Credit: Illustration: Matt Golding
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Education funding
Jacinta Collins, from the National Catholic Education Commission, claims it’s divisive and unhelpful to pit school sectors against each other (“Stop stereotyping private schools”, 15/6). But what does it represent when private schools have paid supplements in the media advertising their elite facilities and programs? That’s divisive.
Creating and reinforcing advantage means there is inevitably a disadvantaged group. One only has to read school brochures to see how private schools (rich and poor) reinforce their difference from public state schools. That’s divisive. Admittedly not all private schools are wealthy but they extol their differences such as religious ethos. That’s divisive.
They are not for profit community services, so should pay tax like those organisations. A very small number of private schools share their facilities and curriculum options. That’s to be encouraged. I look forward to seeing more kids from local public schools sharing the facilities at Xavier, St Leonard’s and Geelong Grammar.
Rosita Vila, Aireys Inlet
Imagine a single, properly funded system
Jacinta Collins puts the argument for not removing the payroll tax exemption from Catholic schools. So much time and ink is spent on arguing for a fair mechanism for funding our schools and whether one change or another benefits one sector – private or public – over the other. This only happens because we have a two-tier system. Imagine if we just had one secular, publicly funded school system that was properly funded and where children of different religious denominations and social classes could mix and hopefully better learn to understand and live together.
Schools should not exacerbate wealth and class divisions in our society. Religion is a private matter that surely can be addressed by families and religious organisations outside the classroom. I know it won’t happen any time soon, but hopefully one day we will have one school system, and the arguments will focus on the skills and knowledge future generations will need for the significant challenges ahead.
Jenny Macmillan, Clifton Hill
A budget mismatch
Twenty three years ago my total school budget for 250 primary children was approximately $1.3 million. Twenty minutes up the road a private school was charging $20,000 per year. So, ultimately, the private school had an extra $5 million in their budget each year.
My school each had on average about 20 children in grade one who were identified at risk. Because we shared a psychologist with 10 other primary schools we were lucky if we had four of those children assessed each year. Up the road they had employed a permanent full time psychologist.
Extra support personnel for children at risk meant that there wasn’t enough funds to employ a physical education teacher. Up the road not only did they have PE teachers but they also employed an ex-AFL player to coach their footy team. Our swimming program was restricted as we shared the local outdoor pool. Up the road the children had access to a heated indoor pool. Our successful chess team (made state finals each year) was coached by a volunteer, an invalid pensioner. Up the road they employed an ex-grand master to coach their team. Our school band borrowed instruments from the Salvation Army, while the private school had a modern performing centre and high country camp.
In 2012 the Gonski school funding review recommended that to improve school results the government should allocate funding on a needs base. More than a decade later and according to analysis by Greenwell and Bonner (Waiting for Gonski) we have much greater inequality in school funding. PISA results from 2012 to 2021 show a decline in the way Australian 15 year olds are performing.
How can anyone justify providing government funding to high-fee schools when the most of the children at risk of failing are in a government schools. Imagine the outcry if the AFL stopped their funding equalisation and North Melbourne were required to operate on a budget a 10th of Collingwood?
Kevin Brown, Moonlight Flat
THE FORUM
Two sides to the story
Jacinta Collins says the state government’s payroll tax initiative is divisive. If you want to see real division, take a tour of some public schools, including those in regional areas, and then through those elite private institutions bloated with a combination of parents fortunate enough to be able to pay, mega alumni money and considerable taxpayer contributions from those who are unable to even contemplate sending their children there.
Craig Jory, Albury, NSW
Doing more with less
Australia’s school system spends much more than it needs to. The Schools Resource Standard indicates the level of per student funding a school needs to ensure most students are achieving above minimum standards in NAPLAN. The per student gross income per student in many private schools is well over twice the standard amount.
Much of this is redirected to capital projects of sometimes questionable educational value in a competition for clients. We would have a much cheaper school system overall if our governments fully funded all schools to the Schools Resource Standards, on condition that they did not charge fees. This is the situation in countries like Canada whose students perform significantly better on international tests. We would also have a less segregated and more equitable system befitting the country of the fair go.
