Steve Price:

The latest right-winger to expose the inequities of the Gillard/Rudd funding of the richest  church schools is Steve Price who is currently a right-wing station presenter on Radio 2UE in New South Wales. According to reports, before he arrived in New South Wales, he built the Victorian radio station 3AW into the most consistently right-wing talk-back  radio station. According to other reports, his wife, Wendy Black, has worked as a policy adviser for Joe Hockey, when he was the Workplace Relations Minister in the Howard Government. Of late, she has been working as an adviser to Mike Beard, the chief leadership rival to the New South Wales opposition conservative leader.

Steve Price Not the First:

Readers can peruse another attack on the Gillard/Rudd rich school expenditure by referring to our News Release 293 at www.adogs.info/pr293.htm

Steve Price's Attack on the Funding of Rich Church Schools

The article by Steve Price in the Sunday Telegraph 10 May 2009, was entitled:  It's Just Welfare for the Rich Kids. It is accompanied by a photograph of the luxuriant buildings and gardens of Kincoppal-Rose Bay convent. DOGS refer readers to the following excerpts:

The closest most of us ever get to the Kincoppal Rose Bay School is a glimpse of the front gates half way up Heartbreak Hill running a City to Surf. Magnificently sited with a spectacular view across the main harbour towards Mosman, it is one of Australia's elite schools.

Last week we learnt that Kincoppal will be given a federal government grant to build a new arts centre. Because the school has primary-aged children going there it - like very other primary school in Australia - qualifies for you money. ....

...As I say, I have never been to this famous eastern suburbs girls' schools, but I am willing to bet their $3 million ( grant for an arts centre) that there is already an arts centre on campus.

Price, like Maralyn Parker in the Daily Telegraph, also refers to the extraordinary large amount of taxpayer dollars being thrown at Knox Grammar and other rich church schools like Kings at North Parramatta.

'Look up your Gregory's street director if you haven't been there as I haven't, ' he writes.

Off Cumberland Highway and Pennant Hills Road, massive ground with from what I can see....It's huge. And for a laugh, or to make you weep, compare its size with Cumberland High and Carlingford West Primary a couple of hundreds metres down the road. They don't appear to have much room or any sports fields for Old Boys or anyone else. '

Price's  most telling political comment occurs later in the article:

Famously, the little-lamented and much-forgotten former Labor leader Mark Latham stuck his big foot in things during the election campaign he fought and lost, bagging King's for have a rifle range.

It might have been the only sensible thing Latham said when he climbed into John Howard for giving King's money. Labor is petrified to repeat the mistake that saw Latham accused of class envy, but they are going back so far the other way it's ridiculous.

Steve Price fails to understand the full story of Latham's political punishment. For the punishment meted out to Latham, not so much by 'the old establishment  at Kings School but by the new Roman Catholic establishment and its bishops, when he said in Parliament on September 5, 2000:

'The oldest and most poisonous issue in our nation's politics is state aid....The resolution of the state aid controversy was supposed to deliver Catholic schools a fair deal, not a special deal. This is one of the sickest things I have seen in federal politics and the Catholic system has been ill-advised indeed to play along. It's unacceptable for taxpayers to contribute $2 billion annually to Catholic schools without any guarantee of its equitable distribution.' see DOGS Press Release No. 81 at www.adogs.info/pr81.htm

Nevertheless, Steve Price like so many Australian citizens and taxpayers is outraged at the glaring inequities in the latest round of 'federal education funding. He compares the largesse of the Rudd/Gillard funding to the well endowed King's and Kincoppal with reference to one of his email correspondents as follows:

' He was working during the last school holidays at the Bidwell near Mount Druitt. He says to put it simply, the toilets were worse than any construction site toilet he has ever been in.''

COMMENT:

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, DOGS NSW were out and about demonstrating against our run-down public schools. They were at the Redfern Public School for example, a school which is now given over to the Uniting Church. They demonstrated at Kogarah High School where the bricks were falling off the walls, and at the Waverley Christian Brothers College with its Olympic size swimming pool. The ALP silenced  and bought off many of the leaders in the public system with a Needs Policy and jobs on Committees or organisations like the Schools Commission. The Needs Policy was a Greeds policy, and arose out of the unholy Protestant/Roman Catholic alliance.   The rich became richer , and the poor church schools in inner suburban areas were retained as show-piece poor parish schools.

 The real winners have been the church school interest.  Equality of educational opportunity for all Australian children had never been the favoured policy of the private church school interest.  

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