world. We have to work with what we’ve got. School uniforms? I can’t see any advantage of the taxpayer paying for those, maybe Labor is back to making deals with the textile industry like in the old days. At least it’s broad-based and not aimed at key property values as so many school spending programs are.
I can’t see the point or value fo private education in this country. You learn the same curriculum; you are less prepared for tertiary education or work; you have a sense of unearned entitlement; and the ‘old school tie’ network excludes you if you’re not at least 2nd generation anyway.
So the idiots who send their children there (while ‘ravaging’ or ‘canola-ing’ the public system) are pouring money down the drain. When it’s their money, fine. But when it’s my tax dollars - I say scrap the system! Or at least remove all govt support, and put the obscene amounts of money back into the public system.
PINS: It is not a comparison between 4x4’s and coaches. It is a discussion of the marginal real, today, cost which the government is picking up on behalf of the families who choose to use my money and yours to have their kids carried half way across the State so that they can snub x number of schools along the way. My initial point is that this is a private decision which has led to a very silent but real public cost, with few or no offsetting public benefits along the way.
That is, unless you personally like driving behind heaps more school buses than would be the case if the users of this service were asked to pay for it.
Just guessing, I believe that about 1/3rd of Aussie kids attend private schools.
Nationally, there must be at least a couple of million schoolkids. Say 700,000 kids attend private schools. Say half of them travel as I described. Both ways. 200 days per year.
Goodness knows what a 10 or 120 km coach trip is worth on average, but say the average journey is 15km past the first public school. 30km round trip. Say $5 each way and 40 kids per coach.
That means:
350,000 kids
15 km average each way additional journey
$5 per student per journey
200 days per school year
140 000 000 The number of additional 100% subsidised pupil journeys annually
4000000 The number of additional coach trips per year in Australia for this rort. NB Most coaches return to base after the morning and go out again in the afternoon from their base, thus thrvelling MT for as far as they travel loaded. Not also that coaches have to travel the distance from their furthest pickup point, where I have allowed only for averages at 15km.
700 Million Dollars annually - the approximate cost to the taxpayer.
Of necessity, these figures are only valid to indicate the size of the ball park, not the placement of the corner flags.
I can think of much better community projects nationally, to throw 700 big ones at than 4 million additional round trips for buses and coaches during peak hours.
Marginal cost, remember. The difference between the bus cost and the taxpayer subsidy of the alternative, which for school kids is 2 car km for every 1km the kid travels (a return trip for the parent). How much does the taxpayer subsidize every car km on the road? I don’t know exactly, but it’s enought to make you lose your lunch.
You should worry about people being subsidized to drive. As Christine Milne points out:
Instead of screaming blue murder at a school bus, you could be suggesting to your MP that transport-related fringe benefits should only be concessional for shared transport, not cars.
Then you might get things like, employers located away from stations forking out for a bus to move their workers between the workplace and the station, and getting tax breaks for it. Now that would be efficient.
So why have we allowed cities to develop whereby we have the kids being driven at all to their schools?
Not only driving kids to schools. We have to do the same to get a bottle of milk.
Did anyone watch ABC 2 last nigh,t a program called e2?
Our lives are dominated by large cars, big houses and a resulting big girth.
Make kids walk their arses off.
Let’s have free choice for private vs public education. Use the voucher idea, where you give parents a voucher, to use where they want, if they want private, then they pay the difference.
Re walking to school, Gerard, it seems some schools won’t allow kids to do this. That’s an indictment on society.
PINS:
New topic - fringe benefits and company cars. Leave this one to Christine Milne and the Greens. They have it in their sights for Budget 2011.
The additional school bus rort still continues apace at the order of $700,000,000 each year, entirely discretional due to parents’ choice of education, entirely picked up by the taxpayer. Still doesn’t sound fair to me. By additional, I mean above and beyond that travel which is necessary to get to the nearest State suitable school. I do not seek to force kids who live a few k’s out of town to start walking in the dark or force their parents to drive them to school.
