Authoritarianism lives in the mind of a Leftist teacher

Brendan McDougall (below) teaches in a government school in country Victoria. He realizes that some parents are prepared to make considerable efforts to ensure that their children get a good education while others are prepared simply to accept what the government offers. He deduces rightly that, no matter the system there will always be at least some people who seek privately-funded education in order to give their children more than the government offers. He wants to stop them doing that. He wants to forbid private education altogether. He would approve of the old Soviet system.

That is a distinctly radical proposal from a distinctly radical website and one with no chance of adoption so why does Brendan argue that? His argument is actually realistic in some ways. He thinks that having private schools diverts resources that might otherwise go to government schools and he wants more resources for government schools. Private schools get all the best teachers, for instance.

What he overlooks is that the existing system greatly expands the share of national resources that goes into education. Private schools attract private money, which adds to what the government spends on education. He is actually advocating for LESS money to be spent on education

He cannot be unaware of that. It is just Leftist envy that is heaving in his breast. He is aware that many private school users "are paying for their children to have access to a more powerful peer group" and he hates it. He just cannot bear the thought of other people doing well for themelves and feeling happy about it. Their happiness makes him unhappy. He must be miserable a lot of the time.

We can be thankful that there are not enough like him to be influential. When Mark Latham was leading the Labour party, he suffered a crashing electoral defeat after just a mild threat to Federal funding to private schools. Around 40% of Australian teenagers go to non-government schools so that is a huge voting bloc to threaten.

In case it is of any interest, I went to a small country State school in Queensland and sent my son to a regional Catholic school. Both schools were rather good, I think


Australia’s public schools are in crisis.

Teachers nationwide have been shouting about this for more than a decade. There are no teachers. Our students are falling behind internationally. Many kids are depressed and school refusal is through the roof. It’s become so dire that even Education Minister Jason Clare agrees.

Over the past decade, right-wing responses have been to blame the teachers or claim there are too many soft skills being taught. Those advocating in the media for school reform have tended to argue about the funding disparity between public and private schools, and the fact our schools are many percentage points away from meeting the school resourcing standard.

These arguments ignore the reality that our current system values the education of some young Australians more than others — and the numbers obfuscate and distract from the true rot in the sector: class segregation.

We have one of the most robust private education sectors in the world, and it’s hard to argue, especially following a recent Four Corners investigation into allegations of harassment and discrimination at Sydney’s Cranbrook School, that this is doing our society any good.

Private schools don’t need tweaks or reforming; they need to be abolished.

No teachers, no resources

Our teachers are overworked, overwhelmed, burnt out and undervalued — and the numbers often cited are egregious. In New South Wales and Western Australia, shortages of more than 2,000 teachers were reported at the end of 2023. In Victoria, 800 jobs remained unfilled across the state when students returned from the summer (now reduced to 795 at the time of writing, including 14 principals).

This shortage is being felt across the board, but the pain is sharpest at schools in our most vulnerable communities, such as mine, where six teachers have returned from retirement this year and we still have seven unfilled full-time jobs, with no applicants in sight.

In the decade following the 2012 Gonksi review — which assessed school funding and depicted a system characterised by alarmingly declining test scores and increasing educational inequality — funding of private schools has increased at twice the rate of public. Not only did the review’s warnings go unheeded, but successive governments have worked in tandem to accelerate the trend. In Victoria and NSW in 2021, five elite private schools spent more on new facilities than governments spent on 3,372 public schools combined.

These numbers are shameful, but while they liven up discussions in staff rooms, they’re not effective at creating change. There are deeper issues at play. For every cartoonishly posh school in Kew or Bellevue Hill charging well over $30,000 tuition a year, there are five or more smaller, lower-fee private schools that cost $5,000 a year that compete for teachers and students across Australia’s less affluent areas.

