David appreciate your comments. Added some numbers.
1) I’m all for strengthening the public education system and reducing funding to private. I just don’t think you do it with a massive shock to the system. My mother was a public school teacher and didn’t want me to go to the school she taught at - definitely some issues with the quality of our public education
2) I’m not an accountant. Looks like somewhere between 7 and 12 years to expense it off. No way it could be written off in 1 year unless it was a write off for some reason. And I imagine a BHP truck costs millions.
https://www.depreciationrates.net.au/truck
This is one of the things that does my head in when organisations run with these headlines. It’s as bad as invermectin pushing using a partially true headline to infer something that isn’t true. Capital expenditure by its very definition gets amortised (expensed) over multiple years.
3) yep income inequality a big driver of much harm. Anything that exacerbates this seems an easy one.
4) Venezuela is definitely an extreme example. Nationalising something you don’t have local expertise in is a bad move - and if your politicians are completely corrupt it will be even worse. In terms of energy prices what is happening in Australia is reflective of what is happening globally - what is your logic of connecting that to privatised utilities? Our prices are pretty much in line with global averages. Bloated inefficient organisations are usually ones that are monopolies (Telstra after that got privatised) or have low accountability and very few individuals get let go for poor performance (afl, many parts of government). My view is government needs to provide a good set of rules for industry to stop it exploiting everything and it will generally do a better job - where this breaks down is on things we consider essential (education /healthcare in Australia) as if you bring a profit motive into that you will undermine the service you want to provide. Can have plenty of debates over what should and shouldn’t be essential.
Scores of govt schools are as good as private schools Hopefully you include the Catholic schools as private. Many of them are *smile*. But can still produce the occasional PM.
So how come these state schools produce the goods on the same budget that others don't. That's the question the massive education bureaucracy needs to tackle.
Back in the day the govt schools were called State schools. The others were Public schools...ie not run by the State. So parents had a choice.... an education aligned to their values or one dictated by politicians of the day and bureaucrats.
Governments were slow to the education game especially post primary. Churches and other groups filled the gap. A century and a half of history and culture to overcome.
I didn't pay much attention but did Albanese take a de funding policy to the election?
The teals wouldn't know that there are govt schools at all.
I'm not sure how long it would take to defund private schools, but it needs to happen. Won't though. But I have a bit of a solution to this - if you are a member of parliament, a public service bureaucrat (especially in the Education Dept) then you should be banned from sending your kids anywhere but the local state school. Watch the state schools improve when that happens!
No idea about how capital expenditure in a company gets accounted for, but surely if $100,000 goes out the door to buy something then that must be $100,000 of expenses.
Nationalising is not always good, but then again, like anything else it depends why and how you do it. The private sector is not by default more efficient, again it depends on the implementation. Privatising energy is part of the reason we are in the current mess. Power companies bought and sold often so they don't care about the long term just the current profits. Wailing about things like Hazelwood closing even though it closed about 10 years after it was predicted to close when it was built. Lots of mess with privatisation. Despite this, and despite privatisation being a complete clusterfuck, it has actually been a roaring success. How so? You have to ask yourself, why did they privatise things like power companies? Simple, so when there is a problem, it is no longer the government's fault. Part of the motivation was just ideology and lining the pockets of big business, but there was also the factor that when things go wrong you can't blame the government of the day for the mess. Oh, and the pockets of the big end of town have been nicely lined too.
DS
I come from a family background of working to lower middle class conservatives/traditionalists. We certainly have no affiliation (and didn't have the means to pay) for private schooling. And in my childhood Catholic schooling wasn't an option either, as one needed to essentially be Catholic to attend - I wasn't from an overly religious family, although I was sent to Methodist/Uniting Church Sunday school for a small part of my childhood. Hence my siblings and I and my parents and aunts and uncles were all State school educated.
As a result always had an uncomfortable moral feeling towards the concept of Private schooling (and they were always seen as another tribe that we didn't belong - the class enemy I suppose). But it wasn't just that. When one comes from the family background I did (partly raised by depression-WWII era grandparents of rural poor stock) there was the practical aspect of always being prudent, or even frugal with money. Hence why I refuse to pay private school fees. I believe no matter one's income level, people deserve access to a high standard of education as their ticket to better themselves. One only has to look at the honour role of some public high school in past eras to see they were churning out just as much achievement as non-govt counterparts. I see pictures of my mother and uncle at State High School in the 1960s and the way the kids presented and the school conducted itself, you wouldn't be able to tell an enormous difference between a public school and a private one. And every person, no matter their income status had access to this quality environment. How it should be.
More, what I bemoan is what public education has become progressively from the late 1980s onwards. And I don't think funding is so much the issue. Sure I acknowledge it's part of the issue. But in past eras (For instance, 1960s/70s) class sizes were far larger, teachers did more with far less. I think a greater determinate is the social decay that gets foist upon public schools that they are unfairly expected to work miracles with. This is a consequence of cultural deficiencies. When traditionalist concepts like mutual obligation, discipline, self discipline, self restraint, personal responsibility and accountability etc are degraded as values underpinning a society. And we instead lurch towards socially liberal values driven by narcissistic self gratification (hedonism) with little consequence as people's central raison d'etre, feeding into illegitimacy and chaotic family breakdown, I think that gives a good explanation of the social fallout we see in public high schools. These themes obviously occur across all social classes. But while these themes have no doubt been detrimental to middle and upper class communities, they have been utterly toxic and devastating to the social fabric of working class communities. And eliminated any ounce of esprit d'corps at all but the top tier of state schools.
I saw it with my own eyes being schooled publicly throughout the 1990s. The high school I attended was located in a kind of mixed lower-middle class to working class neighbourhood. But the zoning stretched a fair way into large welfare dependent suburbs. So the student body really was a mixed lolly-bag. Class life could be absolutely chaotic at times if one found themselves in a class that was anything outside the top stream of a subject. Kids already displaying terrifying prison yard behaviour - to be fair 10-12% of them in some grades ended up in the slammer by their early 20s, so I suppose the cries we often hear that school should modernise and teach students practical skills they will use in their adult life, meant these students were using school to take advantage of this. Come to think of it, slightly more students made it to prison than to tertiary education by their early 20s.
I had such high expectations of high school and arrived there really liking school, being an enthusiastic student, only to become stifled and jaded by the anti-climax that it turned out to be. Actually made me less tolerant in a lot of ways. The opposite to what one would intuitively expect, being schooled surrounded by more 'diversity'.
My children attend a local State Primary school that is quite small and with a pretty cushy, sheltered middle class zoning demographics. It's a really good school. But I'm facing a big dilemma as to what I do for high school for them. For practical and moral reasons, I don't want to send them to a Private school. But detest what the local public high school has become (very similar mixed demographic bag to the high school I attended).
