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Kevin Rudd's 'To Do' list

By Peter West - posted Tuesday, 13 November 2007


Opinion polls say we will have a Labor Government led by Kevin Rudd. Smoothly-spoken, fluent in Mandarin, able to leap tall buildings perhaps? Rudd looks like a winner.

What should be on Kevin’s "to do" list? The much-hated Work Choices laws will be torn up. A sensible foreign policy would also be welcome - one not based on friendship with a sad president mired in an unwinnable war.

The rest of the list must begin with schools, health and media.

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PRIVATE AFFLUENCE AND PUBLIC SQUALOR

In The Affluent Society, J.K. Galbraith argued that modern democracies have private affluence. Thus Australians see higher prices for shares, record salaries for directors and enormous house prices for the top end of the housing market. On the other hand we have public squalor - decrepit buses whose drivers seem to be happier if nobody rides in them, hospitals that bureaucrats prefer to see empty of patients and other comical scenes reminiscent of 'Yes, Minister'.

Public Schools

The state of public education is just one aspect of this syndrome. When aid for Australian private schools crept in during the 1960s and 1970s, it was not resisted successfully. In the eastern suburbs of Sydney, 75 per cent of kids are in private schools. Any tiny group from whatever religion seems able to start up a school these days. Certification of such organisations is lax - few schools have been shut down because of poor teaching standards. It’s easy to walk out of private schools with stunning harbour views and cross town, where you can see kids trying to do their best in run-down Victorian buildings while their principals attempt to reconcile parents’ requests with Department of Education decrees, occupational health and safety guidelines and ineptness from Departments of Public Works. Let alone dealing with incidents of alleged violence, bullying and endless paperwork sent to and from Community Services.

'Summer Heights High' was a big hit on ABC-TV because it targeted real issues in state schools. A kid accuses his father of child abuse to avoid handing in homework. Disabled kids are pitched in randomly with the rest. Private schoolgirls look down their noses at state school "skanks" and "bogans". We wanted to laugh as well as cry, because it was too accurately reflecting many prejudices.

As I argued in my book Fathers, Sons and Lovers, troublesome kids used to be held in check by fathers, schools, members of the community, churches, and sports clubs. Now most of these are much weaker than they were; some are even under suspicion.  Public schools can’t be expected to do all the rescuing as well as teaching kids to read, write and all the other things demanded of them. Commonwealth education funding merely provides a program for this and a little for that, while state schools funded by state governments languish. Their teachers struggle to survive on meagre salaries.

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A Labor Government must tackle the problems of recruitment to public school teaching. We don’t need yet another inquiry into teacher education nor more fast-tracking and dumbing-down of teacher education courses. Already the students in primary level teacher-preparation courses learn less history, less music and less mathematics every year. One of my former colleagues at the University of Western Sydney has tracked that remorseless decline. We do need a return to the days when working-class kids were attracted to teaching because it was a good career move. In the 1960s my colleagues and I were given a scholarship to pay university fees, a small living allowance, a good starting salary, reliable employment and good prospects for promotion.

Teaching can’t compete in today’s employment market. Why would  school leavers start a teacher education course and pay HECS fees for years when clever ads tell them they can join the armed forces, fly helicopters and be trained in weeks, all on a good salary?  Or join the police force, carry a gun, grab some basic training and gain a bit of respect? I’m afraid teachers don’t get much respect these days.

Teachers’ salaries are pitiful, and need to be boosted substantially.  Boys bored by school won’t want to 'stay in school' as teachers for the rest of their working lives.  A man can’t support a family on a teacher’s wage while his wife goes through pregnancy, childbirth and early child-rearing. The salary barely inches upwards each year and good teachers aren’t rewarded. And so the people leaving teaching the fastest are men in their early 30s. Getting good women into teaching is also difficult when salaries in law, real estate and the whole private sector are much more attractive. No doubt there will be panic when all the baby-boomer teachers retire in the next 10 years.

Without excellent people going to teach in public schools, how will we ever lift Australian kids out of mediocrity? The economies of China and India are booming, as is South Korea’s; and all are mass-producing goods using cheap labour. Many Australian industries have collapsed. Who wears Australian shoes or drives an Australian car any more? Half our furniture is now manufactured overseas.  We need to back up teachers and help them make Aussie kids smarter.

So first, a Rudd Government will have to start again with teacher education and come up with a way to make teacher education more practical, get good kids into teaching and keep them there. Universities have become too bureaucratic, with more and more layers of Pooh-Bahs set up in more jobs, finding more ways to justify their exalted salaries by issuing more decrees. At some universities subject outlines, packed with regulations and "in case ofs" now exceed 39 pages. Federal funding of universities has fallen; and the fat amounts of money taken from foreign students seem to vanish into the woodwork. If the universities can’t prepare teachers efficiently, then we will have to find some other agency that can.

