James Massola of the Age/Herald reports that “expectations (are) growing that former Prime Minister Scott Morrison will quit politics”, probably between the May budget and the end of the year, entailing a by-election for his seat of Cook. Please let it be so, because a valley of death stretches before those of us in the election industry out to the second half of next year, to be followed by a flood encompassing the Northern Territory on August 24, the Australian Capital Territory on October 19, Queensland on October 26 and Western Australia on March 8 the following year (UPDATE: It’s noted that the Queensland local government elections next March, inclusive as they are of the unusually significant Brisbane City Council and lord mayoralty, should rate a mention). A normal federal election for the House of Representatives and half the Senate could happen in the second half of 2024 or the first of 2025, the alternative of a double dissolution being presumably unlikely.
Redistributions will offer some diversion in the interim, particularly after the Electoral Commissioner calculates how many House of Representatives seats each state is entitled to in the next parliament on June 27. This is likely to result in Western Australia gaining a seat and New South Wales and Victoria each losing one (respectively putting them at 16, 46 and 38), initiating redistribution processes that are likely to take around a year. There is also an outside chance that Queensland will gain a thirty-first seat. The Northern Territory will also have a redistribution on grounds of it having been seven years since one was last conducted, although this will involve either a minimal tweak to the boundary between Solomon and Lingiari or no change at all. At state level, a redistribution process was recently initiated in Western Australia and should conclude near the end of the year. The other state that conducts a redistribution every term, South Australia, gives its boundaries commission wide latitude on when it gets the ball rolling, but past experience suggests it’s likely to be near the end of the year.
However, the main electoral event of the foreseeable future is undoubtedly the Indigenous Voice referendum, which is likely to be held between October and December. Kevin Bonham has a post on polling for referendum in which he standardises the various results, which differ markedly in terms of their questions and response structures, and divines a fall in support from around 65% in the middle of last year to around 58% at present. For those of you with access to academic journals, there is also a paper by Murray Goot of Macquarie University in the Journal of Australian Studies entitled “Support in the Polls for an Indigenous Constitutional Voice: How Broad, How Strong, How Vulnerable?” In narrowing it down to credible polls with non-binary response options (i.e. those allowing for uncommitted responses of some kind, as distinct from forced response polls), Goot finds support has fallen from around 58% to 51% from the period of May to September to the period of October to January, while opposition had risen from 18% to 27%. The change was concentrated among Coalition supporters: whereas Labor and especially Greens supporters were consistently and strongly in favour, support among Coalition fell from around 45% to 36%.
Forced response questions consistently found between 60% and 65% in favour regardless of question wording, while non-binary polls (i.e. allowing for various kind of uncommitted response) have almost invariably had at over 50%. Goot notes that forced response polls have found respondents breaking between for and against in similar proportion to the rest, which “confounds the idea that, when push comes to shove, ‘undecided’ voters will necessarily vote no”. However, he also notes that questions in non-binary polls that have produced active majorities in favour have either mentioned an Indigenous Voice or the Uluru Statement from the Heart, or “rehearsed the Prime Minister’s proposal to amend the Constitution”. One that conspicuously did not do any of these things was a Dynata poll for the Institute of Public Affairs, which got a positive result of just 28% by priming respondents with a leading question and then emphasised that the proposal would involve “laws for every Australian”. JWS Research got only 43% in favour and 23% against, but its response structure was faulted by Goot for including a “need more information” option, which ruled the 20% who chose it out of contention one way or the other.
To avoid confusion, these are the Black and Tans
https://youtu.be/doegoa3spKo
And these are the All Blacks
https://youtu.be/yiKFYTFJ_kw
I only take issue with Rex patrick on two points in his article of today.
1. The price tag for AUKUS is not up to $368 billion. That only takes us up to the mid 2050s. even if we are wildly optimist about BAE being able to produce SSN-AUKUS boats at a near to schedule timetable in Adelaide (something they have never – not once – come close to actually doing in the UK with the 33 nuclear boats they have thus far made at barrow) that would still mean that HALF of the build project would remain to be completed and TWO THIRDS of the total timeframe for sustainment would be still to run. Make no mistake – even if we manage to pull this off AUKUS is a one trillion dollar program.