My brother in law used to swim his horse across the lake and then ride 8km to sc
OOPS - fat finger disease.
…
My brother in law used to swim his horse across the lake and then ride 8km to school from age 5. I am not advocating that we should all live in slab huts in the bush and do likewise.
I walked 1km each way at a similar age and pedalled 3 km’s to and from high school. I don’t even demand that others should do this.
I just want the subsidised travel to stop at the gate of the first suitable school and for travel beyond that to be on the basis of “user pays”.
Vouchers OK. Excess travel not OK. Vouchers should recognise the additional difficulties and expense of providing education to students who, through physical or other issues, have special needs.
I’d provide travel for rural areas only. The rest can use public transport. They might as well get used to it.
Vouchers valid for both school fees and student travel passes. Parents to split it as they please.
The trouble with ‘choice’ on education is that it is divisive when some form of education is seen to be better than another.
If we had a good education than all kids would go to a good school in the area where they lived. Certainly in urban areas, they could all walk to school and dress the way they feel like. No buses or big black rammers would be needed and the money saved could be spent on buying flowers or other beautiful things. ( but not at Harvey Norman)
Gerard, “when some form of education is seen to be better than another” is another way of saying “when there is competition”. Competition and choice lead to aggregate improvements; mandatory monopoly leads to decay. This is just as true for education as it is for gymnasiums or airlines or any other service provider. New methods in teaching can either be dictated by departmental fads, or evolve out of constructive experimentation and parent selection. Some schools being better than others is an inescapable corollary of this. There can be no improvement, only decay, in a system where uniform quality is considered an overriding concern. And it is usually the rich who are first to try the more innovative offerings, so they get some of the best results and also some of the most disappointing flops. The most successful experiments of the rich then become part of the mainstream.
So, why then are some countries with a better or even best system of education without private schools.? I am thinking of Finland or The Netherlands for example.
Of course they do have some private schools s a Rudolf Steiner or schools for special needs, ADD sufferers or other disadvantaged groups, but those schools are not really seen as’ Private ’ and generally are not allowed to charge fees..
Countries with the highest literacy rates are the former Communist &Eastern Bloc countries. Kazakhstan has a literacy rate of 99.9%
If competition leads to improvements in education, why then are we performing so badly?
By the way, how do we cater for disadvantaged kids? Are the ‘rich’ leading here?
ZUT: Good one, a smidgen theatrical, but good.
POWERISNOTSTRENGTH: It’s the vacuous blonde bimbos who drive the four wheel drives, that get on my quince.
One day last year a bloody great Hummer drove into the back of me. When I protested about it, she climbed down, out of the second floor, and came towards me.
She was dressed in the very latest sports gear and had her sunnies on her head, at the precise angle to hold them on to her thick blonde hair.
She looked at my little red Alpha and said, “Oh, my God, I didn’t even see you.” I could only reply, “That’s odd, most bus drivers do see me.”
— — — — — — — — — — — — — — -
IT’S THE RELIGIOUS schools the government should stop subsidising with OUR
money. Private schools are not the ogres that so many people believe.
Or in the words of Bob Hawke who, at the time was the head of the union movement. Some jouno had popped the question about his kids going to private schools. There was a howl from Bob Hawke followed by, “Me send my kids to a public school??????? Never.”
I thought, at that moment, he would go on to lead the nation. He had a certain deathless honesty.
People should try to pull out the other eye when it comes to private schools. They have, on the whole, a better level of teaching, less kids in the one class. Better equipment, and children who have some idea of how to behave. Thus enabling them to listen to what is going on.
Private schools mean the parents have to pay big bickies to send their offspring to these places, and yes, the schools receive some government subsidisation.
In Melbourne there are two crackerjack public schools. Melbourne High, and MacRobertson High, and in a city nearing four million people, two such schools is scandalous. We need another hundred of them.
The government should cease subsidising religious schools. On the grounds that the children are submitted to endless brain-washing, and taught to believe, blindly, as their parents believe. By the time they have their heads stuffed up with fairy tales there’s little room left for the real stuff.
