Australian Politics

Fears ‘TeacherQuitTok’ social media trend ‘warping perception’ of profession for young teachers

This is a classic case of blame the messenger. If they want to stop teachers talking about quitting, they have to deal with the problems behind the dissatisfaction. And Leftst limits on what teachers can do to maintain order in the classroom are the biggest problem. There should be high-discipline schools for unruly pupils

Australian teachers are being inundated with videos of burnt-out peers breaking down as hashtags like ‘TeacherQuitTok’ go viral on social media, prompting fears the negative reinforcement could be pushing young educators out the door.

There have been nearly 17,000 contributions to the ‘TeacherQuitTok’ tag on TikTok, racking up four million views on the single most watched video, while similar tags like ‘TeacherBurnout’ have 12,000 posts under them.

In clips with thousands of likes, young Australian ex-teachers cited the “never-ending” juggle of different needs among their 30-student classrooms, including pupils with behavioural issues, and “lack of respect” from higher-ups and the general public as reasons to quit.

“Being a teacher is really emotionally draining,” a former Brisbane teacher said.

“You’re constantly juggling and being responsible for all these different personalities and different situations, and it’s relentless, it’s never-ending.”

“The access to you 24/7 (from parents) … sometimes it’s a lot,” another added.

Other popular videos under hashtags like ‘TeacherBurnout’ and ‘HowToQuitTeaching’ are even more extreme, with teachers in the US and UK filming themselves having emotional breakdowns in the break rooms and crying in their classrooms.

University of Newcastle Associate Professor Rachel Buchanan has been researching the rise of ‘QuitTok’, which predates the more recent, niche version of the trend for teachers, and is concerned about the impact of such videos flooding educators’ social media feeds.

Although social media allows educators who are feeling “powerless and unheard” to have a voice, Professor Buchanan said, the echo-chamber effect can also “normalise quitting”, especially for young teachers lacking support and mentorship.

“On TikTok it feels inescapable that everyone’s quitting, and everyone’s burnt out … and it can warp your perception of what’s really happening,” she said.

“#TeacherQuitTok also reinforces and validates the decision to leave the profession – hearing others’ stories and joining in feels like participation in a movement or a moment.”

Sydney-based after-school care manager Teneal Broccardo knows first-hand how damaging the exposure to the constant negativity can be, citing the viral content with making her reconsider training to be a primary school teacher.

“There’s this massive trend about how stressful is, and when I was studying I found it really disheartening,” she said.

“I saw all these people working themselves to the ground and I thought, do I want to do this to myself too?”

Already having experience working with children and with classroom management alleviated her fears, the 29-year-old said, but for others she imagined “it could be the last straw”.

“TikTok is very influential. If you’re seeing more positive things instead, like teachers decorating the classroom or explaining different techniques they use, you are going to be more motivated.”

A 2022 Monash University study found only three in every 10 teachers surveyed on staying in the profession for the long-term, and their concerns are regularly reflected in ‘TeacherQuitTok’ content, lead author Dr Fiona Longmuir said.

“It’s the conditions that are making it challenging (to stay) more so than what they’re seeing on social media,” she said.

“There’s a big public discourse saying that teaching is tough, but that’s because it is tough.

“We don’t have a teacher shortage in Australia, but we do have a shortage of teachers who want to work in our classrooms.”

NSW Education Minister Prue Car said a pay rise, more permanent contracts and ban on mobile phones are among the ways the state is trying to “turn the tide on the teacher shortage”.

“Teachers do an incredibly important job in our community and they should be proud of their work. They deserve to be respected and valued,” she said.

“We are starting to see positive signs in terms of teacher vacancies, but we know there is more to do and we continue to look at ways to reduce workload and restore morale.”

https://www.couriermail.com.au/news/fears-teacherquittok-social-media-trend-warping-perception-of-profession-for-young-teachers/news-story/4e4d6fb39dee4f6aac1ef0929a4f6f0d

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Victoria stil refusing to develop much needed gas

Energy minister Chris Bowen deserves high praise for telling Australia the politically incorrect truth – that we need gas to support our accelerated roll out of renewables.

It could not have been easy for Bowen to tell the truth because it contradicted his previous statements and the “we need gas” truth does not accord with the view of many in the cabinet and the ALP supporter base.

As my regular readers know, over the years Bowen and I have often had different views. In Australia, it is rare for a minister to reverse previous statements.

Accordingly, Bowen rises dramatically in my estimation, and the nation could do with more federal and state ministers with that sort of courage.