2. If we must do AUKUS and buy ‘off the shelf’ virginia class subs next decade, then the obvious pathway would be to buy four of them and then have America ultimately build us four SSNX boats to replace them in the 2050s. In the meantime we could build 4-6 TKM Type 128 ER boats in Adelaide and task them with replacing the Collins clas and the vital littoral water patrols in the northern archipelagos that surround northern Australia AND also ramp up development and local manufacturing of autonomous submarines to operate in tandem with our manned subs and also for export.
Dawkins fucked tertiary education up good and proper.
@laughtong – texts already can’t be sold or passed on. Textbook authors employ a number of different strategies to ensure obselescence.
The solution is a simple market mechanism.
Students should be able to claim a rebate of 25% of any money that they pay on textbooks from the course’s lecturer. Universities can then adjust salaries and textbook requirements accordingly.
Boerwar –
I am not a mathematician (Arts degree) but your claim that “70% of kids in this country will miss out on uni.” smells a bit to me.
How could we have got from 25% of the population with a degree in 2012 to 50% in 2022 if 70% of kids missed out?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/612854/australia-population-with-university-degree/
ABS also states that for 2022 58% of school leavers who had finished Year 12 in 2021 were studying for qual (mainly undergraduate). So unless the drop out rate before Year 12 is pretty stonking I am not sure how you get to 70%…..
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/education/education-and-work-australia/latest-release
Mexicanbeemer @ #1538 Friday, April 14th, 2023 – 1:21 pm
As someone who worked in the Co-op book shop in my uni days I can state text books are a Ponzi scheme, you put money in and you never see it returned. Any kid who buys a text book is just burning money. New editions with limited changes are rampant in the sector. And these days it’s a bit 16th century that people are using text books at all (except maybe for health degrees).
Shellbell
Soz. I should have said NBA 538 Raptor ratings.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/nba-player-ratings/
Andrew_Earlwood @ #1551 Friday, April 14th, 2023 – 1:47 pm
It was a good article. I didn’t know he was a former submariner.
I chuckled when he pointed out that AUKUS is now known as USUKA (pronounced “you sucker”).
The rest of the world knows Australians much better than we know ourselves.
Why are we buying AUKUS subs? Yabba could probably build us some from scrap and salvage at the tip (macgyver style) in Umina ?
Time for lateral thinking.
Uni degrees are an entry barrier to many of the high paying professions.
Not everyone can be a big four accounting partner, not everyone can do an accounting degree, but the more people for middle and lower income families doing accounting the more chance they’ve got of being a partner. Conversely if the entry into the course was based on our best measure of academic merit, rather than dollars, there is a tiny chance we get better people and better outcomes from the big 4.
As just one example, I think law is just too broken to be an example where there is any hope that it could be improved by a merit rather than a wallet induction methodology. Also and this is a self own, we might be all better off if anyone wanting to do law or politics was excluded and those places were made up by some kind of random draft and national service obligation.
Many moons ago I had a Geography professor who set an exam which included a set of compulsory questions that could only be answered by buying his book.
Of course higher education should be subsidised. Contributions are fine unless they get too high.
I was hit by hecs and it hurt for quite a while. 4 years study means very little income and certainly no savings while your mates are out earning and moving up ladders, super and even investing. And there is no guarantee of being more employable or having higher earnings. I shudder to think how much better off (over the working life span) some of my mates who went into trades are.
If we want people at uni from a broad social crosssection (not just those with wealthy parents or with one of the few scholarships) then we have to subsidise those 4 years.
While we are improving law and politics by manipulating the entry, a rule where if any of your four grandparents or your parents were a lawyer, you are excluded from law and if any of them were politicians you are excluded from being a politician would probably have largely very positive outcomes.
Of course there is a counter argument about the value of degrees, in fact they are measurably less valuable than they used to be.
There’s a concept out there called Education Inflation, which deems that as a greater percentage of a nation’s population attain a university degree there is a commensurate raising of the qualification you need to get an actual job. As degrees become less exclusive then employers raise the bar on the type of qualification you need.
I saw some unemployment figures today that show people with Cert 1 to 3 are actually more likely to be unemployed that those without a Cert. Weird stuff.