Lawrence Ingvarson, Canterbury
Setting the standard
“Schools can’t be treated like businesses,” Collins writes (“Stop stereotyping private schools”, 15/6). Maybe private schools shouldn’t act like businesses.
James Lane, Hampton East
Moderates losing out
The Age headline “Pesutto’s Coalition sinks to a new low in the polls” (15/6) would have been more accurate had it stated: “Support for the Liberals sinks to a new low.” As a rare moderate in today’s Liberal Party, Pesutto is like a shag on a rock as the party moves to the right.
Pesutto’s treatment by his Liberal colleagues echoes that of the late Malcolm Fraser, when John Howard initiated the Liberals’ transformation into a party that elected the likes of Tony Abbott and Scott Morrison to its leadership. The fact is that moderates no longer have a place in the contemporary Liberal Party. Prior to his untimely death, Fraser proposed that there was a need for a new party guided by genuinely liberal-conservative principles. It’s time to resurrect this idea.
Allan Patience, Newport
Safety upgrades
Two horrific bus crashes have occurred in Australia within a month. The devastating impact of these incidents will have long-lasting repercussions for the passengers and bus drivers, their families, communities and the emergency services and hospital staff involved. The coverage of these events has been heart wrenching. It has also shaken my confidence in the inherent safety of bus travel. Is it not time to address the issues and fallibilities surrounding airbags for bus passengers and the design and mandatory wearing of seatbelts by passengers on buses?
Wilga Kottek, Main Ridge
Whose safety comes first?
Our politicians do love their three-word slogans. Listening to Victoria’s minister for roads and road safety during budget estimates on Wednesday, it’s about people being able to move about “safely and efficiently”. But apparently this concern is mainly about people moving about in motor vehicles.
Those of us who want to move about by walking, cycling or using public transport usually need to choose between safety and efficiency. People wanting to cross busy roads safely often need to add some distance to their journey to reach a safe pedestrian crossing. Cyclists often have to take a circuitous route to reach one of the few safe cycling paths. And people wanting the safe option of public transport often have to endure long travel times due to infrequent, indirect services.
And the upshot of this bias towards people moving about in motor vehicles? More people choosing to drive, making the roads less safe and less efficient for everyone.
Andrea Bunting, Brunswick
The cost of development
One reason we are not able to improve our productivity is that we are often, and increasingly, stuck in traffic jams as soon as we leave our homes. Our taxes are being turned into concrete, with hugely expensive infrastructure projects aimed at reducing future congestion. We are unlikely to make up for the extra time we have spent slowing down for road works over the last few years, and with continuing rapid population growth, the new roads will fill up with more traffic in no time so we are really no better off.
Meanwhile, we don’t have enough resources for the services that really matter – aged care, healthcare, housing, public education, social support, and environmental protection.
Jennie Epstein, Little River
One track mind
The federal government has appointed a fast train authority for trains between capital cities. Without major political support and new thinking, this idea will get no further than it has in the past 40 years. The less infrastructure we build the more bespoke each project becomes, meaning each is dearer and takes longer. We currently build roads everywhere and subsidise truck transport by not charging for the disproportionate road wear from trucks.
There is however one country that has built more fast trains than the rest of the world put together in the past 15 years. It is also building such projects in neighbouring countries. It now has the expertise, labour and manufacturing system to build, ship and install all the rails, bridges, rolling stock and assorted equipment quickly and cheaply. Would we consider the fast train world leaders building some for us?
Mark Freeman, Macleod
A national freeze
The federal $10 billion Australia Housing Future Fund legislation is being blocked in the Senate. The Greens want $2.5 billion for public and affordable housing from this year and $1 billion to help co-ordinate a national freeze on rent increases, joining forces with the LNP to block legislation. So what else do they have in common? They all go home to warm beds and a roof over their heads.
Gary Roulston, Endeavour Hills
We all lose
Reading Shaun Carney (“Voice raises doubts over PM’s skill”, 15/23) I felt an enormous sense of sadness and shame that Peter Dutton has chosen to turn the Voice debate into a win or lose situation between our white leaders. Anthony Albanese’s campaign skills should have nothing to do with the success of this referendum.
