Australian Politics
Thursday, February 08, 2024
Classroom chaos linked to Aussie teaching styles
Teachers should instruct rowdy students in good behaviour and use back-to-basic teaching methods, a senate inquiry into chaotic classrooms will recommend on Wednesday.
Schools need closer ties with health services to give students faster access to psychologists, social workers and behaviour specialists, the Senate Standing Committee on Education has concluded after a 15-month inquiry into the issue of increasing disruption in classrooms.
The committee will recommend that the Senate begin a follow-up inquiry, to investigate Australia’s declining academic standards, focusing on literacy and numeracy.
Its final report contains fresh data from student surveys in the latest global testing of 15-year-old students in maths and science, the 2021 PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment).
A startling 83 per cent of students responded that “students do not listen to what the teacher said’’ in mathematics lessons.
Ten per cent said students failed to listen in “every lesson’’, one in four said classmates did not listen to the teacher “most lessons’’, and half said students failed to listen during “some lessons’’.
In contrast, just 1 per cent of students in Japan – one of the highest-performing countries – said students failed to listen in every lesson. Only one in 20 Japanese students said classmates ignored the teacher in most lessons, and one-third said students failed to listen in some lessons.
An analysis prepared for the senate committee found that the “disciplinary climate’’ in Australian schools was the fifth-lowest among 37 nations in the OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development).
The senate inquiry, chaired by Liberal Party Senator Matt O’Sullivan, will recommend the Australian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (ACARA) devise a “behaviour curriculum’’ to teach students how to behave in class.
It calls on teachers to use evidence-based teaching methods, including “explicit instruction’’ with step-by-step explanations, and practice and testing to ensure all children mastered each lesson.
The committee has called for an end to open-plan classrooms, which can be noisy and distracting for teachers and students.
Teachers told the inquiry that out-of-control students had sexually assaulted and threatened to kill them, punched classmates, and dealt drugs in the playground.
The National Catholic Education Commission said principals were the victims of physical violence at 11 times the rate of average Australians. The Australian Psychological Society said disruptive behaviour could be linked to low levels of literacy.
Children and Media Australia said violent videos and games were a risk factor for aggression among children and teenager.
Vaping was singled out by the NSW Primary Principals’ Association.
The Australian Secondary Principals’ Association said many teachers were at “breaking point and the addition of disruptive youth adds to this load’’.
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Olympic supremo John Coates calls for $2.7bn Gabba rebuild to be axed
A plan to demolish and redevelop the Gabba as Brisbane’s main Olympics venue is being probed by an infrastructure review led by former Liberal National lord mayor Graham Quirk.
Mr Coates, vice-president of the International Olympic Committee and who has been involved in every summer games since 1976, met with Mr Quirk this week and recommended the Gabba rebuild be scrapped.
Costs to rebuild the Gabba – which was set to hold the athletics as well as the opening and closing ceremonies for the 2032 Games – have already blown out by 170 per cent on preliminary costings to $2.7bn.
Mr Coates has suggested the opening and closing ceremonies for the Games instead be held at Suncorp Stadium and the athletics moved to the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre, formerly known as QEII Stadium.
“We’ve put it to the review committee we should abandon the Gabba and we should look for another site for the athletics,” Mr Coates told The Courier-Mail.
“The Olympic movement … was something that did have community support and was going to leave a great legacy for community and sport … now suddenly we’re on the nose in Brisbane.”
Mr Coates acknowledged his recommendation to dump the Gabba rebuild meant the project was almost certainly dead.
“I’m sure it is, it just does not stack up,” he told The Courier Mail.
Earlier this week Premier Steven Miles who championed the redevelopment as Annastacia Palaszczuk’s Olympics infrastructure minister, said he had believed the Gabba was the best option with legacy benefits for Brisbane, but acknowledged he had failed to sell the plan to taxpayers.
“I don’t think I’d succeeded at convincing Queenslanders,” Mr Miles said.
“Queenslanders were saying to me everywhere I went that they thought there should be an alternative, they didn’t think that was a good use of money in the context of housing shortages, cost of living, all of the other challenges.
“I think in the face of changed circumstances and feedback from the community, it’s entirely appropriate for a leader to change their mind.”
Mr Miles said that as Olympics infrastructure minister he had asked his department to provide alternatives to the Gabba rebuild but “none were very good”.
“So it’s entirely possible this review comes back and says that we have to go with that original plan, and if that is the outcome, I hope that puts the division and bitterness and politics to one side and we can get on with building,” he said.