Most especially, do I hate the Catholic school system. If for no other reason than they have taught succeeding generations to pronounce the letter ‘H’ as if it was spelt ‘Haitch’ instead of ‘Aitch’ as it correctly pronounced.
Listen to the verbal convolutions of newsreaders, politicians, actors, debaters and the socially, upwardly mobile, as they struggle to unlearn the dreaded Haitch. This habit has now taken hold in our public schools.
There was a time when one heard the Haitch one knew the person saying it was a Catholic. Nowadays it is merely the product, and the proof, of shocking teaching.
Across the pond in New Zealand, they are Haitch free. Perhaps they per capita, didn’t have the same overdose of Catholic teachers. Long live New Zealand!
PINS is running out of stuff.
Tried to say that the curriculum developed by private schools differs from that used by public schools. Not so.
Assumes that if school buses were reduced, then 4x4’s would have to do the job. What about feet? Bikes?
Now assumes that improvements come from “rich” schools and somehow benefit others (“The most successful experiments of the rich thus become part of the mainstream”). This is somewhat counter-intuitive to me. Is not education taught at university? Are not the curriculums developed by collaboration? Do not the universities do a very substantial amount of research in their education departments? Are not religious institutions renowned for their conservatism and lack of openness to change? Are not the bulk of private schools run by religious organisations? And isn’t it true that these same schools see a significant opportunity in being able to inculcate kids into feeling superiour, apart and special, because they have a relationship with an invisible old man in the sky? Mainly, though, I would have thought that the rich would choose not to have their offspring “experimented” with by those entrusted with their education.
No amount of blather will hide the fact that, at the end of the day, it takes a village (read: community) to raise a child. Start splitting the children into culturally divided groups and you have gone backwards, big time. And Australia certainly has in this regard.
All this leaves the $700M on the table. I suggest educational efforts in East Timor and remote Australian communities, split 50/50. And in future, please consider getting your own kids to school or, better still, selecting a community school within walking or bike distance.
Socialist countries study a lot of what goes on in capitalist countries, so yes, to a certain extent socialists can hitch a ride on the innovations of capitalist countries and even add their own touches.
If education is done in too much of a vacuum, innovation becomes effectively experimentation without control groups, and unsuccessful experiments compromise the education of an entire nationwide class. I’m not just talking theoretically here, I’m thinking of some of the disastrous bureaucratic fads that ruined much of my own public education along with the careers of a few courageous teachers who tried to defy the system.
A great compromise is to have competition between state education systems within a federal structure. That’s what we’ve had for many years in Australian public education. Note that Julia Gillard is in the process of destroying this competitive federalism with her new uniform national education system.
JB: Don’t entirely agree with you, but para three is a blinder. Well done!
Religious schools should be banned, for the reasons I wrote in my last comment.
PINS: Are you a politician? You sure have an answer for everything.
Well,
In between your buses and large hummers, all I can be thankful for is having been taught English ( and French and German) for a few years at a Dutch high school. My younger brothers did suffer a high school at the hands of De La Salle Bretheren here in Aussieland, which they, apart from whacking on knuckles with rulers and not shy of doing a bit of rogering on the side. ( to ease the pain) failed to teach much at all.
Education isn’t a competitive sport.
There should be one system for all children to be taught the same level of knowledge. Yes there will be different levels of ability, aptitude and engagement – but it should be to a standard level commensurate with being able to operate and function successfully in our current society.
Education is too important to become a competition involving private money and exclusivity.
Stupidly now increasing numbers of parents are spending thousands of dollars and kids are missing out on their childhood as they spend all their spare time outside school attending private tutoring – not to increase their knowledge – but to learn how to pass the entrance exams of selective government high schools or private schools. Kids are suffering because of this crazy desire of the parents to get their kids into a school that they perceive is better – when in reality it offers no real benefits – just a higher cost for a “Gucci” brand school.
