David Penberthy: Teachers deserve more, but their union demands are illogical

You could argue some of the teachers’ unions demands are fair – but others are just illogical and show a complete lack of restraint, writes David Penberthy.

There is no doubt teaching is a demanding profession and one that has become more demanding in the past generation. There are more kids with special needs and more kids with behavioural problems in the mainstream education system today. The nature and insidiousness of bullying has worsened in the digital age.

The curriculum is more cluttered than it was. Teachers have extra procedural demands and scholastic expectations such as running NAPLAN tests.

Against this backdrop, teachers have the right to ask whether they are getting a fair go.

Equally, the community has the right to ask whether the demands of their union are realistic and whether the lunge towards strike action is the most sensible or only available response.

More importantly, parents have the right to ask how a prima face ludicrous demand for a 20 per cent reduction in teaching time – when teaching time is already lower than it has ever been – could ever be implemented without damaging children’s education.

On the question of what teachers are paid, a lot of people (including me) would argue you can’t pay the best teachers enough. Such an approach has always jarred with the Australian Education Union, which has long opposed performance pay in keeping with its Marxist “all for one and one for all” ethos.

(I’m not using Marxist as a cheap insult there by the way, rather an accurate description of some of the personalities who have held sway over the years on the AEU central committee on Greenhill Rd).

SA teachers during a rally in 2019. Picture: AAP / Sam Wundke

But let’s just agree that as a matter of general principle that teachers deserve more dough.

The Malinauskas Government has tried to argue teachers deserve more, just not as much as the union is demanding.

The government’s success making that argument was dented this week with the timing of the “arm’s length” remuneration tribunal decision to hand every MP in Australia a 4 per cent pay rise, which ends up being a very generous amount given their base rates are already so high. In the case of the Prime Minister it’s a $22,000 increase, and the Premier gets a generous slice too.

Mr Malinauskas was right when he said in the public’s mind there’s never a good time to give a politician a pay rise. That may be true, but there’s also a really bad time to give them one too – like in the midst of a cost-of-living squeeze where everyone, teachers included, is being urged to show wage restraint.

But what the union is demanding shows the opposite of restraint; indeed it looks more like an old-fashioned industrial try-on where you demand the world but deep down would be happy with a midway compromise.

The component of this dispute that is of concern isn’t so much the pay part but the conditions part, and the impact the demanded changes to conditions would have on kids and the budget.

I can see no logical way the AEU could achieve its demand of a 20 per cent reduction in teaching time without affecting children’s education, especially given the school day is already half an hour shorter than when I was at school. The union response to this criticism is to say the government will just have to hire more teachers. If you do the sums, a 20 per cent reduction in teaching time would require an extra 3000 teachers.

Couple that with the union’s original demand for an SSO in every classroom – which equates to another 6000 SSOs – and that’s a grand total of 9000 new jobs. That figure is just 1000 shy of the number of jobs created by the AUKUS deal, at a time when the union is already complaining about a crisis in teacher recruitment.

This is the opposite of real-world thinking and shows an almost deliberate indifference to the reality of managing a state budget in tight economic times. Having mentioned AUKUS, the union’s approach on this seems to reflect a kind of Old Left stream of thought, namely that if we can spend so much money on a few damned submarines, surely a lazy billion for teachers isn’t too much to ask?

But there is one aspect of this dispute that strikes me as symptomatic of a broader malaise, namely this soft-headed view that jobs should no longer come with any level of stress or expectation.

As I said at the start, there is no doubt teachers’ workloads have changed for the worse, but is it all as onerous as we are being told? There’s an aspect to this campaign that seems like the thinking of the triggered generation has crept its way into enterprise bargaining.

Whether the AEU likes it or not, there is a very strong stream of community thought that holds many of us would be prepared to cop almost anything in return for 12 weeks holiday a year.

The determination of the union to strike this Friday was such they notified the government of their industrial intentions before they even bothered to submit a counteroffer to the original pay and conditions deal.

That suggests a kind of blind militancy, the backdrop to which is an election for the AEU leadership, with some more moderate candidates claiming the incumbents are deliberately muscling up to boost their chances of re-election.

So the balancing act for the union is this. We understand the pay part of the argument, we have a degree of sympathy towards the conditions part, but we don’t think that children should suffer from unrealistic demands for the reduction in teaching time.

We also find the claims about the unyielding stress of the job somewhat overblown, suggesting the AEU is more there for the teachers who find the whole job an unbearable ordeal, as opposed to those many great teachers who love the job, regard it as a calling, and can’t think of anything else they would rather be doing.