Doctor and activist
10/10/2021
10 October 2021
The legacy of being turned into financial entities may be very severe. This article looks at their finances.
What will happen to Australia’s intellectual elite, now hopelessly underpaid or unemployed with no stable career path?
How can Australia compete internationally in this scenario?
https://jacobinmag.com/2021/09/australia-universities-neoliberalism-speculation-finance-real-estate-international-students?
09/07/2021
9 July 2021
Here is an article from The Conversation talking of the effect of Chinese resistance to certain views on their history. Teaching is already distorted by the need to pass students who have paid a lot.
02/07/2021
27 June 2021
Author Bri Lee ties it to privilege in education.
We have to bring back the Gonski reforms and stop just giving money to the elite schools.
www.smh.com.au/culture/books/education-and-elitism-under-the-microscope-in-new-bri-lee-book-20210617-p581ul.html
16/04/2021
16 April 2021
I note in Australia’s recovery, we now need skilled migrants. Why? Because we stopped supporting TAFE and gave the money to dodgy private providers.
At the other end of the pile we need unskilled migrants to pick our fruit because the wages are so low that Australians do not want to work for them.
Where are young Australians in all this? Are our kids going to unis with no jobs at the end of their courses? In India excess doctors drive taxis. Marx said that the capitalists were more loyal to their class than their country. Are we for a fair go for all Australians of not? A living wage? Or are skilled migrants who settle more likely to vote Liberal?
www.abc.net.au/news/2021-04-15/skilled-migrants-missing-link-australia-covid-economic-recovery/100069670
05/03/2021
5 March 2021
As a child our family moved to Port Kembla, and we lived on Hill 60, just above the rocks where a lot of people have drowned recently.
I went to Port Kembla Infant’s School, which was overcrowded but interesting. Half the kids there came from the migrant hostel in the old WW2 army camp where ‘displaced Persons’ (as WW2 refugee families were called) lived. These kids arrived in kindergarten without a word of English. This was taken as normal by the teachers, who just plugged on. The kids from the hostel were called ‘Hostels’, but it was a descriptor rather than a pejorative. By the time we got to 2nd class in our 4th year (Kindergarten, Transition, 1st Class, 2nd Class) there was no difference between Aussie borns and Hostels. There were 46 in my 2nd class and girls filled the top 6 places. There was minimal racism in kids leaving this school.
There was no anti-discrimination legislation or bureaucracy in the 1950s but all the parents had jobs in the steelworks or associated industries and the Housing Commission was building suburbs full of affordable housing as fast as it could. If you had a go, you got a go. The ABC Radio had an awkward segment before the news called ‘Learn English with us’ where some somewhat stilted practical speech exercises lasted about 2 minutes. I used to wonder how the new migrants all tuned in for this little segment if they could not understand the rest. But the intention was there.
In 1966 there was a movement demanding ‘State Aid for Church Schools’ on the basis that they had paid their tax, and now they had left the state system they were paying twice. The government wanted to win the election, and this was seen as critical for the Catholic vote. The Democratic Labor Party, which had split from the ALP were the champions of this and still represented a significant threat to the ALP as they preferenced the Libs. State Aid came in.
Some time later there was a lot of emphasis on ESL (English as a Second Language) classes at TAFE, which were held during school hours. Their target was migrant women and their objective was to encourage English speaking to allow the women both to meet each other and to participate in society more easily. John Howard defunded the programme; ‘user pays’ was the new paradigm.
I now live in Sydney in a relatively central affluent suburb. Each morning 8 private school buses start near my door ferrying students to 8 private schools. No public transport needed- the school takes care of it all. Others students in private school uniforms catch subsidised public transport to the schools of their parents’ choice. But the cost of ‘choice’ is ‘residualisation’. Schools where there are a lot of ethnic students suffer from ‘white flight’, and so have concentrated social disadvantage and a lack of native role models. One school I visited in Western Sydney had had a stabbing in the playground about 25 years ago. The school photos in the foyer had no white face for the last 20 years. That was as far back as the photos went.
When we wonder if the Cabinet have any idea how the poorer folk live, my opinion is that they do not. These social dynamics have now been going for long enough that it is possible to be old enough to be in Cabinet and have no idea how the other half live. Some think that people without jobs have ‘wasted their opportunities’ or have alcohol or gambling problems. Add a little self-ri ghteous religion, ‘the poor are always with us’, a touch of arrogance and a peer group that thinks the same, and you have policies that are increasingly dismantling the fair go and equity that should be at the heart of our culture. It may be that you cannot make all people equal, but you can give all children equality of opportunity, and all adults enough to live on. We have to change direction and do just that.
Here, at the risk of being repetitive, is an article on Christian Porter.
www.themandarin.com.au/150633-christian-porter-the-unshakeable-belief-of-a-white-man-born-to-rule/?fbclid=IwAR2PbktE5jzTIgIjcL4orzdW1TO8ax03VpOBCFDTzDbRUepQnigaB1WG24Q
22/01/2021
A recent article has university cheating as a million dollar industry and it is hard to to argue with this. As everything becomes online it becomes ever easier.
When I was in Parliament a University of Wollongong lecturer, Ted Steele, got into problems because he refused to pass a fee-paying foreign student, whose father had been a generous benefactor. He became a whistle blower. He was helped by the Union reluctantly as he had been very anti-union in his previous views. He had a victory and was reinstated as described in the SMH of 29/3/2002, but I think later was forced to resign and settle.
Universities dependent on fee-paying students have a powerful incentive to pass them, and by the same token, less incentive to find cheating ones.
It is one thing to have forged CVs. It is one step further when the CV is true but the knowledge is absent. The problem is that everything is for sale, and nothing else is respected.
www.smh.com.au/national/sacked-whistleblower-gets-university-job-back-20020329-gdf5mq.html
22/01/2021
A report by the NSW Auditor-General shows that NSW TAFE had failed in its social objectives and not made its cost saving from merging 10 institutions into one.
It is significant that these problems are always found by Auditors. One would think that monitoring of costs savings or not would be built into such a major change. Dream on!
The problem with mega-mergers is that it empowers people a long way away, who then make decisions without the facts from those on the ground, who have usually been sacked or depowered.
Speechwriter Martin McKenzie-Murray, writing in the SMH of 28/12/20 opined that the reason that speeches were so unmemorable now was that the content was more about short-term media grabs than any substantial vision, and that since political advisers have replaced public service mandarins as the main source of advice there has been a loss of the sense of past history and future vision. In short the lack of proper thinking is why the speeches are no good.
TAFE was conceived as help up; a technical education for those who could benefit from one, whatever their age, and where good tradespeople were valued and could teach their trade. Interference by those who merely see education as another commodity to compete in a market and who have no concept of equity, justice or a fair go as part of public policy have done immense harm to TAFE, not to mention the rest of the nation.
Policy should have continuity and decisions should be evidence-based. A public service that has expertise and long-term stability is the best guarantee of this, where those giving the advice do not have a financial or ideological commitment to a single option.
The article is important in that it emphasises that ideologues must justify their management pontifications and their failures must be held up to them.
www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/scathing-review-reveals-tafe-s-failure-to-meet-cost-savings-20201217-p56oex.html
28/05/2020
Prime Minister, Scott Morrison is perceived to have done well in managing the COVID-19 crisis as, smarting from his bushfire debacle, he took expert advice. He has used the crisis to shut down Parliament and with his use of State Premiers as a sort of wartime Cabinet he has bypassed the Labor opposition. Now he […]