Tony Abbott will never be prime minister via Kate Adams "Christopher Pyne is the Tom Waterhouse of Australian politics. He seems to be everywhere, and he is annoying. Toothy, insincere and annoying. We most often encounter Pyne in his role as manager of Opposition business in the House of Representatives, a role which gives him maximum scope to irritate the body politic. He also turns up far too regularly at media ‘doorstops’ and on TV panel shows, a glib and facile presenter of the party line. There is not a lot of gravitas about Christopher; he is sharp and witty, to be sure, but also somehow lightweight, like he never quite matured beyond the school debating society and undergraduate politics. But we shouldn’t laugh. For in his other role, as education spokesman for the Liberal Party, Pyne is in the front lines of a class war. He and his colleagues on Wednesday voted against the government’s Australian Education Bill which, if implemented, would see an extra $14.5 billion in state and federal money flow to schools across the nation over the next six years. The Opposition has marshalled various arguments against the reform measure, but in essence, its position can be summed up in a single word: “choice”. It is a code word, of course. What it refers to is a fear that the private schools (which most of the Coalition front bench attended) would lose some of the relative advantage they hold over the public school sector (which most Australian kids still attend, despite a big shift in recent years to the private sector). It was the conservative mantra on school funding all through the term of the previous Howard government, too. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? Parents should have a choice about how their kids are educated. Well yes, except that for many families there is no choice. State schools are all they can afford. And, unique among developed countries, Australian taxpayers subsidise the choice of the relatively wealthy to send their kids to private schools. And that has had dire consequences for the overall educational outcomes of Australian kids. The outcomes were set out in minute detail in last year’s Gonski review of school funding, on which Labor’s proposed education reforms are based."
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 04:00:06 +0000
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