The AEU’s SA boss should have seen trainwreck interview coming | David Penberthy

If the Australian Education Union is to be believed, teaching is nothing other than a hellish task, writes David Penberthy.

The attractiveness of teaching as a job is now so dire that the Albanese Government has announced a $10 million campaign to urge people into the profession.

It is a great initiative and the advertising around the push is excellent.

For those of us who came up through the state school system, the teachers featured in the advertisements remind of us of the great teachers we had who went the extra yard for us.

Aside from our parents – or in some cases even more than our parents – these teachers played a huge and beneficial role in our path to adult life.

Having said all that, I can’t help but wonder whether the organisation that is ostensibly there to defend and protect teachers has been complicit in running the profession down.

If the Australian Education Union is to be believed, teaching is nothing other than a hellish task, which gets more hellish with each passing year.

Perhaps my circle of mates is a statistical aberration, but most of the teachers I know claim to love their jobs and have little time for their union.

It feels like the teachers who see the job as a calling, the ones who can’t imagine themselves doing anything else, regard the AEU as something to be shunned or endured, speaking as it seems to do for the stress leave squad who lie awake fretting at the unyielding burden of it all.

Australian Education Union SA branch president Andrew Gohl speaks at the September 1 teachers strike. Picture: NCA NewsWire/ Kelly Barnes

From a logical perspective, it seems weird that an organisation that wants more people to teach will in the same breath act like there’s no tougher job out there than being a teacher.

In terms of its political credibility, public standing, and capacity to attract and retain the people who should make up its base, the SA branch of the Australian Education Union finds itself at a crossroads.

The pigheadedness the union has shown during this industrial campaign has been something to behold.

I can’t remember talking to a less prepared and more hapless subject than the local AEU boss Andrew Gohl in his radio interview last week, in light of the union’s decision to do two things – threaten further strike action before it has even seen the government’s revised offer, and vow to hold that stoppage smack bang in the middle of Year 12 exams.

It was guileless of Gohl not to realise that the impact on Year 12s during the most stressful period of their schooling life would of course be the focus of the interview, especially as we are talking about the Covid generation whose schooling was marked by interruptions.

Education Minister Blair Boyer said he felt talks were progressing in good faith. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Morgan Sette

It was the very angle taken in that morning’s coverage in The Advertiser, and opposition education spokesman John Gardner had made the same criticism the day before.

Education Minister Blair Boyer had also spoken of his confusion that things were about to go off the rails again in an industrial sense when (he figured) talks were progressing in good faith.

For Gohl to not see the freight train coming was laughable.

The AEU’s combined leadership did not even seem to have discussed the wisdom of disrupting the Year 12s during their final crucial weeks – though Gohl claimed otherwise and said: “If there are teachers involved in supporting Year 12 students doing their exams then I’m sure we can work our way around that.”

It suggests there’s some truth in the assertion that in terms of actually doing any teaching, it’s been a long time between drinks for the AEU leadership. And as for Andrew Gohl’s casual suggestion that Year 12 students are resilient and work well independently, it’s hard to reconcile an industrial campaign framed around the demand for more teaching staff with the declaration that Year 12s don’t really need teachers anyway.

The image of teachers as whingers – which is in my view is overwhelmingly garbage – is perpetuated by the likes of Gohl talking about how unbearable it’s all become. When most people hear that, especially after doing a 12-hour shift nursing or digging holes with four weeks annual leave, they just laugh to themselves and say: yeah right.

The tactics of the union throughout its drawn-out industrial campaign have been hard to follow.

For the past two months it has been arguing that it was all about reducing teaching time for teachers. The government has already publicly agreed to do just that, agreeing to a time frame to implement a 60-minute reduction per week.

Having told the people of South Australia that it was never really about extra money, now it seems that apparently, it is.

The AEU is still demanding an 8.4 per cent pay rise in the first year. If you contrast that with other workers in the public service, it is tactically harder to win the argument, given the ambos got 2.5 per cent and the nurses got 3 per cent. And if you reflect on the regard with which nurses are held, compared to teachers, I am not sure why the AEU thinks it is winning the public over with any of this.

The union is at least consistent in terms of its failure to read the popular mood. This is the same lot who in 2019 told parents to take the day off work to watch their children perform in Christmas plays after the traditional end-of-year performances were shifted from evenings to 10am in a union ban on performing duties outside of school hours.

In that same campaign the AEU imposed a statewide ban on writing comments in student’s report cards, opting for a straight A to E, giving parents no insights into why their student’s performance had declined or improved.

All great ways to win hearts and minds.

To finish where we began, none of that reputational criticism should be sheeted home to teachers.

Most of them are too busy simply doing their jobs, and doing them well, to worry about the woe-is-us stylings of this old-fashioned industrial clique on Greenhill Rd, who think teaching is such an unimaginable burden that no amount of recompense does justice for the suffering they endure.