Fairfax-Ipsos: 51-49 to Labor

1,075 thoughts on “Fairfax-Ipsos: 51-49 to Labor”

1. http://www.buzzfeed.com/markdistefano/imessage-hoax#.haNqVqO4Q

   Note in this article the person who pretended to be Christopher Pyne is correct. If they don’t understand it how can they legislate about it?

2. lizzie@1046

   If the TPP on medicines is passed, and medicines become more expensive, it will surely impact Medicare rebates.

   I wonder if Hockey and Robb have discussed this (and doubt it).

   Lizzie – Ley is being ripped to pieces in the comments over on the Guardian link.

3. http://www.theage.com.au/national/education/fourth-study-this-year-confirms-private-schools-no-better-than-public-20141109-11jlgn.html

   The fourth study this year has found Australian private schools produce no better results than public schools, when students’ socio-economic backgrounds are taken into account.

4. Dave

   Not surprised.

5. Tanya P explaining Labor’s position on troops to train Iraqi troops. Said Labor hasn’t agreed to it lightly. It’s conditional on Abbott reassuring us all that we’re only there for training for a limited time.

   Labor won’t have any part of being coalition of the willing as in 2003.

6. newmans ‘legacy’ –

   The work schedule of Queensland’s chief justice, Tim Carmody, has been removed from an official calendar that showed him to be the least active judge in the supreme court.

   Carmody, the former Newman government’s most controversial appointment, was due to hear cases for 12 weeks – only seven of those on his own – between February and July, according to a calendar published in February.

   But Carmody’s schedule has since been removed from the calendar. It shows all other judges except senior judge administrator John Byrne sitting at least 15 weeks, and all of them at least 12 weeks on their own.

   Meanwhile, the chief justice’s “engagements calendar” – a new initiative of Carmody’s which lists his outside activities, including a Chinese New Year function last month – remains online.

   http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/mar/03/chief-justice-carmody-taken-off-court-calendar-showing-him-to-be-least-active

7. guytaur@1041

   I agree with you entirely in principle.

   However, as I have noted elsewhere the real world of politics, elitist aspirations, economics, tradition, religious affiliation, nostalgia, geography overlay all ensure the concepts of secular, free and compulsory are on a hiding to nothing these days.

   When, for instance, the Director of Education in WA (the current one) sends her child to a private school for “personal reasons” you can get some idea of where heart and head lie.

   She, to be fair, is just part of a long line of those who tout how wonderful “their” department is, but quietly send their kid off to this or that high fee paying, usually single sex, private school.

8. Interesting move:

   The federal government has announced the forced sale of the $39 million Point Piper mansion Villa de Mare, formerly owned by recruiter Julia Ross, in one of the first such acts in a decade.

   Treasurer Joe Hockey has told federal parliament the property was sold illegally or in contravention of the existing laws governing foreign ownership.

   http://www.afr.com/p/national/hockey_orders_sale_breach_point_4vfndyC0uTrYvcShhGyu8M

9. Tricot

   Some teachers do not like having their children at the same school they teach in and this could partly explain the sending your child to a private school while teaching at a public school.

   However that is still a choice not denied to parents just because they work in a public school. Just like any other parent they suffer the pros and cons of that choice.

   Government has to stop giving taxpayer money to private schools. At the moment due to that money they are not private schools just semi private high fee paying ones

10. LU

    whew. That’ll fix the problems with the housing market.

11. Libertarian Unionist@1058

    Interesting move:

    The federal government has announced the forced sale of the $39 million Point Piper mansion Villa de Mare, formerly owned by recruiter Julia Ross, in one of the first such acts in a decade.

    Treasurer Joe Hockey has told federal parliament the property was sold illegally or in contravention of the existing laws governing foreign ownership.

    
    http://www.afr.com/p/national/hockey_orders_sale_breach_point_4vfndyC0uTrYvcShhGyu8M

    It is a shame that the AFR can’t afford either a spell checker or a subeditor.

    Xu Jiayin, is China’s fifthteen-richest man with a net worth of $7.6 billion, according to the Hurun Report.

12. Sussan Ley, on SKY now, was asked if she thought there should be less bulk billing, and agreed.

13. zoom:

    whew. That’ll fix the problems with the housing market.

    It might be effective.

    The worst/best it will do is very slightly trim the top from the premier market.

    The best/worst it will do is signal to Chinese and other hot money the jig is up, and not to try and buy into the Australian market for established homes; and since prices are set at the margin, this could cause an abrupt halt in price growth, causing a small amount of panic among negatively-geared property speculators…

    I genuinely don’t know!

14. Fredex posted a very good point: When researchers compared public and private schools with comparable student populations, and looked at how much it cost for public and private schools to take those students to the same learning outcome, the public schools do it at half the cost. In other words private schools, particularly the high fee ones, deliver poor value for money.

    The parents of private school students are paying for perceived quality, not actual quality. They are paying for prestige, reputation and peace of mind. They are buying the feeling that they giving their children the very best. It is incredibly unscientific and wasteful. Those parents are entitled to waste their own money but they are not entitled to public subsidy.