These schools are often as materially scruffy as the fee-free public school down the road, with similar performances in metrics like NAPLAN and ATAR. Despite this, parents flock to these independent private schools in droves, with enrolments ticking up 14.1% over the past five years, while enrolments at Catholic private schools increased by 4.8% in the same period. Yet despite recent cost of living pressures, enrolments in public schools only grew by a measly 0.7% over the past five years, well below the average growth for all schools of 3.5%.

Paying for a peer group

We are certainly not getting richer, particularly those of us young enough to have kids starting school for the first time, so why might cash-strapped parents be willing to spend an ever-increasing portion of their disposable income on a product that isn’t measurably “better”?

One reason is that private schools have marketing departments, but a more potent force is that middle-class parents in Australia consider privately educating their children a cultural norm.

Australia is one of the richest countries in the world, and we have one of the highest percentages of private-school-educated young people in the world — 36%, with an increase of 4 percentage points over the past 20 years. In a country like the United States, where there are roiling debates about school choice and rampant social inequality, only 10% of students attended private schools as of 2022-23.

In Australia, enough parents send their kids to private schools that to do otherwise can feel inadequate or negligent. Parents care about their kids and they don’t want them to miss out, so they work two jobs and send their kids to private school so they can relax knowing they did everything they could.

In doing this, however, they inoculate themselves against needing to care about what happens to those who can’t afford what they can. They tap out, and if a third of our families tap out of public education, there becomes little political will left to make our public schools work. This is compounded by the fact that it’s the wealthier, powerful third — the parents who are also doctors and bankers and lawyers and politicians — who leave the public system first.

This means that in Australia we have two education systems — one for everyone, and one for the students whose parents believe that the one for everyone isn’t good enough. These latter children spend their formative years only associating with people like them, with limited mixing across class lines. Parents who send their kids to private schools aren’t necessarily paying for a better education — they are paying for their children to have access to a more powerful peer group.

This has been true for decades. Parents today who attended public schools grew up knowing the state didn’t care about their education, and so it is with today’s young people. They know this in their bones as they walk through the gates. As teachers, we see it in their eyes, but we also see it in our declining PISA scores, our school refusal rates, completion rates, our problems managing behaviour, and the upticks in youth crime statistics. These kids know that their country cares about other children more than them.

Education for all

In a debate about the value of VCE in my Year 12 English class last week, one student asked me if “a 40 here is really worth the same as a 40 at a private school in Melbourne”. The truth is that it’s worth so much more when it’s been fought for so much harder, but there aren’t the structures in place for us to see that.

The rampant, chronic underfunding of our public schools is a blight on our national identity, especially for a country that lionises the idea of a “fair go”. But simply reallocating funding to be more equitable will not address the class segregation corroding Australia’s school system.

So what can we do? Well, we can start by phasing out the federal taxpayer dollars pouring into the coffers of private schools — a minimum of $17.8 billion in 2024. If someone wants to pay for their child to attend a school where they won’t fall in with “the wrong crowd” or the other classist monikers we reserve for poor kids, they can pay for it themselves. We could then invest that money back into our public schools, targeting funding to the communities like mine who need it most.

We could ban the new construction of private schools that are de facto designed to siphon away from the public sector the families who have the resources to invest in their children’s education, robbing their local school of their assistance. A better-resourced public sector could be designed to provide different educational options for different kids, and we could repurpose some of those three-storey performing arts centres into facilities accessible to everyone.

These solutions aren’t easy — they require long-term thinking, values-based politics and bravery. The issue has been ignored for so long that it is entrenched. Decades of underfunding and neglect have made our public schools less competitive and less attractive to middle-class parents. Decades of conversations during school pick-ups and dinner parties have made parents increasingly anxious that their child might get left behind.

Even if we did manage to abolish the grossly inequitable privatised model we currently have, our schools would still be segregated by postcode; by the capacities of parents to pay “top-up fees” to give their local public school an edge. But unless our leaders dare to acknowledge the injustices baked into the system, more kids will leave the public system, more burnt-out public school teachers will leave the profession, and more of our next generation will leave the education system feeling as though it wasn’t designed for kids like them.