Australia’s new gas policy means both the government and opposition have similar gas policies, and that suddenly puts Victoria in a position where it is holding the east coast of Australia to ransom by stopping development of its immense low cost onshore no fracking gas reserves.

Fascinatingly, the last time Victoria held the nation to ransom over gas was in the 1960s, soon after gas was discovered in Bass Strait. The then Premier, the late Henry Bolte, wanted to keep the gas for Victorians and to use cheap, reliable energy to boost industry in the state.

It worked and Victoria got a great boost, but eventually the gas was shared with NSW and other states, and we have an east coast pipeline grid.

It is time for Canberra to get much tougher with the delinquent Victorian state, which keeps crying poor when it in fact is not using its enormous riches.

If Victorians wants higher unreliable energy prices, I guess that’s their business, but there is no reason why the existing pipelines should not be used to send Victorian gas to NSW and Queensland who understand the value of gas to lower emissions while keeping reliable energy prices low.

Victoria can encourage its industry and people to follow its energy and go north.

Meanwhile, Victoria can still benefit from is the remarkable attributes of its gas, which is dissolved in deep water. In Queensland, the water that is produced with gas is not suitable to grow crops but the water that contains Victoria’s gas needs very little if any treatment to be used to grow carbon absorbing plants and to revolutionise parts of Victoria’s agriculture, including making it drought proof.

Bowen’s current energy policy still insists that nuclear is too expensive. It is certainly a lot more expensive than a Latrobe Valley gas fired power from the incredibly low-cost Victorian gas. But BHP has shown that Canadian nuclear power is much cheaper than current Australian power costs. .

By using Victoria’s low carbon gas not only can we remove coal from the power equation but suddenly by not rushing nuclear we can watch a nuclear revolution taking place that is led by China.

The world’s second-largest economy now operates nuclear submarines using molten salt cooled thorium, and the same fuel is being used in container ships and also new power stations. It looks to be the future if nuclear, so it makes sense to wait.

My regular readers know the detail of Victorian gas and the fact that former Premier Daniel Andrews gave a carefully selected committee $42m with the instruction to look for gas on shore in Victoria, but that instruction carried a strict caveat – they were forbidden to look where one of the world’s leading gas reserve estimators, MHA Petroleum Consultants, (now part of the giant Sproule group) had calculated Victoria gas reserves totalled 4.996 trillion cubic feet of gas.

That’s some 60 per cent of the last 50 years of Bass Strait production. Better still there was a “high” estimate of reserves at 12.6234 TCF which would make the Victorian reserves second only to the North West Shelf. Lakes Oil also has onshore gas, and its reserves were also in forbidden territory.

The Andrews Committee pocketed the money and dutifully reported Victoria has no on shore gas. Publication of the MHA calculated reserves was removed from government web sites.

The gas was first discovered when Victorian brown coal fields were being mapped in the decades leading up to the 1950s. Decades later, with Bass Strait running down, Exxon in Houston began researching this very deep gas that is dissolved in water and sent the data to MHA.

The first proposal to develop the gas included Esso and BlueScope in the consortium and was put to the then Coalition Premier Denis Napthine in 2014. Napthine incorrectly thought it involved fracking and would hurt farmers, so rejected it prior to the election he lost.

That first proposal emphasised that further wells (about six) must be drilled to make sure that production and permeability will duplicate the first test wells. But Exxon were so confident that they planned to spend $200m (in 2014) on the project, arranged for BlueScope and other major gas users to pencil intent contracts and signed six agreements with local landholders who would benefit from the development.

In the decade that followed Andrews and his energy minister Lily D’Ambrosio, must have known that fracking was not required and because the gas was on the national pipeline and next to the Exxon treatment plant the costs were very low. As a result, they had to be able to deny its existence to keep green seats.

To get Victoria to comply with national policy may require punishment. And also required, is a local media that is not engulfed by Victorian government propaganda.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/victoria-holds-australia-to-ransom-on-much-needed-gas/news-story/35a6f82bb79fa59f942dad9f93144de4

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PM says Labor senator Fatima Payman’s use of Israel ‘genocide’, ‘river to the sea’ was inappropriate

Another Muslim bigot

Anthony Albanese says it’s “not appropriate” a WA Labor senator used a controversial chant when she broke ranks with the government’s position on Palestine, as the Coalition heaps on pressure on him to “take action” against her.