I went to a country public high school and learnt Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Geology, Agriculture, Music, Maths, ComeerceEnglish, German, Economics, Geography, History, Art, Woodwork, Plastics, Metalwork, debating, PE, cooking, health and I even sewed a few bags & seat cushions.
I certainly didn’t lose out or was disadvantaged by not attending a private school.
There is no need for private industry or religious organisations to provide education in Australia.
“ComeerceEnglish,” perhaps I needed more spelling practice though. No one’s perfect!
John Bennetts, EngineeringReality, and Gerard,
For a concrete illustration of my point, let me recount some of the teachings I myself received from these “university educated” teaching theorists, who commanded from the top down the public school system in which I was, shall we say, processed. (Some insiders will be able to pick my age and home state from what follows.)
- Reciting multiplication times tables was strictly banned along with all forms of rote learning, enforced by random surveillance and grave career consequences for defiant teachers.
- Students do not need to study the works of past thinkers; you get full marks for blurting out your own opinions, however ignorant and vapid.
- A new form of handwriting based on block capitals which made all of us atrocious writers and is now threatening arthritis in my right hand.
- World history consists of a vague and tragic blur of class exploitation until Democracy and the Australian Labor Movement came along and fixed everything.
- The political basis of Australia is … a democracy. No further explanation needed or given.
- Aboriginals didn’t know how babies were made until clever anthropologists came along and explained it to them.
- All famous literature is superflous; the only books worth reading are those which strongly suggest that ethnic differences are only skin deep, or that all rich people are depraved, or similar moral lessons.
- It’s better to write poetry than to read it, and meter and rhyme are just elitist barriers to try to stop people from expressing themselves.
- Don’t over-analyse problems in science or mathematics (see the contradiction?), it’s more important to express your views verbally on how important it is.
I could go on but I think you get the picture. Nor do I begrudge the CPA members who ran the department from trying out their innovations. Because at least there were other people out there being educated with other frameworks - some conservative, some new-age, and everything in between - according to their parents’ tastes and, yes, their means. Other contemporaries brought up on different intellectual diets, whom I would later come into contact with and realize I had a bit of catching up to do.
If it had been a monoculture, an entire generation would have been condemned to live the rest of their lives on the drivel that was taught to me, and would have seen nothing wrong with it, because they would have had nothing to compare it with.
As I said earlier, I’m not a raze-it-all-to-the-ground-and-start-again person. I’m a work-with-what-you’ve-got person. And I think the greatest strength of public schooling in Australia is that it is not a monoculture. There are separate public school systems in each state. There are also church-run schools, non-church private schools, Rudolf Steiner schools, Maria Montessori schools, and so on. All of them, I believe, can learn at least something from each other.
So I speak up not only for private schooling but for keeping the state education systems separate. And I dread Julia Gillard’s move to impose a national educational monoculture. It may start off top notch, but who knows what the next generation of university-educated theorists could impose on an entire generation?
Am I making my point a bit clearer now?
Yes, your point is clearer.
I pity you your history. As husband of a teacher, I have seen her fight against the trendoids and suck-ar_es of the “system”. Thankfully, most of these trends have been curtailed.
Some of the newer systems, such as Reading Recovery for the littlies, are amazing but they require very substantial additional training. Not needed for private schools, though - they seem to simply advise the parents of kids with reading difficulties that, after Y1, the school cannot help them. Lazy buggers. Yet they still want the same value ticket.
I remind you though, I introduced not a discussion of private schools per se, but the principle of additional transport becoming a cost to the state, although it is to me a wholly personal decision to incur the additional component of the travel to a more distant school.
The guesstimate of $700M per annum is set out above.
I still reckon that there are much deserving uses for this kind of largesse, including support of remote schools in Australia and schools of any kind in Timor Leste.
OK, it looks like I still haven’t explained it. There’s no need to pity me my history; the point is I still benefitted from other kids my age getting a different education than I did. By comparing my own deplorable understanding of the world with that of other people who had gone through different schools, I was motivated to overhaul my own education by my own efforts. Athletes run fastest when they run against the hardest competition. And at least the commissars had taught me how to read.