Education Inflation is highly contestable so I dont necessary subscribe to it as a robust theory, but its out there. I’d lean towards getting more education than not, but I’ve said that enough today.
Ley at it again.
From the Guardian
Deputy Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, is claiming that the “undefined” scope of the Indigenous Voice to parliament could see changes to Australia Day and Anzac Day.
Ley told 3AW Mornings today:
The scope of the Voice as described by the Prime Minister is deliberately undefined. So that means the Prime Minister can’t rule out that the Voice has the de facto veto rule on, for example, our national days of commemoration such as Australia Day or Anzac Day.
The minister for Indigenous Australians, Linda Burney, yesterday ruled out that the voice could make changes to Australia Day:
It won’t be about making changes to things like Australia Day. That is an act of desperation to start talking about things like that.
Acting prime minister, Richard Marles, earlier this morning called the speculation a distraction.
All of that is about trying to create distraction away from what should be the central issue here, and that is recognising our First Nations people in the constitution, which Australians want to see happen.
My partner (uni professor) told me recently that they’ve phased out textbooks entirely from their courses. It was covid what done them in, in the end. Pushing everyone to remote made textbook acquisition impossible, so they structured their course material to have all of the readings provided. When they came back to face to face learning, they kept it that way.
I suspect that this will be done by most universities eventually.
Laughtong
Dutton and Ley are gonna turn the Voice into a huge scare campaign just like the carbon tax drivel of the 2010s.
Burney needs to get her head in the game. Labor cannot afford a weak performer in this role.
Ley’s comment was: The Voice could veto the date of Australia Day.
“It won’t be about making changes to things like Australia Day.” is both a lie, and unconvincing. Obviously, the Voice will decide what it speaks about, and it seems incredibly likely that when the date is changed, the Voice will be heavily involved.
Burney only needs to memorise one line to rebut everything Dutton says.
“The Voice is an advisory body with no ability to veto anything.”
Will this guy face the Anti Corruption Commission?
https://www.theage.com.au/politics/federal/stuart-robert-linked-contracts-need-closer-scrutiny-as-department-links-revealed-inquiry-20230414-p5d0f5.html
If:
“The Voice is an advisory body with no ability to veto anything.”
Its either about addressing fundamental injustice or it isn’t ?
If it doesn’t really change anything – why is the Govt sacrificing the next 6 months to talking about it?
‘Geetroit says:
Friday, April 14, 2023 at 1:53 pm
Boerwar –
I am not a mathematician (Arts degree) but your claim that “70% of kids in this country will miss out on uni.” smells a bit to me.
How could we have got from 25% of the population with a degree in 2012 to 50% in 2022 if 70% of kids missed out?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/612854/australia-population-with-university-degree/
ABS also states that for 2022 58% of school leavers who had finished Year 12 in 2021 were studying for qual (mainly undergraduate). So unless the drop out rate before Year 12 is pretty stonking I am not sure how you get to 70%…..
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/education/education-and-work-australia/latest-release‘
———————————————————–
This does not disturb my main point one little bit. One half of the population wants the other half of the population to subsidize their degrees. Once they have the degrees they earn substantially more money over a lifetime. Plus, they get to whinge about their pitiful fate in having to pay HECSs. Plus, their kids get all sorts of better opportunities than the kids of the people who subsidized them. Plus they get to claim that because they are better educated than the people who subsidized them they do better for the country than the sods who subsidized them.
Nice little closed system of virtue there!
And so it goes.
I agree partially with Pi’s professorial partner concerning the effects on text books of distance learning due to covid. I made a textbook available (in the form of the last proofs) via Researchgate, as covid struck in early 2020. And told professors in the discipline that I had done so and satisfied users could choose to give a donation to charity. Counter-intuitively, despite thousands of downloads and hundreds of ‘reads’, sales of the physical book have increased in consective years since. The title remains on course lists and evidently enough students choose to pay for 500 pages (and a functional index) printed on dead trees. Royalties used to cover my wine expenses.
Could the Voice veto Sussan Ley?
Please?
LVT: “Its either about addressing fundamental injustice or it isn’t ?”
It’s about following the guide of the Uluru Statement. That is what THEY said they want as a way of establishing reconciliation. It isn’t what you choose to deliberately ignore.