Fatima Payman on Wednesday accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza, and questioned how many more deaths would be needed before the Prime Minister declared “enough”.

In a significant split from the Labor Party’s position, the Muslim senator called for sanctions and divestment from Israel, and declared “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” – a phrase Mr Albanese has previously condemned as a violent opposition to a two-state solution.

She said the phrase was a call for “freedom from the occupation, freedom from the violence, and freedom from the inequality”.

Senator Payman criticised Mr Albanese and her Labor colleagues for failing to condemn Israel and “stand up for what is right”, accusing her government’s leaders of making “performative gestures” while defending the “oppressor’s right to oppress”.

Mr Albanese on Thursday morning was asked if he had spoken to Senator Payman since she made the comments, to which he gave an emphatic “no”.

He said he did speak to her regularly, as he does all his Labor Party colleagues, and their last conversation was “very pleasant”.

But he said her use of the politically charged phrase was “not appropriate” and did not reflect the Labor Party’s position.

“What is appropriate is a two-state solution, where both Israelis and Palestinians have the right to live in security and peace and prosperity,” he told ABC Radio.

“It is not in the interests of either Israelis or Palestinians to advocate there just be one state. That is a forerunner of enormous conflict and grief.”

Coalition home affairs spokesman James Paterson said the Prime Minister “has to take action”, noting Senator Payman had “laid down the gauntlet” to Mr Albanese.

“She’s used a phrase the Prime Minister himself has agreed is a violent statement. She’d endorsed the phrase, and in the Prime Minister’s own analysis, people who make this statement are in opposition to a two-state solution,” Senator Paterson told Sky.

“She’s not just undermined decades of bipartisan foreign policy, she’s undermined decades of Labor Party policy.

“The Prime Minister has said this phrase has no place in Australia. Surely he cannot (have) a member of his caucus saying this.”

Senator Payman gave a statement to a small selection of media on Wednesday on Nakba day – the anniversary of Israel’s 1948 establishment – where she acknowledged there was “disillusionment” in the community with the political parties.

“Today, more than ever, is the time to speak the truth – the whole truth – with courage and clarity,” she told SBS News and Capital Brief.

“My conscience has been uneasy for far too long. And I must call this out for what it is. This is a genocide and we need to stop pretending otherwise.”

Mr Albanese said the scenes coming out of Gaza were “very traumatic”, but said Jewish Australians were also experiencing “a lot of trauma” due to rising anti-Semitism.

“People who happen to be Jewish are being held responsible here for the actions of the Netanyahu government. I don’t believe that is appropriate,” he said.

Senator Paterson said Senator Payman’s call for Australia to end trade with Israel especially at a time of rising anti-Semitism would “further undermine and test social cohesion”.

Former Labor minister and ALP Friends of Israel co-convener Mike Kelly labelled Senator Payman’s comments “disappointing” and “completely wrong”, while opposition foreign affairs spokesman Simon Birmingham said the slogan had “no place” being uttered by members of the government.

Jewish leaders have repeatedly sounded the alarm about the “river to the sea” chant, which they argue calls for the destruction of Israel.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/labor-senator-breaks-ranks-over-israels-genocide/news-story/cf597ea6581533f513a8fca0be0bbc5e

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Albanese government shows its true character in budget blowout

Federal budgets are more than numbers; they reveal the character of a government and this week’s effort confirms that Anthony Albanese is running the most green-left government we’ve ever had, with more handouts, more debt and more picking winners.

On top of epic incompetence in immigration and border protection, workplace changes to buy off the unions, the failed attempt to entrench racial difference in our Constitution via the voice proposal and the broken promises on tax and superannuation, now gone is any pretence at budget responsibility.

With the terms of trade at a once-in-a-century high and unemployment at a once-in-a-half-century low, the budget should be in massive surplus.

Instead there’s a wafer-thin $9bn surplus, largely on the back of fossil fuel exports that the government wants to stop, to be followed by a long run of deficits of between 1 per cent and 2 per cent of GDP based on extra baked-in spending of $315bn largely on the so-called care economy.

Plus there’s $80bn in off-budget spending (for student loans, low-income housing and more green projects such as another $7bn for Snowy Hydro).

But even with so much spending off-budget, net debt is still expected to grow by another $200bn across the next five years.

All the old budget rules – such as keeping tax under a certain percentage of GDP, capping growth in spending and insisting that new spending is offset by savings – that helped Peter Costello deliver 10 straight surpluses and Paul Keating to deliver four have been scrapped in favour of creative accounting that dresses up spending as investment.

