AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL FOR THE DEFENCE OF
GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS
PRESS RELEASE 858
AUSTRALIA : A PRIVATISATION PARADISE
12 September 2020
The current plague has exposed the gross inequities in Australia’s educational provision. The privatisation, neoliberal policies that have exposed our innocent children to the education ‘industry’, religious or otherwise, is an abomination!
A generation of children has been affected. How are we going to get out of the economic mess with our manufacturing industry at an all time low? Where are the skilled workers going to come from as China cuts the tow rope?
The OECD has revealed dangerous levels of expenditure on vocational education – fourth-last in the OECD after the Russian Federation, Mexico, Lithuania and Turkey. So, with the privatisation rorts in TAFE we are well on our way to the bottom. Australia also spends 36% less per student in vocational education than the OECD average. https://www.oecd.org/education/education-at-a-glance/educationataglance2019-dataandmethodology.htm
Privatisation of TAFE is a disaster – even a catastrophe!
But so is privatisation of education generally. Because successive Lib-Lab governments have exposed our children’s educational opportunities to the vicissitudes of the ‘Market’, and allowed religious systems to undermine our public systems with complete impunity.
Australia also spends significantly less per student in public education institutions than the US, UK, Canada, and the EU.
Australia has the third highest level of private expenditure on education institutions, behind the US and UK at $US4, 505 per student. This is more than 2.6 times the OECD average.
The Australian education industry has made billions out of insecure Asian parents, but that cash cow has gone home and may not be back any time soon.
It may be poetic justice, or it may be desperation, but British educational profiteers are now eyeing insecure Australian parents and their bank balances as cash cows. We discover that a British school Westbourne College will open a Sydney campus for year 11 and 12 students in 2021, offering only the International Baccalaureate. They are meritocrats and ‘intend to top the state with their first cohort’. The fees will be $22,500 a year, but, most importantly, the College has obtained not-for-profit status and taxation exemptions! https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/sydney-campus-of-uk-school-expects-first-year-12-class-to-topstate20200904p55sco.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_national_nsw
It is little wonder that Lyndsay Connors, writes:
In other countries it would be hard for a government to persuade an electorate it was dealing with widespread economic hardship while it was funding private schools with resources beyond the dreams of avarice.
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