If governments, state and federal, are serious about fixing public education, they must consider the radical choice of abolishing the private education sector. Until they do so, they will never truly ensure that our schools are about every child learning, growing and flourishing.

https://www.crikey.com.au/2024/03/15/australia-public-school-private-school-funding-class-disparity/

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Urban planners decry NIMBYs as residents oppose St Lucia housing development

Nimbys are often very active and vocal so goverments are reluctant to defy them. But they are claiming a right that usually does not legally exist under statute law. But Common Law is more flexible and can beget wins. They certainly obstruct housing provision for others

Urban planner Dorina Pojani says "selfish" NIMBYs are preventing much-needed homes from being built.

What's next? Brisbane City Council will decide on whether to approve the development following the weekend's election.
Robert Davidson fears his apartment's value will plummet when a luxury high-rise apartment is built right next door.

The University of Queensland music lecturer lives on a leafy street in St Lucia, just down the road from his campus.

The developer, Place Design Group, plans to build a four-storey building with ten units at the neighbouring property, 7 Ryans Road.

Dr Davidson's real estate agent, Plum Property, estimates his apartment is currently worth $830,000, but would only sell in the $600,000 range if the development goes ahead.

"When I bought the unit I didn't know that was the case. It's kind of been sprung on me and it feels like I'm paying for someone else's profit," Dr Davidson said.

"I'm a huge supporter of medium-density housing. I just think you need to think strategically about where it should go, and there's so many reasons this is not strategic."

Planning educator says attitude 'selfish'

University of Queensland urban planning Associate Professor Dorina Pojani said, in her view, a four-storey housing development in that area of St Lucia was perfectly reasonable.

Dr Pojani said Brisbane's housing shortages were being exacerbated by "selfish NIMBYs" — home owners who oppose new houses being built in their neighbourhoods.

She said in her view this was a clear example of "typical NIMBYism", driven by fear of falling property values.

"That kind of attitude is extremely selfish as the city is undergoing a major housing crisis and we've got people living in tents and parks," Dr Pojani said.

"Even if their property values decline, I say 'who cares?'

"A house should be a place for living. It should not be a place to store wealth, showcase wealth, or pass wealth from generation to generation."

Dr Pojani said any new units, even luxury ones, would help boost Brisbane's housing supply and alleviate the shortages.

Place Design Group did not respond to the ABC's request for comment.

However in their written response to objections raised by residents, they rejected claims their building would lower neighbouring house prices.

"The development will have negligible impacts to surrounding property values," it said.

"The development will enhance the street appeal of Ryans Road, not only for the property subject of the development, but those within the immediate and surrounding area, having a positive influence on nearby property prices."

The 'Nimby Paradox'

As suburban sprawl radiates from cities across the country, experts and politicians are increasingly saying we need more infill development. But building higher-density homes isn't always easy.

Brisbane artist Jackie Marshall, who currently lives with Dr Davidson, said she felt the developers were effectively "stealing" value from the neighbouring properties.

Ms Marshall said the development would worsen traffic, endanger cyclists, clear greenery, and spoil the views for neighbours.

"There are so many sites in St Lucia that are ripe for high and medium density building that do not contribute to cyclists' problems, that aren't on the floodplain, that aren't taking value away from residents' properties," she said.

"If the LNP are serious about solving the congestion problem they need to make sure we don't approve developments that will put cars on the Brisbane river loop and create a danger for commuters."

Natali Rayment is the executive director of Wolter Consulting Group and the co-founder of YIMBY QLD, an anti-NIMBY group.

Ms Rayment said Brisbane had a severe "missing middle" — a shortage of medium-density apartment blocks.

She said higher density accommodation was particularly crucial near facilities such as universities, train stations, and other areas of high activity.

She said many Brisbane residents still clung to the idea of low density suburbia, despite its drawbacks.