Human rights, empathy and hope for our nation should determine the success of this once-in-a-lifetime chance to right the wrongs of the past.
Marilyn Hoban, Mornington
Why I’m saying No
I’ve decided to vote No in the forthcoming referendum. My main reason is that we are all now fortunate to live in a free, democratic and largely prosperous country. We all originated from somewhere in Africa so all of our ancestors came from somewhere else. Some of this involved invasion and inhumane treatment of earlier settlers. But we are now all Australians.
Isn’t the very idea of one group having more of a voice than others undemocratic? This is not to say that Indigenous people should not be recognised by an amendment to the Constitution that acknowledges they were indeed the original occupants of a land that now presents benefits to all its inhabitants.
Ken Barnes, Glen Iris
Truth-telling first
The Voice is top-down, paternalistic, complex, opportunity-intensive for politicians – and ineffectual except for an increase in white complacency: “look what we’ve done for you”. But it’s like trying to decorate the house before the foundations are laid.
Truth-telling or restorative justice, is from the ground up, confronting, nation changing, destructive of our colonial complacency and administratively simple, with no room for politicians. So for Canberra, the choice was easy. But truth-telling should be first — otherwise how do we know what we’re voting for?
John Laurie, Riddells Creek
We need a guarantee
Your correspondent’s suggestion to reboot and redistribute re the referendum (Letters, 14/6) is a short-term solution to a long-term issue. If political parties could be trusted to do the right thing by our Indigenous colleagues then it could be workable but only a constitutional guarantee can give them the support they need (and deserve).
Leah Billeam, Portarlington
They deserve your trust
A Voice that can “be legislated any time without a referendum” is a Voice that can be eliminated any time. Removing the words “and the executive government” strips the Voice of its most effective means of achieving practical change – which is why the Voice has been proposed in the first case.
Don’t ask for the Voice to change, ask what you can do to trust and understand the Voice so you can support it to succeed. Read the submissions to the Senate inquiry into the history of its evolution and proposed wording. Understand the gap for what it is – a stubbornly persistent inequality in health and wellbeing in Australian society, whose seeds lie not in a difference in race or culture, but rather in the First Nations people’s experience of colonisation. Ask how we can “undo” the legacy of colonisation and improve lives.
What does it mean if you cannot trust the majority of First Nations Australians who support the Voice to know what’s best for themselves, and then support them to achieve it?
Giselle Darling, Fitzroy North
AND ANOTHER THING
Donald Trump
Single-handedly Trump, supported by his unreflective followers, has made abuse, lying, misogyny, etc. into a positive political quality.
Barrie Bales, Woorinen North
As Trump’s behaviour worsens, his popularity seems to grow. Is that an American thing?
Phil Lipshut, Elsternwick
Trump. Jail? Are those pigs flying by? Too pretty, too rich, too well-connected. Jail? Never going to happen.
Owen Wells, Mont Albert North
Double, double toil and trouble: Fire burn, and cauldron bubble. Donald Trump is upset because the “witch hunt” might have uncovered a witch.
Phil Allender, Nirranda
Trump’s best defence would surely be to admit to taking the top secret files, but then confessing to not being able to read them.
Henry Herzog, St Kilda East
Furthermore
Will the RBA further raise interest rates to counter the increased employment caused by the workforce taking on extras jobs, because of the effects of previous RBA interest rises?
Malcolm McDonald, Burwood
Surely if we can have a referendum to change the constitution to add The Voice we can also at a later date have one to remove it if it does not work out? Some people seem to think it is there forever.
Dave Torr, Werribee
The problem with Liberal leader John Pesutto is he is a good honest man.
Lindsay Bradley, Ballarat
If you oppose duck hunting but let your moggie out at night, you’re also part of the problem.
Steve Melzer, Hughesdale
As a Baby Boomer, could someone point me as to where my husband and I could receive these handouts and are they back datable to the 1980s and ’90s when we were on one wage raising two children living $11 above the poverty line?
Jane Taylor, Newport
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