An education in lies, waste and delusion

AUSTERITY should be the hallmark of the Turnbull government’s first Budget.

We can’t afford to keep throwing money at so-called entitlements while the cost of living hits taxpayers in the pocket and we certainly can’t afford to keep shovelling money to the international community so former Labor politicians on impressive pensions can bask in the praise of their global fellow travellers. Australian taxpayers are still paying for the fantasies of the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments and face a $400 billion hit over the next decade, thanks to Labor, since the GFC. Run the ruler over some of the burden the taxpayers are carrying for Labor and it’s easy to understand why Labor’s pet projects are costing us a bundle. Former prime minister Julia Gillard’s global generosity to her favourite education project is still bleeding Australian taxpayers at an outrageous level. To date Australia’s combined contribution to her particular favourite, the Global Partnership Education Fund, has reached a staggering $480.8 million. The GPEF was known as the Fast Track Initi-ative when Gillard first diverted Australian dollars its way. Given her open-handed generosity in disbursing taxpayers’ money toward the GPEF, it’s not surprising she was rewarded with the chairmanship of the New York-based fund in 2012 and was reappointed last December for a further three-year term. Back in 2007 her government contributed $70.8 million in a three-year grant to the fund. In 2011, that was increased to $270 million to cover the next three years to 2014. Of the $140 million, a welcome reduction, for 2015-2018, $51 million is still to be disbursed. Figures released at the time of Gillard’s reappointment show Australia listed as the second largest donor to the GPEF, providing the equivalent of $US257.6 million or 18.26 per cent of its $US1410.6 billion total budget. Our generous donation is only exceeded by the UK’s which is the equivalent of $US431.3 million or 30.58 per cent of the budget and well ahead of Denmark’s contribution of $US164.8 million (11.68 per cent) or the Netherlands which ponied up $161.4 million or 11.44 per cent. While we are helping students internationally, our own kids are falling behind inter-national benchmarks as the teachers’ unions which support Labor, and presumably Gillard’s generosity, get even more funding while their ­pupils’ marks decline. According to the GPEF’s website Gillard had a “distinguished career of public service” in Australia. So distinguished she only managed to form a government with the assistance of two idiosyncratic renegades, Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott, who both betrayed their conservative electorates to prop up a government so dysfunctional that the Labor Party was forced to move against Gillard and reinstate the leader of the Labor government which so famously “lost its way” — Kevin Rudd. The website also claims Gillard “successfully managed Australia’s economy during the global economic crisis” — as outlandish a statement as was ever used to polish a CV. Under Labor, first under Rudd and then Gillard, before Rudd returned, Australia had $44.8 billion in net assets in 2007 and a net debt of $161.6 billion in 2013 when Labor lost office. If that counts as successful management, the average householder managing the mortgage and paying the school fees and other run-of-the-mill bills and still staying ahead, is a financial genius. The deficits run up by Gillard were wasted money. But that’s not the story the spin doctors, including Gillard’s old staffer Bruce Wolpe, a former Fairfax adviser who is now working for her in New York. According to the website, again, Gillard “reformed Australia’s education at every level”, which may be part of the reason standards are on the slide. “She developed a needs-based funding system for every school and ensured funding was tied to a quality improvement agenda of better teaching, individual learning plans and parental engagement,” the blurb burbles. Presumably, that would be the unfunded Gonski plan to throw more money at the teachers’ union. A plan that is set to cost Australians about $37 billion over a decade unless sanity prevails and important considerations such as effectiveness are adopted. As for parental engagement, ask parents how many of them agreed to a curriculum which encourages sexualisation of pre-pubescent children under the Left’s plan to enforce a level of social engineering not seen since the Soviets attempted to break the family and Maoists encouraged young people to denounce their parents for thought crimes. Gillard is also lauded for “ensuring significant investment in school buildings” which makes me think the horror stories of the BEF didn’t reach New York or they were scrubbed from her CV, unless shade cloths count as significant investments at the GPEF, in which case more millions are likely to be wasted under Gillard’s chairmanship. Every year we keep spending on international school programs, our own students fall further behind their peer groups overseas. The average 15-year-old is more than three years ­behind the equivalent Shanghai student in mathematics and 18 months in reading. A 12-year-old Korean stu-dent would match a 15-year-old Australian in problem-solving. It makes sense to invest in education, if the investment shows dividends. But it makes no sense to keep throwing money at international programs under the direction of a failed Labor prime minister while our own children fall further and further behind.