Now if one million public students costs the taxpayer about $10,000 a year each, and if that’s about two-thirds of students, then the government has a choice. Some parents will never send their kids to public schools, no matter what. Others weigh the costs against the benefits before making a decision. Subsidies of private schools target the last group.
Suppose subsidizing private students to the tune of say $3,000 (including school buses and all the rest) caused 10 per cent of parents to change their mind and use private schools. Then the taxpayer would break even. The cost would be $3,000 x 500,000 = $1.5 billion. A subsidy affects some parents’ decisions, while having no effect on others’. If the effect were to divert 150,000 students out of the public system, this would save the taxpayer $1.5 billion worth of public student places, so the taxpayer would break even.
Any improvement on that, and the public student comes out ahead. Otherwise the $10,000 per student has to be diluted between more students, or else the taxpayer is up for a bigger education budget.
So the question is not whether privileged kids deserve a bus while kids are starving in Africa or Timor Leste or wherever. The question is whether the bus and other subsidies to private students improve on the break-even benefit to public students. If a subsidy costs too much for the number of parent choices it influences, then it’s a pork barrel. If it influences a lot of parents’ choices relative to its costs, then it benefits public students at the same time as the more obvious beneficiary, and is good value for taxpayer money compared to the alternative.
This kind of private subsidy is almost always a necessary corollary of publicly funded social services. And it’s one of the hardest things to explain to the public, because most people can’t see indirect chains of cause and effect.
PINS: You’ve made me understand your point of view. However, could your experiences not be an extension of the ghastly chip on the shoulder, tall Poppy Syndrome, and the immutable law of Oz: ‘Thou shalt knock every bit of talent out of the Ocker minority’, with ONE HUGE exception. ‘“Thou shalt bow down, “on your face-infidels”-and grovel to any Oz sports star”’?
I suppose I would rather it was this, than a deliberate Government policy. I think most of the world’s children go though hell. Certainly the powers concerned have to pitch knowledge at the centre of the collective whole. If they pitched knowledge and learning at the most intelligent pupils, most students would fall out. If for no other reason than children mature at different ages. If they pitched it at the bottom end we would be a race of road-makers. (No comment please!)
So, I just don’t see any other way than pitching the curriculum, at the middle part of a class. I speak with feeling. I was ripped out of school at the age of fourteen by my stupid mother. The rest of my life has been a huge effort to educate myself.
I can’t tell you how, at the age of fifteen, in a foreign country, I had to work beyond reason, to bring myself up to a university standard. I used to think I was a martyr, until I started to realise that all the people who have succeeded in life seemed to have overcome hideous school careers.
Even the ones perceived as being born to succeed, haven’t had it nearly as easy as we all think.
Anyway, my comment was at least to show you that someone was listening.
PINS: I should have added that, when it comes to buses, and the costs thereof, I am completely in the dark. Whether it was my mother’s fault or not, I don’t know. But I was so determined to get an education that I was forced to drop the part of my brain which understood anything more than two plus two=Four, I think!
Venise,
Yes I think there was a generous serve of that. A bit of the old proletarian reverse snobbery; a bit of trying to redesign the mind of the future body politic. And a bit too much reliance on one or two books in vogue at the time, within the sort of intellectual closed feedback loop that bureacrats sometimes create when they rely on each other for career progression.
I think government departments go through cycles of enlightenment and decay. Sometimes it works really well - the public-school students I had to catch up with when studying for a second degree (another state, another generation) were brilliant, some of them had minds that could light up the deepest tunnel. But mediocrity is at best just a few elections away. There will never be a time when people can no longer grasp Joseph Heller’s meaning: “There was only one catch and that was Catch-22.”
I’ve come to believe that while bureacracies out of Heller or Kafka will always be with us, structurally we can limit the damage they can do, by ensuring that a single organ cannot hold an entire population in its thrall. When people have somewhere else to go (however inconvenient the choice may be) they have the strength of choice on their side. The constant comparison of results ensures that charlatans and petty tyrants will always be operating on borrowed time.
