AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL FOR THE DEFENCE OF GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
PRESS RELEASE 511#
ABBOTT’S BRAVE NEW WORLD OF PRIVATISING PUBLIC EDUCATION
The Australian opinion polls currently favour an Abbott Government by the end of 2013. What will this mean for public education ?
DOGS have always held that a combination of free market ideology and entanglement of church and state spells the death knell for a free, secular and universal public education system for our country.
Tim Colebatch, the economics editor of The Age has been researching Abbott’s book, Battlelines and has this to say:
His tribe is a smaller one (than Howard’s): affluent Catholic traditionalists. Since student days, he has defined himself more by what he is against than by what he is for. He is for the monarchy, and the church, and traditional values, but he decided long ago not to tie his political career to them. Howard once called him an ''arch-pragmatist'', and he is. Rule one for an Abbott government will be: do no harm to his chances of winning the next election.
As his Battlelines reveals, he sees issues through a prism of private sector good/public sector bad. His loyalty is to private schools, private hospitals, private transport and to private provision of government services.
The most startling proposal in his book is that the federal government should unilaterally take over state schools and state hospitals, and turn them into privately run institutions handed out by tender, much as he privatised employment services through the Job Network.
But state governments actually built and paid for those schools and hospitals. They own them, and if Canberra were to take them over, it would have to pay massive compensation. Second, the constitution clearly provides that education and health are run by the states.
Abbott proposes getting around that by a referendum to authorise Canberra to take over any area it wants to. Battlelines even includes a draft bill to do so. He is serious.
Abbott’s Church has never accepted State involvement in education. Abbott’s Church has never accepted that education is a right, not a charity. Abbott’s Church has never accepted democratic as opposed to autocratic government. It is after all an international hierarchy and powerful and wealthy multinational corporation. Such institutions are never satisfied. Their ‘needs’ quickly become their ‘greeds’.
The only surprising thing about this report is that a Fairfax reporter is prepared to finally tell it as it is. Abbott’s Church has always been honest about its beliefs and preferences. DOGS notes that Australia’s problems lie with its politicians and judges who have entangled our taxpayer funds and political processes with not only Abbott’s church but other sectarian institutions that lined up for government handouts.
What is also of interest is the comments of some of the at least 749 readers of this article. Consider the following :
It is not Abbott’s economic agenda that I fear. It is his mindless anti secular pro religious agenda founded on Jesuit principles that bothers me, this is what they are keeping tight lipped about.
Watch Abbott and Pyne (and the faceless God boys) do their best to destroy secular institutions such as public education and public hospitals, things that I value....
Commenter
Bruce
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