Credit: Matt Golding
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Obscene priorities
Presbyterian Ladies College now has an $85 million pool yet is receiving funding by the federal government (″Despite $85m pool, PLC gets more funding″, 30/5). The Grand Prix has just been promised $350 million for a new pit building and corporate facility – along with all the other subsidies to the race. Yet the St Kilda Primary School is still – as the film Casablanca puts it – waiting, waiting, waiting for a school hall where students can assemble when the weather is bad. These priorities of the federal and Allan governments are not so much mistaken as obscene.
Noel Turnbull, Port Melbourne
Broken system
How can a school where the median parent incomes can be as high as $344,000 still receive taxpayer funds when public schools remain underfunded?
Peter Baddeley, Portland
Scoring incomes
Perhaps there should be a median income score for families of children in government schools. Those numbers would really be an eye-opener. I doubt there would be too many in the six-figure range, particularly in the western suburbs.
Marie Nash, Balwyn
Taxes for common good
The Greens education spokeswoman Penny Allman-Payne says it is “unfair and indefensible” that a private school with an $85 million sports centre continues to receive public funding. She is right. How can anyone justify taxpayers’ money contributing to a private school’s extravagant aquatic centre?
Taxes are paid for the common good. We all contribute to public health, education, roads, transport, communications, sports clubs, parks and gardens, and so on to ensure such facilities are accessible by all and for all.
We don’t pay taxes to enable rich people to choose an expensive private school, and then expect us to subsidise those choices. If you choose a private school, you should pay for it. Otherwise, do what most of us do – send your kids to a public school, and contribute the money you save from outrageous private fees to that public school. You would then be subsidising the children of parents who are poor, unemployed, single parenting, or
disabled.
You could even boast to your friends that you’re a modern-day Robin Hood. That would be fair and defensible.
Robyn Edwards, Chelsea
Heartbreak high
I am both heartbroken and furious to learn that the Labor Allan government is choosing to short-change Victorian state school students.
The reality at the coalface of under-resourced schools is heartbreaking. Parents might be wondering why their child has a shared class or doesn’t have a school nurse or librarian. This is the reality of schools working under a decade-long funding deficit. Teachers are pushed to teach their maximum face-to-face allotment (making up any extra time by moonlighting as a nurse, librarian or team teaching to ensure no minute is left idle).
When these overworked teachers are sick, schools are routinely redistributing students to other teachers, pushing class sizes into the 30s. Teachers are being pressed to “volunteer” to take extra classes to cover absences, anything, to reduce the school’s spend on casual teachers.
Jacinta Allan pointing to increases in capital funding is a furphy. The building of a hall (projects green lit to help COVID recovery) does nothing to help the tired teachers and undersupported students sitting down to Monday morning assembly.
The added insult is watching students walk to the campuses of private schools carrying their full funding allocation to pre-class swimming training in an Olympic-sized pool.
Kate Rose, teacher, Rosanna
Electoral favours
That the Victorian government will provide, as part of an extended drought package, a $5000 grant to Victorian farmers to help their family businesses pull through the temporary drought is laudable.
I look forward to similar benevolence to the family-owned milk bars and local butcher businesses facing competition from their local mega-supermarket rivals; or the local family-owned hardware stores and nursery businesses facing challenges from the encroaching DIY megastores; or the family-owned gift shops, florists, clothing and toy shops facing devastation from the expanding big box chains. Why do farming small businesses get favourable government attention? I suspect it’s all about electoral politics.
Dennis Richards, Cockatoo
What’s the point?
I wish to add my voice to the letters in The Age (30/5) despairing the decision to extend the North West Shelf project. So many of us are trying our hardest to reduce plastic, compost, save water, live sustainably in every way we can with future generations in mind, and it is a huge slap in the face that makes one feel “what is the point?” Goodness knows what the despair of Indigenous communities is like.
Libby Gillingham, Outtrim
Yesterday’s man
It may have escaped Tony Abbott’s notice that he is a ″yesterday’s man″, which is a nice way of saying he is living in the past. Sussan Ley should ignore him. He is one of the cadre of Liberals, mostly ex-PMs, who are becoming more out of touch with ordinary Australians. Victoria is showing the effects of a poor opposition and listening to conservative Liberals won’t improve matters.
Adrian Tabor, Point Lonsdale
Heed the regions
Waleed Aly (Comment, 30/5) has a vision where the National Party becomes a bit teal, and therefore enables the Coalition to compete politically with Labor. It won’t happen. Urban Australia needs regional Australia more than vice versa. They feed Australia’s cities. They dig the coal and minerals that keep the economy ticking over and Australia’s export income high.
We repay them with second-rate healthcare, a food market that is stacked against producers, and a steady flow of city refugees who make regional housing unaffordable to locals.
If we urbanites occupy their minds at all, what they would see is a bunch of hypocrites who ramble on about the post-carbon economy but in international terms are heavy carbon polluters.
Maybe the teals and other city-driven politicians could pay a great deal more attention to regional Australia. Then they might listen to us.
Alun Breward, Malvern East
Changing Australia
Waleed Aly is spot on, especially with the changing demographic of Melbourne’s regions.
George Megalogenis also noted in his Foreign Affairs essay “Changing Face of Australia″ that the children of Chinese and Indian migrants are also better educated than those from an Anglo background and this has allowed them to be part of the middle class too.
These skilled migrants are a dilemma for some in the major parties who don’t acknowledge and understand the nation’s changing identity and are still stuck in that Anglo past with a lack of diversity in their candidates.
This class divide between the white working classes was reflected in voting patterns as well, especially in the outer suburbs.
Mel Smith, Brighton
Soul of humanity
As a non-religious person, I was moved by Sunday’s Faith column (25/5) by Warwick McFadyen where he discussed the virtues of the The Piano. I agree with everything he said and I congratulate the ABC for having produced it. My view, which I believe coincides well with McFadyen’s, is “that music is the soul of humanity”.
Louis Roller, Carlton
Adverbially, yours
Re adverbs, to your correspondent (Letters, 31/5), I profound feel you pain.
Peter McGoldrick, West Hobart