The LNP position can be summed up as “How can I be racist without everyone knowing I’m racist?” And all their little foot soldiers are crawling under every rock looking for a solution to that dilemma.
Mexicanbeemer @ Friday, April 14, 2023 at 12:26 pm
Prior to the rise of Trump and BoJo, climate change was a fairly uncontroversial topic in the UK. The Tory party was largely on board with tackling the issue. So there wasn’t much mileage to be gained by throwing Thatcher’s words back at Conservatives. Even Boris Johnson ultimately committed the UK to a 78% reduction in emissions by 2035, although some doubted his sincerity. There is a climate-sceptic wing of the Tories, no doubt emboldened and encouraged by the far-right of the US, but there’s also a very sizable group who fully approve of emissions reduction. This is one of the reasons why the UK Greens have far less support in the UK than the Greens do in Australia.
As for Conservatives in Australia, although some of them certainly pray at the Shrine of Thatcher, she’s just not particularly relevant to the conversation being had in this country. Banging about Maggie Thatcher in this country is not likely to have much effect these days.
Part of me thinks that uni in general is a scam these days.
I started uni in 1997, the year that HECS differential (where there were 3 different tiers of HECS contribution amounts – supposedly based on how much you can earn with the degree after graduating, rather than a flat fee for all) was introduced by Howard. My degree, in speech pathology, was in band 2, even though the earning potential (at least in the public system) is often about the same or slightly less than a nurse or teacher (band 1). All allied health degrees were band 2. Because I started the year that HECS differential was introduced, my degree ended up costing about twice as much as it otherwise would have.
I had to do some psychology subjects (the whole degree was prescribed) in first year that were taught by the then School of Behavioural Health Sciences, so they were charged at the band 1 rate, where psychology was placed. By the following year, however, the school had changed its name to the School of Public Health, and any subject name with ‘Psychology’ in the title was changed (e.g. ‘Neuropsychology’ became ‘Central Nervous System Disorders and Human Behaviour’), so that they could charge it at band 2. The content of these subjects did not change.
I stupidly bought most of the text books that were prescribed throughout the course, although I read very little of most of them.
The thing that concerns me most about HECS/HELP (whatever it’s called now) these days is, thanks to degree inflation, it often costs a LOT more to get the same qualification that was once offered via an undergraduate degree. When I studied, all speech pathology degrees in Australia were at the Bachelor level. Soon after I graduated, however, the graduate-entry coursework “Masters” degree was introduced, and students were then (early 2000s) charged about $32k for a two year course. Eventually, my uni switched to undergraduate students doing a combined Bachelor/Masters degree, even though the degree duration was the same length. Purely a scam so that they can extract more money from students for offering the same thing.
My degree was originally a diploma until the early 70s, then a Bachelor degree, then a combined Bachelor/Masters degree. Ain’t credential inflation grand?
When I was a student, having a Masters degree (which were almost always research-based or at least a specialist qualification continuing from a Bachelor degree in the same field) seemed like an impressive feat. Now you can get one after 4 years of undegraduate-equivalent study.
And all of this is before you realise that you were taught at uni by academics who mostly had only spent a handful of years, if that, in the ‘real world’ before entering academia and really had no idea of how things work outside of it.
The core problem with post-truth politics as practiced by the Coalition is that everyone eventually figures out that you are a habitual liar.
Dutton’s big bad faith lies:
1. The Voice comes out of the Canberra Bubble and not from Indigenous people around Australia.
2. Indigenous people do not support the Voice.
3. The Voice will require thousands of public servants.
4. The Voice will cost billions.
5. The Voice is a threat to Australian democracy.
6. The Voice is an Albanese Vanity Project.
7. The Commonwealth Solicitor General advised against the wording.
8. The Voice will be a ‘new arm of the government’.
9. The Liberal Alternative Legislated Voice will be (local and regional). Not ‘national’ as he informed his Party Room .
10. Albanese wants to silence people and depict them as ‘racist’.
11. Dutton is going out to the regions to talk with Indigenous elders.
——————————————————-
Contested lies. That is, where others who were present said different things from what Dutton has said:
1. The Party Room Lie about whether national or local and regional
2. The Elder lie where he advised her to vote ‘yes’!
——————————————————
Lies by people other than Dutton about the Voice.