"We're a big city with great opportunities, yet we still seem to have these old country town values," Ms Rayment said.

"We've got a housing shortage and if someone wants to build four storeys in St Lucia right now, I think we need to say yes and get it happening."

The development is currently pending approval from Brisbane City Council, which is in caretaker mode for the local government elections.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-14/urban-planner-decries-brisbane-nimbyism/103582718

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Australian Alps snow cover to fare worst in the world under climate change, German study finds

And pigs might fly. Prophecies are worthless. The best snow in our general area is in New Zealand, anyway

A grim picture has been painted of the future of the Australian Alps, with research predicting snow cover days may fall by 78 per cent by the end of the century.

Worldwide, 13 per cent of ski areas are predicted to lose all natural snow cover by 2100.

Researchers from the University of Bayreuth in Germany have today published a study in the journal PLOS One, prompting calls from academics to reinforce an urgent need to address climate change.

The study puts Australia's rate of decline as the highest when compared to six other major skiing regions in the world, including New Zealand, Europe and Japan.

"I'm not surprised by the findings of this report, to be honest," Climatologist and Australian National University Professor Janette Lindesay said.

"There's no doubt that we're heading for an even warmer future."

The study found one in eight ski areas across the globe, or 13 per cent of winter ski slopes, were predicted to lose all natural snow cover this century under a high emissions scenario.

High emissions referred to one of three climate change scenarios based on the Shared Socio-economic Pathways model laid out in the study, alongside "low" and "very high".

Study co-author Dr Veronika Mitterwallner said her team focused on the "high emission" projection to summarise their findings because they considered it the most current and realistic scenario of the three.

Despite this, the study found annual snow cover days across all seven "major mountain areas with downhill skiing will significantly decrease worldwide" across all three scenarios.

Professor Lindesay said it reinforced a need to ramp up efforts to tackle climate change and lessen potential damage to alpine environments.

"The scenarios are effectively storylines … taking into account possible future carbon dioxide emissions, socio-economic circumstances, population growth and possible policy responses to global heating," she said.

"The best thing we can do is get emissions down to net zero as fast as we possibly can."

The study predicts snow resorts may need to move or expand into less populated mountain areas at higher elevations to combat the effects of climate change.

But University of Canberra based geomorphologist Phil Campbell said that would not necessarily work in Australia where ski resorts were at a lower altitude compared to other countries.

"One of the problems in Australia is that we're fairly low in our ski resorts, which are already at the very top of our mountains," he said.

"We're not going to have the same ability as many other countries do to be able to relocate our ski resorts.

"The same goes for endangered plant species as well, because there's nowhere for them to retreat to."

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-14/australian-alps-snow-cover-climate-change-german-researchers-/103577562

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Dick Smith's urgent warning to Australia as a record influx of new immigrants move Down Under

Australian entrepreneur Dick Smith says a record influx of new immigrants is a 'disaster for families' and young people wanting to own their own home.

The electronics chain founder, who turns 80 next week, wants Australia's net immigration slashed to 75,000 a year to ease Australia's rental and housing affordability crisis.

This would take immigration levels back to where they were in 1997, before the overseas intake doubled within a decade, only to double again after the pandemic.

'Every Australian family has a population plan to have the number of children they can give a good life to, but at the rate we are going, it means the average Australian family will have less,' Mr Smith told the Daily Telegraph.

Australia's population is estimated to double in the next 50 years, with big business interests advocating high immigration to boost the supply of labour.

Mr Smith said 'billionaire political donors' only promoted high population growth to expand their wealth.

New Australian Bureau of Statistics data released on Thursday showed Australia welcomed 125,410 permanent and long-term arrivals in January, marking the highest January on record.

Accounting for departures, the net growth in permanent and long-term arrivals for January reached 55,330, surpassing the previous highest intake in January 2009 by 40 percent.