“But if there is an alternative, well, that’s great news too.”
Mr Quirk, Brisbane lord mayor from 2011-19 and central to the city’s original Olympics push, will deliver the findings of his review to the government on March 18.
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Labor’s House of Lords: ALP’s super-sized power grab
By PETA CREDLIN
Have you ever wondered why big business was so totally behind the failed voice campaign and, before that, in favour of same-sex marriage? Has it ever puzzled you that the green-left now consistently outspends the conservative side of politics in election campaigns, even though it’s the Coalition that was always thought to represent the “big end of town”?
There are a number of factors at work here: the sustained leftist indoctrination of the bright students (once just at uni but now in schools too) who eventually go on to dominate the commanding heights of our society and economy; plus the “long march of the left” more generally through our institutions.
But a key element in the radicalisation of big business and in the avalanche of money to support leftist causes has been the mobilisation of our savings into union-dominated superannuation funds that are staffed by Labor activists and largely run by former Labor politicians.
Arguably, thanks to the union-dominated super funds which now manage well over a trillion dollars of retirement savings for about 10 million Australian workers, there’s a giant green-left octopus with tentacles into every corner of the economy that’s reorienting big business towards social, rather than market, objectives.
Maybe socialising capitalism wasn’t the explicit objective when Paul Keating and then ACTU secretary Bill Kelty (and Garry Weaven) set up the compulsory super system, more than three decades back, but that’s been the outcome; especially as the savings taken out of workers’ pockets and given to the union-dominated funds have multiplied, with compulsory contributions climbing from an initial 3 per cent of wages to over 10 per cent now, and legislated for 12 per cent, with Labor wanting 15 per cent as its goal.
It was dressed up as helping people have a better retirement, but the main purpose was always to revive declining union influence (now less than 10 per cent of the private sector workforce) and, in the process, to turn big businesses into social enterprises.
Now, the move towards a green-leftist corporatist state is set to be turbocharged with the Albanese government’s recent announcement that former ACTU boss and Labor minister Greg Combet would succeed Peter Costello as chair of the Future Fund. Since leaving parliament in 2013, Combet has been chair of Industry Super Australia, an umbrella organisation owned by a number of large industry super funds, that in turn provided services back to them, such as investment advice, wealth management, government relations and campaigning.
As part of the closed shop operating in this sector, he’s also been deputy chair of the largest single union-dominated fund, AustralianSuper. More recently, he’s been the head of the Net Zero Economy Agency.
In that capacity, he has called for the mobilisation of workers’ savings towards “nation-building” projects such as welfare housing and green energy, that would not attract investment on a normal cost-return basis.
As Future Fund chair, he’ll now have the chance to redirect the $200-plus billion that’s been accumulated to help fund the pensions of public servants and military personnel, and that under Costello had generated returns of 9 per cent a year, into less prospective ventures that better accord with the left’s agenda.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg of the Labor Inc that Keating and Kelty set up and that successive Coalition governments have largely failed to rein in. The biggest of the union-dominated super entities, AustralianSuper, is chaired by Don Russell, a former Keating staffer.
Other large industry funds include HESTA, chaired by former Labor health minister Nicola Roxon; Cbus, chaired by former Labor Treasurer and current Labor national president Wayne Swan (before that, Steve Bracks); TWU Super, chaired by former Labor minister Nick Sherry; and Industry Super Holdings (the latest umbrella entity for the bodies providing services to many of the union-dominated funds), chaired by former Labor candidate and ACTU official Cath Bowtell.
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John Howard has described the governance of these super entities as “almost like a House of Lords for Labor politicians”. And these are the funds that are growing strongly because they’re mostly the default superannuation choices for workers who fail to nominate a fund when they join a business and because the alternative for workers who don’t want to self-manage their superannuation – the retail funds that were generally owned by banks – have been discredited by the banking royal commission which Labor pressured the Coalition into setting up.
To put the economic clout of these funds into perspective, with nearly $300bn under management, the wealth controlled by AustralianSuper is twice the market capitalisation of BHP, our biggest public company.
What’s more, these union-dominated funds are starting to throw their weight around: whether that’s insisting that the public companies, where they have a large shareholding, disinvest in fossil fuels as part of the “ESG” (environmental, social, governance) push; or by taking direct control of important national assets.