1. It won’t make a practical difference.
2. It will clog the budget, slowing it down.
3. The Constitution requires fine levels of detail
4. Ley: the Voice can veto Australia Day and ANZAC Day.
The MSM will keep the Voice alive as a talking point. Theyre desperate to write an Albo fail story so their hero Dutton can become relevant.
Boerwarsays:
Friday, April 14, 2023 at 1:26 pm
I notice you haven’t even tried to answer the question of, what is the economic benefit of someone starting their working life with a significant debt?
‘steve davis says:
Friday, April 14, 2023 at 2:51 pm
The MSM will keep the Voice alive as a talking point. Theyre desperate to write an Albo fail story so their hero Dutton can become relevant.’
—————————
Apart from The Australian and this does not seem to be particularly true to me.
‘Barney in Cherating says:
Friday, April 14, 2023 at 2:53 pm
Boerwarsays:
Friday, April 14, 2023 at 1:26 pm
I see that the elites can always find good reasons why the poor should subsidize them to buy EVs, build solar panels on the houses they own and for them to go to University. They do this for the good of the country as it turns out.
This is just part of the complex of reasons that ensures that 70% of kids in this country will miss out on uni.
It’s the rich wot have the pleasure and the poor wot have the pain.
‘Twas ever thus.
I notice you haven’t even tried to answer the question of, what is the economic benefit of someone starting their working life with a significant debt?’
—————————————————
Straw man. Have you ever worked out the economic benefit of someone starting their working life with the burden of paying taxes so that their betters can get a subsidised degree and earn much more than them over a lifetime?
Lars Von Trier @ Friday, April 14, 2023 at 2:38 pm:
“If:
“The Voice is an advisory body with no ability to veto anything.”
Its either about addressing fundamental injustice or it isn’t ?
If it doesn’t really change anything – why is the Govt sacrificing the next 6 months to talking about it?”
=======================
1. I question the main premise of your question. There are more ways to change public discourse on policy debates in this country than solely by setting up additional checkpoints in the legislative process with veto power. The VTP can:
a) place entire subjects on the public agenda that might otherwise be ignored;
b) highlight some of the impacts upon Indigenous lived experience in this country of government/opposition/crossbench policy positions, which might otherwise go generally unnoticed, or which might be noticed but not accurately appreciated from an Indigenous standpoint.
2. I question your other premise. Over the next six months, the Government will be handing down a Budget and putting plenty of other legislation to the Parliament. Ministers will be continuing to exercise their executive decision-making powers. It is a compete mischaracterisation to refer to a VTP Referendum debate as consuming so much of the Government’s legislative and executive attention as to constitute a ‘sacrifice’ of the next six months.
3. If you maintain there will be excessive bandwidth in the public discourse space being devoted to the VTP topic over the next six months, you can chiefly blame the party which has gratuitously chosen to make this a partisan issue. Look at the news over the past week: it is largely about who is to blame for Julian Leeser quitting the Liberal frontbench, and figures on the Right donning their black hats and subjecting the Simon Birminghams of this world to loyalty tests.
Accountancy, won’t that go the way of Switch Board Operators and Camera Film manufacturers?
I personally can’t wait for AI to render bean counters and law makers obsolete…
Mr Newbie: “in the ‘real world’ before entering academia ”
This anti-intellectual narrative is one of worst things to come out of the US over the past few decades.
Alpha Zero : “law makers obsolete”
I’ll pay good money for a ChatGPT legal service.
Susan Ley really is an idiot, imagine her as an acting Prime Minister – actually I’d prefer not to.
Pauline Hanson has a poll on her social media feeds, asking her followers if Simon Birmingham should be sacked from the Shadow Front Bench? Gotta think one reason Julian Lesser quit earlier in the week from his shadow ministerial roles was that he found it repugnant that Dutton was cosying up to Hanson.
Pi:
You’re misrepresenting what I was saying.
In a vocational degree, some ‘real world’ experience is important, to place what is being taught/learnt in context to how it can be used.