The Catholic church is a good example of this (a topic I know you’ve commented on before). Once the Reformation was strong enough to protect its own, the stranglehold of the “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” on intellectual thought, its power of torture and excommunication for heretics, was broken. By degrees, it ceased to be an empire and was demoted to just a church, one whose members today have the option of crossing the road and joining another church (or none) if they think they’re being enslaved.
So, while I can appreciate the arguments of various emphases and methods in education, my response is: open up Pandora’s box of diversity, let parents be the judges. Let no national organ ever gain a stranglehold on a whole generation of children. Parents spend a great deal of time discussing and comparing the merits of different schools. Individually, many of them may be subject to the biases and limitations of their own backgrounds. But they’re not all fools, and collectively, their combined judgement is better than any single state or private organ can match.
PINS:
I totallyagree that it is important to open the Pandora’s box of diversity. The problem is that the box is sold to the highest bidder and those with the dollaria then get the best bits and most benefits.
The box should be freely available and paid for equally through taxation and no part of the box should charge fees to the kids parents.
Another part of the problem is how to make the box available at all schools and places of residence. Ideally, kids should have all that within walking distance without the need for buses or Bazooka trained mums in hummers.
I survived because of schooling in Holland, my brothers did not have that benefit. Believe it or not, my mother was astonished they would pass to the next grade because of their height. Brother Joseph thought they were’ too tall’ to stay in the class they were in. They were more interested in socks and shirt liftings and flag raisings at assemblies than teaching.
My grandkids, fifty years on,apart from the same attention to school uniforms now carry towering school bags, as if on their way to Mount Everest.
Have schools ever heard of lockers? Or is this a separate subject?
PINS: The reason I feel deeply about religion-the Catholic religion is the worst offender-and religious schools. Is because, as anyone should be able to work out, all religion is merely an extension of the superstitions man had.
Granted we all know fear, awe, wonder; but fear is the paramount feeling which led us to have superstitions. But hey! Today we know why there are eclipses, tusanamis, that earth is not the centre of our universe, that there is no such thing as ‘intelligent design’, that man is a work in progress, that space is a vacuum, that black cats are no more inclined to bring bad luck than any other colour cat.
Scientists such as Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and the Frenchman Pierre-Simon de Laplace, to mention but three, have educated millions of people to know what really does go on in our universe.
So what happens? As knowledge, art, literature, creativity, burst out in an unimaginable profusion. A profusion which would make the thinkers of the Renaissance pale with envy, we have millions and millions of people in thrall to the superstitions and witchcraft of the middle ages, aka religion.
Why is this so? As a TV scientist used to ask of the viewing audience. My reply would be-here I’m not talking about the mentally challenged adult who suddenly opts to join some weird cult such as Catholicism, Seventh Day Adventists, Christian Scientists, Hillsong, Ring of Fire or Exclusive Brethren.
The main reason for superstition with a halo still continuing to thrive, is because parents feel obliged to brainwash their children to follow their own inane, and unquestioned beliefs. If this pattern of behaviour was not bad enough, these same parents make sure their children attend religious schools.
Thus does does mindless superstition keep regenerating itself. Add to this the power that the men who run religion have to play superstition at the basest level and the ability to make religions into a gaol. From which the criminals placed in these dungeons keep up an eternal siren song to entice the non-believers into the same gaol.
Ordinary people locked up in the slammer spend days, weeks, months planning to get out of the damn place. But not the believers, they want everyone to be at the same abysmal level as themselves.
Then we get a self-described Conservative Catholic-Steve Conroy-as an arbiter of what is, or is not to be, allowed to viewed by a public which is probably better educated that the Senator anyway.
Plus the ultimate tragedy, if the winner of the next election turns out to be the Coalition we will have the twenty-first century version of Savanorola, Torquemada, or this century’s very own Bin Laden as leader of the county, in the form of Tony Abbott. And as leader of the National Party, we have Barnaby Joyce, whose Catholicism rivals that of Tony Abbott.