Treasury economists are expecting Australia's overseas intake, covering skilled migrants and international students, to slow to 375,000 in 2023-24.

This would be lower than the record 518,000 intake for 2022-23 and below January's annual increase of 481,620.

But this would still be almost double the pre-pandemic level of 194,400 in 2019-20, before Australia was closed from March 2020 to December 2021.

Official data showed the majority of new arrivals are settling in NSW and then Victoria, leading to more congestion in Australia's two biggest cities.

Most migrants begin as renters, leading to more competition for accommodation in Sydney and Melbourne.

High population growth is also creating problems in other states, with Brisbane the recipient of high interstate migration, as south-east Queensland attracts residents from NSW and Victoria in search of more affordable housing and warmer weather.

Daniel Wild, the deputy executive director of the Institute of Public Affairs think tank, said high immigration was behind Australia's housing crisis.

'It is clear that the federal government's migration program is unplanned, out of control, and out of step with community expectations,' he said.

'On top of this it has failed to address Australia's worker shortage crisis, the very thing the federal government uses to justify such rapid increases in intake.

'It is clear this lazy approach to solving worker shortages is not working and there should be a greater focus of getting Australian pensioners, veterans and students into work.'

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13199425/Dick-Smiths-urgent-warning-Australia.html

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Australia’s ATM extinction!

Hands up if you’ve struggled to find an ATM lately… I don’t mean an overpriced service station ATM; I mean a free, big four banks ATM. If you’ve struggled, you’re not alone.

The big four banks in Australia, namely ANZ, Westpac, the Commonwealth Bank, and the NAB, have not only been shutting down bank branches (around 460 branches in the past three years), they are also rapidly removing ATMs.

As of June 2017, there were 13,814 bank-owned ATMs across Australia. Six years later, in June 2023, there were just 5,693 – a decline of almost 60 per cent or 8,121!

Banks, the government, and corporate media will claim customers overwhelmingly prefer digital transactions, and they’re shutting down ATMs in response to the lack of demand for cash. I push back on this by asking: What came first, the inability to find an ATM, or a natural shift to online services?

Further, considering we were locked down in our homes for almost three years, I would’ve thought measuring outdoor-based consumer activity during this period would be fraught with difficulty.

Over the past few years, one of the main drivers toward digital transactions has been reframing cash as dirty and capable of spreading diseases such as Covid.

As someone who works in the service industry, I witnessed first-hand how successful this narrative proved in scaring people away from using cash. Retailers and businesses took this artificial marketplace signal as a cue to get rid of money permanently – a move many companies would applaud given the considerable costs involved in maintaining cash on the premises.

Offering cash as tender is expensive – from Armaguard collection to paying an accounts employee – not to mention the security costs involved in preventing internal and external theft. Businesses also prefer cards as they can add various surcharges. The ACCC currently has its hands full trying to rein in Australian businesses charging excessive credit card surcharges. Australian companies are legally obliged to charge customers the amount they pay to credit card companies, which is 0.5-3 per cent. Thus, businesses charging a flat surcharge for every transaction are not just ripping us off but also breaking the law.

Further, running and maintaining an ATM costs the bank money. Aside from the initial cost of purchasing the ATM, a suitably qualified person must physically stock the machine with cash and receipt paper. Then there are insurances, including public liability, rent charges, and the ongoing costs involved in anti-fraud software and hardware updates. It’s ridiculous to suggest that banks don’t minimise these costs as much as possible; nevertheless, there’s no doubt ATMs are expensive to maintain. All this highlights that ATMs and cash are no longer strong profit drivers for banks compared to digital products and services.