This budget conclusively proves that Labor monumentally fails to grasp that government can’t spend a dollar that it doesn’t get from taxpayers, either in taxes now or in taxes tomorrow to pay for today’s debt. As always, Labor thinks government is much smarter at spending taxpayers’ money than we are ourselves.

All the average Australian will gain from this budget that’s new is the non-means-tested $300 electricity bill handout that won’t nearly compensate for the climate-policy-driven leap in costs; and for low-income renters, some extra help that won’t nearly compensate for the immigration and interest-rate-driven rise in housing costs.

And even these are essentially the government putting in one pocket money that it has taken out of the other. What this budget will mean for all of us is a long-term weaker economy with bigger government, lower productivity and more green protectionism.

The only real surprise in the budget was the brazenness with which Jim Chalmers abandoned any fidelity to the fiscally responsible pro-market legacy of Keating and Bob Hawke, to trumpet the virtues of green interventionism.

The relentless boosterism of the federal Treasurer sits uneasily with the fact Australians, struggling with mortgage repayments that have doubled, don’t feel Labor has helped them and they are starting to notice that GDP per person has fallen for four straight quarters – meaning that whatever the headline numbers say, ordinary families are already in deep recession.

Very few economists accept the government’s spin that its energy and housing handouts will reduce inflation. Even if the handouts temporarily mask some policy-driven cost increases, struggling families are much more likely to spend on other necessities than to keep the money in their pockets. Hence the overall inflationary pressures that so worry the Reserve Bank and have led to the sustained rise in interest rates, which might even increase again.

The budget has only intensified the paradox of the Reserve Bank tapping the economic brakes while the government presses the accelerator; so, with some economists now tipping more interest rate rises, it seems undeniable that the biggest impact of the budget will be to keep interest rates higher for longer, with even the government’s own budget papers forecasting no drop in the cash rate before the middle of next year.

What was needed in this budget was a short-term focus on beating inflation, a medium-term focus on controlling government spending and a longer-term focus on making our economy more productive. In failing on all three counts, the government has let our country down badly.

As well as permanently higher wages for aged-care and childcare workers (as if the government should be meeting the wage costs of mostly private sector workers), there has been no serious attempt to rein in skyrocketing National Disability Insurance Scheme costs other than by funding the states to stop cost-shifting on to the commonwealth. And it’s far from clear that the government is serious about big cuts to immigration.

Quite apart from the fact it needs continued high immigration to pump up the overall economic growth numbers and avoid a technical recession, and even on its own figures still expects to keep immigration at double the average of the Howard years, there’s as yet no specificity about how it will cap overseas student numbers or require educational institutions to house the students they import.

But this has become a characteristic of this government: to declare an objective without any detail about its implementation and then to act as though wishing it has made it happen.

Given the woke obsessions of our universities, is the government’s announced objective to graduate eight out of 10 Australians by 2050 likely to make us more productive, as opposed to more likely to vote green left?

Then there’s some $23bn in various Future Made in Australia programs designed to make us a renewable energy superpower because, the Treasurer insists, the “world is committed to net zero”. Even though China and India are not – or at least not nearly as quickly or as convulsively as we are.

It doesn’t matter how often the government asserts it, the notion that Australia has a comparative advantage here, as if other countries don’t have wind and sunlight, hardly stands scrutiny.

There may be a case for some assistance to the strategic minerals that more battery making will require, especially given China’s attempt to corner this market, but it’s hard to credit that we should invest massively in “green hydrogen” that’s completely unproven at scale or that we can out-subsidise the US or the EU. Given that the big players in these industries include billionaires such as Andrew Forrest, why is the government relieving them of the need to commit more of their own money? Why is Labor bankrolling billionaires but making ordinary families scrimp and save?

It’s now a decade since the last budget that attempted any serious economic reform, when the Coalition tried to roll back entitlements and cut government spending. Instead, what we have now is a budget where government spending, as a share of the economy, is forecast to rise to its highest levels, outside the pandemic, in almost 40 years.

With no obvious cuts to anything and an abundance of giveaways, this one has the feel of a pre-election budget. Perhaps backed with more wall-to-wall government advertising, it might be enough to anaesthetise voters. But if the government does run to a premature election before the end of the year, it will expose its fear that the overall economy is going to get worse.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/albanese-government-shows-its-true-character-in-budget-blowout/news-story/92625302366a4870e12f85092825f038