    We ought to be talking about two types of schools: government schools and government-subsidised schools. It is Orwellian to speak of “independent” schools which depend on public funds.

15. New thread.

16. zoomster@1062

    Sussan Ley, on SKY now, was asked if she thought there should be less bulk billing, and agreed.

    Bulk billing has been one of the best things to happen to the Australian medical system.

    It has steadily increased in takeup, from ~44.0% in 1984 to ~77% in 2014, with a few minor hills and valleys in the graph.

    http://health.gov.au/internet/main/publishing.nsf/Content/1A9DB6D72BD5879ACA257BF0001AFE28/$File/Copy%20of%20MBS%20Statistics%2020144%20DecQtr%2020150120.pdf

    It is certainly popular with the public, and must be popular with medical practioners – possibly because they don’t have to chase up bills, and there are no bad debts.

17. Nicholas,

    The parents of private school students are paying for perceived quality, not actual quality. They are paying for prestige, reputation and peace of mind. They are buying the feeling that they giving their children the very best. It is incredibly unscientific and wasteful. Those parents are entitled to waste their own money but they are not entitled to public subsidy.

    They are paying for a preferential matching service — old school ties, future partners and the like. It’s not unscientific or wasteful, it’s actually very lucrative, but it is also steeped in class and privilege. And it stinks.

18. Don

    Has a sometimes buyer of the dead tree version of the AFR, it isn’t uncommon too find poor grammar or spelling errors, considering I’m good at typos this is saying something.

19. G@1059

    Yes, you are correct. My point about the DG in WA sending her kid to a private school was to call into question the credibility and integrity of comments she cares to make about how wonderful her department is operating.

    Kind of, good enough to send your kid to but not mine.

    I once remember a teacher in a tough school saying something about that while he worked in a pig-sty (his school/place of work) did not mean he wanted to live in one or have his kid go to one. He did not send his kid to a private school but a better located/operating government school.

    In Perth, Perth Modern School has now reverted to becoming an academically selective school and has, for the past 2-3 years, once the kids got to Year 12, essentially wiped the floor with academic achievement against those kids whose parents are spending mega bucks to send their kid to one of the Western Suburbs schools.

    Needless to say this school along with two or three other well-placed (socio-economically) schools in Perth have parents clamouring to get their kids into said schools. To the extent that real estate agents tout the fact that the a well place local primary school has entry to such academically competitive government schools, parents are keen to be placed in the catchment.

    Why pay $25K a year – plus – when the state can get my kid into UWA for next to no direct fees?

    Not only that, but as evidence seems to show, not only do these kids do well at school they seem to do better than their private school mates once they are at Uni.

    On the other hand, these schools are robbing other secondary schools of some of their best and brightest such that some ‘sink’ secondary schools (and I know this word applies to UK schools rather than here) have abandoned most, if not all, of their so-call academic subjects for Year 12. The poor, in other words, have been deprived again.

20. From Tricot

    Not only that, but as evidence seems to show, not only do these kids do well at school they seem to do better than their private school mates once they are at Uni.

    Here is some of the evidence to back that up.

    http://theconversation.com/state-school-kids-do-better-at-uni-29155

    State school graduates do better at university than private school graduates with the same end-of-school tertiary entrance score. That’s the clear finding in a number of Australian studies since the 1980s (here, here, here and here), and in England since the 1990s (here, here, and here)…..
    The Australian research found that, on average, graduates of state schools received the same marks at the end of first-year university as graduates of private schools who had tertiary entrance scores around three to six points higher.

21. “Sussan Ley, on SKY now, was asked if she thought there should be less bulk billing, and agreed.”

    Why should she care? It’s the GP’s choice. Medicare pays the GP a schedule fee determined by the Government whether or not he/she bulk bills. Unless she thinks that people see GPs too frequently. Or unless it’s for ideological reasons.

    She’s let the cat out of the bag. Like most Liberals, she most likely does not believe in universal public health insurance, but won’t ever say that. And the copayment is not dead, just coming in by stealth over several years via the freeze on copayments.

    Before someone points out that Labor started the freeze, yes, it was a bad idea, a response to surplus fetishism in the face of falling revenues from other sources.

22. LEY IS LAUGHABLE re Medicare
    ________________

    On 3AR’s Tom Elliot-program,even Elliot a Liberal from way back was reduced to laughter after an interview…so convoluted was Le’s reply…and listeners likewise expressing amazement at the silliness of it all

    a sure receipe for losing an election too

23. Your snide aspersions aside, the rich private schools often receive more public funding then the (relatively) poor private schools.

    That may be true in isolated circumstances but the statistics show that the amount of public funding per child is inversely related to the wealth of the school.

    Public>Catholic>private

24. Public money is for public services. If a service is only available to households who can afford thousands of dollars in fees per year, it isn’t a public service.

    Public money is often used for services that are only available to select groups, such as mining companies, arts groups, the AFL, Olympic sportspeople etc etc

25. New thread

    http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollbludger/2015/03/03/essential-research-53-47-to-labor-7/