Indeed, any profits derived from ATMs disappeared in September 2017, when all four big banks stopped charging $2 transaction fees to non-customers using their ATMs. At the time, the banks collectively and accidentally ‘came out’ by stating in the media that they would accept the loss of $500 million in profit produced annually by charging ATM fees. This is interesting, as you will recall that up until that point in time, the banks had claimed that they did not make a cent of profit from ATM fees. For those more astute readers, you may have also noted the significance of the timing of this announcement. 2017 was the first year that ATMs started to disappear en masse…

In response to the rapid closure of bank branches and ATMs, many have suggested that we withdraw our cash at Woolworths, Coles, Aldi, or Australia Post. Okay, sure, that seems valid. However, the other day at my local Woolworths, I counted only two cash checkouts with withdrawal facilities and 12 card-only checkouts. We’re seeing the same scenario play out at Coles. Many Woolworths stores in metro locations across Australia conducted cashless trials as early as 2020. As for Australia Post, well, to achieve sustainability goals, it is currently shutting down local branches and creating regional hubs.

The situation at Aldi is worse. There are some newly opened Aldi stores across the United Kingdom and Europe that require you to scan a digital QR code with embedded digital ID tracking to enter the store. These stores are entirely autonomous, with no shop assistants, and cash is not accepted.

Imagine there’s nowhere to withdraw our money from, and a hiccup in the banking system were to occur, for example, a global banking crisis. Without ATMs or bank branches, it would be hard, if not impossible, to withdraw our savings. This, in turn, could lead to a situation known as a bank bail-in. Bank bail-ins are when a bank’s creditors and investors, i.e., you and I, are forced to take a loss on our holdings to recapitalise the bank during a financial crisis. This is a fancy way of saying the bank uses its customers’ savings to bail itself out of monetary issues, and yes, it’s 100 per cent legal.

Bank bail-ins were introduced in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis to improve the stability of the international monetary system by screwing over the working and middle classes. And please don’t make the mistake of thinking that bank bail-ins only occur in corrupt third-world countries. They have occurred in Cyprus twice, once in 2013 and again in 2021, and in Italy and Spain in 2017. It’s yet another legal mechanism that allows the elites to steal our money to pay for their uncontrolled and unregulated greed.

The banks and government must be positively licking their lips at the unprecedented amount of consumer data falling into their laps at zero cost, with little to no oversight or pushback from the population. The ability of governments to track where their citizens are spending every dollar in the broader economy gives them extraordinary powers. When people use cash instead, that data cannot be captured or subsequently profited by selling it to third parties.

The collection of data on our spending habits is in addition to the ability of certain devices and applications to track our location, know who we’re dating, where we work, how much we earn, and our complete medical and tax histories. These apps, websites, and devices also read our emails, texts, and social media posts and listen to our phone conversations. So, now they will know how, when, and where we spend our money. This occurs even when our financial interactions are technically between us, our bank, and a third party. Imagine what it will be like when we’re all forced onto a government-controlled Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC).

The government plans to fully integrate us into their new dystopian system of digital IDs and CBDCs by 2030. This will usher in a cashless era of control over everything we own and how, when, and where we spend every dollar. When you combine these mechanisms of control with existing Australian government digital infrastructure, such as the MyGov website, which centrally collates every citizen’s Medicare, Centrelink, and taxation information, the government’s digital surveillance box set will be complete.

This digital boxset represents what Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff has labelled the Dictatorship of no Alternatives. Whereby it is not only challenging to escape submitting to this regime, but it also becomes impossible to offer an alternative system. It’s a monopoly on power and information beyond anything previously imagined. Soon, CBDCs and a government-issued and controlled digital ID will become compulsory for living a normal life. This digital pass will be required to travel, sign a lease, open a bank account, apply for a mortgage, enrol your kids in school or university, visit the doctor or hospital, attend a concert, and get a new job. We will have no choice but to submit. Thus, the dictatorship of no alternatives is simply technofascism by another name.

This is all happening right now. The globalists are busy behind the scenes, rapidly dismantling the old financial system based on physical dollars and implementing a new digital ID and CBDC system, gamed to their advantage. One small way to push back against all this is to keep using cash. Sometimes, the simple things in life really do remain the best!

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/03/australias-atm-extinction/

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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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