Most if not all of my lecturers had niche specialty areas, which is understandable and the norm in academia. But some of them literally went from their Bachelor degree to doing postgraduate qualifications after only one year of working in the field, 20+ years before they taught me. So they didn’t really have an idea of what it’s like to work in the field they’re supposedly an expert in, outside of their narrow area of expertise.
“Students should be able to claim a rebate of 25% of any money that they pay on textbooks from the course’s lecturer. Universities can then adjust salaries and textbook requirements accordingly.”
And how would that work when i) the text is freely available online and purchase of a physical copy is voluntary, ii) all the assessable materials is contained in the lecture notes (if a bit terse, cough cough), and iii) there are 800 students in my course?
Pi,
“My partner (uni professor) told me recently that they’ve phased out textbooks entirely from their courses.”
All three courses I teach atm use texts that are freely available online.
In the course which covers my little areas of expertise, there are no up-to-date texts, so we have written the material for our slides and then converted it to a document, like a little textbook, for release alongside the slides (thank goodness for beamerarticle).
Boerwar – it kinda does undermine your point actually. If your point is that there is some self-perpetuating system that locks out 70% of kids, and the number is nothing like that then it kinda isn’t locking them out at all.
And it also does kind of undermine the authority of the argument if you use data justifying your argument that is basically just pulled out of your a***.
As the result of some terribly incompetent risk management the ANU lost around a million books from its main library a couple of years ago.
I wonder whether it has made a difference to the quality of the graduates?
I’m not sure why the focus is specifically on uni, but taking up education/training to change jobs should be as low friction as possible to reduce employee capture (so to speak) by employers.
Interesting article on the Voice polling their is a view NSW is not a sure bet for voting ‘Yes’ on the Voice. Despite the ‘Yes’ vote having a substantial lead in the polling. There is also a view from some Liberals that Anthony Albanese won’t rule out abandoning the referendum if he does not think it will pass.
“A Melbourne pollster, Kosmos Samaras, said Victoria and South Australia would vote Yes and Queensland was likely to vote No. That would require the Yes case to win two out of NSW, Western Australia and Tasmania.
Although parts of Sydney have similar social attitudes to Melbourne and Adelaide, western Sydney’s large immigrant communities might see the debate differently, some Liberals believe. They may not have the same feelings of historical regret at the treatment of Australia’s original inhabitants by the British colonists, and may be wary of granting special treatment to a racial group.
Tasmanians outside Hobart would be less likely to vote Yes, Samaras said. Western Australia, which is urbanised and Anglo, also has large Indigenous populations.”
https://www.afr.com/politics/federal/dutton-and-the-voice-if-he-loses-he-wins-and-if-he-wins-he-loses-20230414-p5d0e2
‘Geetroit says:
Friday, April 14, 2023 at 3:23 pm
Boerwar – it kinda does undermine your point actually. If your point is that there is some self-perpetuating system that locks out 70% of kids, and the number is nothing like that then it kinda isn’t locking them out at all.
And it also does kind of undermine the authority of the argument is you use justifying data that is basically just pulled out of your a***.’
————————————
Deflection.
It doesn’t matter whether the elites have conned fifty per cent or seventy per cent of their poor cuzzes to subsidize them so that they can then out-earn them for the rest of their lives, swan around telling their poor cuzzes that graduates are making the real difference in the world and it is only right that the children of graduates should get better opportunities than the kids of the poor sods who subsidized their parents.
As for tertiary education so for subsidized roof panels and so for subsidized EVs.
Which is what you are determined not to address.
This is a very cunning plan that actually works!
PN
‘…There is also a view from some Liberals that Anthony Albanese won’t rule out abandoning the referendum if he does not think it will pass.
…’
————————————-
There is not the slightest indication from Prime Minister Albanese that he will do so. He has repeatedly stated that the referendum will go ahead. This is just another Liberal Lie from ‘some (unnamed) Liberals’.
“If:
“The Voice is an advisory body with no ability to veto anything.”
Its either about addressing fundamental injustice or it isn’t ?
If it doesn’t really change anything – why is the Govt sacrificing the next 6 months to talking about it?”
Why is the Opposition “sacrificing” the next six months to opposing it?
@Boer:
“Straw man. Have you ever worked out the economic benefit of someone starting their working life with the burden of paying taxes so that their betters can get a subsidised degree and earn much more than them over a lifetime?”