Second, a Labor Government would have to encourage state governments to take the axe to state bureaucracies. They are paralysed by inertia, political correctness and fear. Cut down the multiple levels of public servants and find people who can help teachers teach.

Health

Private affluence and public squalor is again the pattern in health. There are excellent medical practitioners, but their cost to patients approaches American proportions. I gave up one medical specialist who was charging me $600 for a one-hour visit. On the other hand, the never-ending story of disaster at Royal North Shore Hospital is one tiny aspect of the train wreck that is going on in public hospital emergency wards. Sleek, new private hospitals are camped next to decrepit public ones, sucking the life out of them. My father, who used to run a hospital, said the private hospitals took away all the people who paid their fees, leaving the public hospital all the poorer patients, the infirm and terminal.  I wonder if public school teachers might find this a tad familiar? Howard’s botched attempt to take over one hospital in Tasmania simply shows what a mess we have got into.

Nursing is hard work. Instead of being cheaply trained in hospitals, kids have to study at uni and end up owing thousands in HECS. Why would you do this instead of leaving school as early as possible and going into a trade? Plumbers, carpenters, and tilers work hard and get good money. You can’t find one to do a job and they all want to be paid, in cash, now. Why would anyone become a nurse? Are the benefits of a university education worth it for the mess we are in now? In the words of Robert Pike’s thesis, nursing, like teaching, is a Cinderella Profession. Both pay poorly, yet make heavy demands on their members in terms of stress and responsibility. Nursing education needs a complete rethinking and more Federal support.

The drug companies are making more and more profits, for we medicalise health instead of solving problems through better living patterns. In many cases (not all) we don’t make people healthier by pouring more and more drugs into them. People who are overweight or obese probably need to rethink their exercise pattern and diet before they start taking pills to reduce their food intake and medication for their depression. Yet anti-depressants are given away every day as if they were lollies. Over-active boys are routinely prescribed Ritalin. Working people need better eating, exercise and living patterns more than most. But they are exhausted from long journeys to work, raising kids, fighting interest rate rises and leaps in electricity costs, trying to pay taxes on taxes and waiting for the Federal Government to get GST on the lot.

Vast amounts of our taxes are going into keeping this inefficient ‘health’ industry going; but too much is falling into the hands of those who provide health. In the literature, this is called "provider capture". Surely it is possible for a Rudd Government to sort out a better arrangement with the states and help people become healthier. Surely a Federal Government can stop the advertising of junk food on children’s TV. Too many of these key decisions (or non-decisions) have been a capitulation to powerful interests.

Media

We need a good public media, just as we need public education. SBS TV used to be good public television. It was ground-breaking, exciting, fronted by people of gravitas and dignity. Now it looks and sounds like a commercial station. It is increasingly staffed with people who used to work in commercial current affairs programs and the like. Silly programs like ‘Pizza’ have driven out  quality, despite awards for a few programs.  Educated people commonly used to praise SBS; now they groan and complain about a loss of standards. Why did the Federal Government allow the changes to happen? SBS has gone dramatically downhill and has been dumbed-down in a search for ratings - as I argued in an earlier article, I wonder what a study of ratings would reveal?

The Federal Government funds SBS TV. A Rudd Government should make a wholesale review of the Board and move the current managing director on. US media are poor, but the USA does have a great public television sector which has given us the best there is on US TV.

Other public TV and radio stations could be established and supported. Teenage kids could do a better job than most of the people we see on current affairs shows and travel shows in which the aim of the show is to give maximum attention to the presenter. Even on ABC TV, tired 'celebrities' endlessly promote themselves. The much-trumpeted feature on James Cook was little more than a voyage of discovery about the presenter, with her face forever on the screen and her peculiar British accent. Are we not capable of doing our own story on Cook? A Rudd Government could promote good Australian TV shows, not issue demands as Howard did for schools to teach Australian history. We need to revitalise public media.

MUCH TO DO

The Howard years have been the years the locusts have eaten. I am hard pressed to think of a single initiative that has carried this country forward - apart from some progress made in boys’ education and making men’s health more of an issue. The rest have been wasted opportunities for improvement. We have a legacy of money squandered on TV advertising for the government, toadying to the US and pandering to media interests.

In the words of Oliver Cromwell to the Rump Parliament:

You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

If Labor wins, there will much to do. We need people prepared to govern for all Australians, not just the noisiest and wealthiest. Let’s all hope that the next government can do better than what we have at the moment.

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About the Author

Dr Peter West is a well-known social commentator and an expert on men's and boys' issues. He is the author of Fathers, Sons and Lovers: Men Talk about Their Lives from the 1930s to Today (Finch,1996). He works part-time in the Faculty of Education, Australian Catholic University, Sydney.

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