What a primeval farce, and a primeval disease religion is.
Here endeth the lecture.
This brings me back to my hypothesis
PS: Delete that last line, Please.
I had to reprint this as the powers that be objected to my description of female circumcision.
GERARD: Certainly, this Pandora’s box of diversity of schooling seems to be excellent, but I have a couple of queries.
I would not like it to be institutionalised. The reason being, look at the sacred word of ‘multiculturalism’ and the way this has been abused, and how patronising it is.
“Let young Muslim females-if their parents so desire-have their sexual organs surgically removed. (I refer to female circumcision) because, morally we show our tolerance of cultural diversity.
Forget the screaming agony of the wretched bride when the stitched-over remains of the pudenda are being fiercely penetrated, by the male, on her bridal night. Forget the stench emanating from this uncleansed organ. Forget her shame and embarrassment when her school friends have not been treated to this form of torture.
Let the religious quacks who impose the burqa (Yes, the bleeding hearts who scream ‘multiculturalism’ who solemnly preach that it is her right to wear this garment, if she so chooses) However, let these same nitwits pay for the rickets and other diseases which the lack of sun promote.
Also, let them pay for any accidents caused by her driving a car into someone else, owing to her peripheral vision being impeded.
Forget the riots at the tennis and the soccer where ancient feuds are given free rein (it’s a horse term, not a monarchial one) to have their day in the sun. Serbia versus Croatia, Macedonian Greek, versus Orthodox Greek, Cypriot versus Greek. It is all good clean multicultural fun. How patronising is that attitude?
This Pandora’s box should be in everyone’s home? What about the fascist Christian right-wing who won’t allow their wives and children to watch this box, nor to use a computer, read newspapers, not vote. The Exclusive Brethren are but one cult with these rules. All at the same time as their men have wheedled their way into a monopoly of water-trading rights. Thanks to the support given them by John Winston Howard.
Then there is your suggestion that the government support all different forms of schooling. Can you imagine the howls of outrage of the community, going along the lines of, “Our money would be better being spent on our hospitals, and giving aid to overseas countries”-when the dictator of the country trousers three quarters of the incoming cash.
It’s a big nasty world out there. Anyway, I loved your remark about your mother being horrorfied (sic) at school classes being delineated by height.
I’m a bit jaundiced about life at the moment so please don’t take my remarks too much to heart.
MODERATOR: I can’t take much more of being moderated for no good reason. How can a discussion on multiculturalism and the inter-net filter lead to me insulting someone and me indulging in sexual depravity?
The only depravity which exists in my above comments, is the depravity committed on female children of the Muslim faith. A depravity committed on some young, female Australian Muslims.
Anyway I have terminated my comments on the cartoon section. Yet still you are gunning for me on philosophy
I think that’s about it. Don’t you?
Geez Venise:
I just want normal milk that tastes like real milk.
We all had school milk in bottles each day at the school in The Hague. Then, all of a sudden the Coca Cola trucks arrived and each school and each student given their first taste of Cocka Cola.
That was part of the US Marshall Plan to help Europe on its feet again after WW2.
I never thought that was part of the Pandora box.
I feel sorry about female circumcision and associated horrors. The vasectomy back in 1972 by Dr Barbara Simcock was the closest I came to in that division.
That item was deemed newsworthy enough to be taken up by Chanel 9 after which the local butcher and others though it was an item of endless and great hilarity. ” Ha, ha, y’ve had it chopped up, ha, ha.” und so weiter.
Hi Gerard:
The trouble with American Pandora’s box, is that they cram it full of junk-as you so rightly say.
“We don’t deliver the kids milk any more, but we do give them hours of torment at the dentist.”
The only time they ever got repaid for their crassness, was when Coca, without the cola, industry got a whole new lift off. Thanks to the sordid machinations of American overseas interference.
Having a vasectomy, and contrary to your butcher’s opinion, makes you a hero, not a figure of fun.
The butcher was probably a closet gay, anyway.