Seriously, you could just as easily say “Have you worked out the economic benefit of someone starting their working life with the burden of paying taxes so the elderly have subsidised healthcare” or “Have you worked out why working people pay taxes so that the unemployable get paid to be on welfare?”. That’s Liberal Party thinking.
We subsidise university degrees, we subsidise apprenticeships, we subsidise TAFE, we subsidise pretty much anything that will get people jobs and training. Most of which doesn’t require any repayment unlike HECS.
This just comes off as anti-intellectual cringe. “So their betters can get a subsidised degree?”, really? Do you want to reserve university places only for rich families that can pay full fee and fuck working class kids who have intellectual interests?
Whitlam’s setup was the ideal, the Hawke/Keating HECS more of a realistic understanding that the system is more sustainable if uni graduates repay some money (but only as they can afford it), without which there would probably be a lot less uni places being funded.
Edit: OK, I’ve seen your next post too – serious anti-intellectual cringe. Don’t worry, tradies who don’t go to university are as capable of being arrogant fuckwits as any doctor or lawyer.
Other middle-class welfare is an entirely separate issue. I agree that money for solar panels for etc sounds well intentioned but is a subsidy for people who are already property-owners more than anything, and same for subsidies for electric vehicles you need to be wealthy to buy even with the subsidy. But this disdain for people getting educated is bizarre. People go to university from all walks of life – it is THE best way for people from poor backgrounds to get ahead. I didn’t take you for a “know your place, working class scrub, and go back to the factory” type.
4BC jock Peter Fegan interrogates Peter Dutton on the Voice. “I don’t understand it”, Fegan admits:
“what I want to know is: where does this person sit in parliament? Is it a man or woman? Are they going to be within the upper house? Are they going to be a minister?”
https://www.theguardian.com/media/commentisfree/2023/apr/14/the-voice-try-and-understand-it-kid-gloves-for-reporter-who-asks-dutton-is-it-a-man-or-a-woman
Mr. Newbie: ” So they didn’t really have an idea of what it’s like to work in the field they’re supposedly an expert in, outside of their narrow area of expertise.”
I don’t think I’ve misinterpreted what you said. I’m directly contradicting that assertion.
Mr. Newbie: “supposedly an expert in”
Law? Engineering? Medicine? Computer Science? Psychology? Materials Science? Research? Where are these fields that working in academia makes you unsuitable for working in industry?
I’d like to see an industry psychologist explain to an academic how they better understand AHPRA requirements. Law academics get asked for their professional opinions all of the time. Didn’t you see the robodebt commission hearings? Same with doctors. It would be a brave professional that would choose to debate a point of a qualification with the academic expert in a field. At the top of these professions, they generally exist in both academia and industry.
Boerwarsays:
Friday, April 14, 2023 at 2:55 pm
Some people will start their working life with no burden of paying tax. Depending on the amount they earn that tax burden will vary. It’s called a progressive tax system.
A university education benefits a society in many ways and the higher taxes paid on average by graduates outweighs the costs by many times, so how is any burden being placed on non-graduates?
https://gpseducation.oecd.org/revieweducationpolicies/#!node=41761&filter=all
“And how would that work when i) the text is freely available online and purchase of a physical copy is voluntary, ii) all the assessable materials is contained in the lecture notes (if a bit terse, cough cough), and iii) there are 800 students in my course?”
Your base salary would increase by the number of students enrolled in your course, multiplied by the average spend on textbooks per person in an average course, multiplied by 0.25%.
So, if an average student in your course spends $50 on textbooks and the average in an average course spends $200, then your pre tax income would be:
old salary + 200*800*0.25 – 50*800-0.25
i.e. you’d be fine
Edit: and before you ask: The above leaves students better off, lecturers equally well off and universities worse off (all before lecturers take any actions to minimise textbook costs). There would therefore need to be an increase in course costs, which could be paid under HECS arrangement.
Arky
I support subsidizing people who do not have good fortune.
I do mind subsidizing the wealthy at the expense of the poor.
Not surprisingly, the Greens want HECs debt forgiven for everyone.
It goes with NIMBYism of not ruining the view with windmills, blocking housing for the poor that might upset the inner urbs wealthy people and so on and so forth.