For instance, an industry super fund consortium has bid to own Sydney Airport; super funds have lobbied against the reappointment of public company directors that don’t share their goals; and AustralianSuper has reportedly blocked a Canadian takeover of Origin Energy, partly on environmental grounds.
Meanwhile, unions have demanded super funds review their investments in CSL after Australia’s third-largest company (by market capitalisation) supposedly had a strategy to scale back highly paid workers’ conditions.
Then there’s the issue of super funds channelling money into unions that can then be recycled into the Labor Party.
In 2022, while unions gave some $17m to the ALP, super funds gave some $9m to unions. And if you want to know why sporting organisations were so quick to line up behind the voice, part of the explanation is another one of the big union funds, Hostplus, that reportedly gave nearly $2m in sponsorship to the AFL plus further large sponsorships to other big sports bodies.
Then there’s the issue of the training bodies which super funds sometimes sponsor and that unions often run.
In one recent notorious case, the electrical trades union tried to include in an award a provision that, in order to access pay increases, workers had to undertake a training course. This course was free to union members but cost twice the union fee to non-members. And the only entity reportedly running this course was the union itself.
None of this is going to improve while the Albanese government is in office. The question, though, is whether this giant union-corporate conglomerate is now too powerful for any Coalition government to touch. A reason for the then-Morrison government delaying its signature “super for homes” policy till the last week of the 2022 campaign was fear of the union-super response.
These days, opposition Treasury spokesman Angus Taylor keeps stressing that super balances belong to individuals, not to the funds or to the government. But if it really is our money, and not a government piggy bank, why not make compulsory super contributions optional? Because it’s still tax-advantaged, many would keep paying in.
But especially during a cost of living crisis, why wouldn’t the Coalition consider letting people take the nearly 12 per cent of wages that their employers put into super on their behalf as a pay rise instead?
It’s not as if compulsory super has reduced pension dependency for retirees, which is down just 2 per cent over three decades.
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Business leaders slam IR reform move as an `overkill’
Business leaders have slammed potential changes to industrial relations laws including making it simpler to convert casual employees to permanent and enshrining the right for staff to “disconnect” if they feel work is creeping into their home life.
Harvey Norman Holdings executive chairman Gerry Harvey said he “can’t see the logic” in the IR changes
Taking aim at the push to make is easier for casual workers to become permanent, he said Australia was currently at or near full employment
“We don’t have an unemployment problem and businesses are looking for people but they can’t find them,” Mr Harvey said. “I don’t know why it’s an issue. I don’t get it.
“I think if you’re a business you should be able to employ permanent people and you should be able to employ casual people. But I don’t see how you can make a ruling that because you employed a casual person that after a certain period of time they have to become permanent. You may not have a position for them.”
Mr Harvey labelled the complexity of the labour laws “a joke”.
“There are too many labour laws and so many different categories. You need an army of people to go through it and try and make sense of it,” he said.
Looking at the disconnect issue Flight Centre chief executive Graham Turner described it as “overkill”.
“From our point of view I can’t see why people can’t disconnect if they want to anyway. All they have to do is switch your phone off or switch your laptop off,” he said.
“It’s overkill from what I see. I can’t see the rationale behind this.
“I suppose it depends on what your position is. If you’re a senior executive you have to accept calls and you certainly would not get a promotion to that sort of level if you didn’t.
“My gut feeling is that it’s a total over-reaction on something that’s not an issue.”
Mr Turner said most people who work casually do so because they want to.
“I can’t see the rationale of making casuals who want to be casual, permanent,” he said.
“Most employers who have a good casual would want to make the permanent if they could. They seem to want to solve problems that don’t exists.
Right-wing think tank the HR Nicholls Society described the proposed amendments as “absurd” which seek to add further confusion and anxiety by altering definitions of what is a casual employee.
“It will be medium and small employers and their employees that will most suffer. Squeezing out small business in the market, will only lead to less competition and accountability for larger businesses. It will also impact upon opportunities for employment whether casual or not.,” it said.
The Society said the federal government has taking on board the “right to disconnect” to secure the Greens support, with little to no consultation with business leaders.
“In going down this path there has been little consideration how these changes affect employers and damaging effects it will have on interstate business.
“The amendments are victim of political back dealings that does not put the Australian economy and productivity at the forefront.”
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Also see my other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM -- daily)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Evelyn Rae, a 
Sahara Ray is undoubtedly a good-looking woman. Since she is Australian-born there is even a possibility that we may be distantly related
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