As thousands of NSW teachers took to the streets over a fight for better classroom conditions last week, Peter Dutton was setting his sights on a different kind of battle over education.
The new opposition leader recently emphasised the issue as part of the opposition’s path back to government. “There is a lot of non-core curriculum that is being driven by unions and by other activists that parents are concerned about,” he told The Australian’s political editor Simon Benson.
Don’t be fooled by the standard red-meat-for-the-base bashing. Dutton’s call to arms is more than just a routine attack on the usual Liberal Party enemies; it’s inspired by the success of his international political counterparts at reframing education as a conservative-favouring issue.
Last month, Crikey reported on how Dutton’s signposting about education as a political battleground in one of his first interviews as opposition leader seemed to draw inspiration from the United States. In recent years, state and local Republicans have capitalised and encouraged confected fears about critical race theory or gender theory in curricula to scare parents about what’s being taught to their children.
In an attempt to avoid an unfavourable comparison to the book burning of the 1970s and the obvious hypocrisy of the so-called “party of free speech” policing what’s taught in Year 4 classrooms, Republicans are branding it as an issue of “parents’ choice” — a messaging sleight-of-hand that Dutton has also adopted.
Except it’s really about less choice around what children can be taught in Australian schools. Dutton wants to crack down on “non-core curriculum” — surely something that would go hand in hand with choice. Nor is it about parents: as Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes recently said, the future of the Liberal Party depends on “fixing” the education system.
Hughes really gave the game away when she told an audience at the conservative think tank the Sydney Institute that youth voters are abandoning the Coalition because of “Marxist” teachers who are teaching them “absolute leftwing rubbish”. In Hughes’ eyes, the actual problem with the education system is that not enough children are coming out with a desire to vote for the Liberal Party.
It’s also important to look at what Dutton, Hughes and the rest of the party don’t say about education. They want to talk about the national curriculum. They want to talk about protecting schools’ values (presumably a reference to the debate over our religious discrimination bill and its impact on schools). The education debate, by their telling, is being fought over the culture that they’re being taught about.
They’re quiet when it comes to any analysis about why our education system is reaching a crisis point. After gruelling years of teaching in a pandemic, there are severe teacher shortages. Some of those still in the sector are planning to leave. An exhausted cohort of teachers are striking because they’ve been offered less pay for doing more work. Private schools funded with millions of taxpayer dollars are building a third pool while other public schools scrape by.
These are the real issues with our education system, and therefore the ones that are actually hurting our children’s education. Our quality of teaching isn’t being hurt by children learning about gender or Australia’s colonial past. It’s being sabotaged by a system that leaves overworked teachers with managing big classrooms with fewer resources. Any significant education reform would probably be complicated and expensive — neither are attractive attributes for a conservative opposition.
That’s why Peter Dutton has been careful to draw the battlelines as he has. He’s right to identify education as an issue that Australians care about, parents most of all. He’s just hoping that voters are desperate enough to believe in his solution.
Dutton’s motivation is about anything but improvement in education. He and his party do not possess the collective intelligence to produce a sensible policy, so they poach the disastrous corporate model from the US, which employs punishing “reporting” regimes on already overworked teaching staff, and is more about privatization, and profit, than education. Part of this process, is an intentional dumbing-down of both the process and quality of teaching, to produce factory ready workers, incapable of critical thought.
There is a crisis of literacy and numeracy in schools, as described by both my family members in education. The influx of children enduring minimal parental guidance is a slow motion epidemic, which the parents expect the teachers and schools to rectify, right down to kindergarden level. Should a teacher dare to discipline an unruly child, an enraged parent can relatively easily force the dismissal of that teacher, in true US fashion, with little resistance from a compliant bureaucracy.
Dutton’s proposals are nonsense, as expected from a group hardly described as intellectual juggernauts..
“the disastrous corporate model from the US, which employs punishing “reporting” regimes on already overworked teaching staff…”
Yes. It’s been going on for decades. I have a book published in 2002 that is a brilliant extended polemic attacking the spread of “managerialism” in the UK, the worship of anyone with an MBA, the growth of incomprehensible management jargon and the insertion of countless parasitical managers and consultants into organisations with no discernable use for them. There is a chapter on how UK state schools were brought to their knees by these pernicious practices, including a huge increase in testing children year after year. Critics observed, ‘You don’t fatten pigs by weighing them,’ but this fell on deaf ears. If anything, it just gets worse.
Tory education minister Kenneth Bake did much of the damage in the 1980s. This included destroying the teachers’ union. He gave an interview in 1999 where he recalled how the opponents of his policies and their warnings of his hidden political objectives that were denied and dismissed out of hand,
‘And now he’s laughing because the funny thing is – they were right! “I took away all negotiating rights from the union. It was quite brutal.” He chuckles as he recalls by statute he removed their right to negotiate…’
The australia system is a copy of the USA system that was created by an ex Car Manufacturing Executive Robert McNamara. Then we copied the UK’s TAFE system that didnt work. Then Bob Kawke said “we will all go to Uni. ” And the only way you ca fire a teacher is if the assault someone. We HAVE PBL now that doesnt work either ALL are to blame the whole system is rotten , its about everything except teaching and learning. Its,main focus is social engineering
McNamara was, as you say, a highly placed executive in the US car industry for a time, but that’s rather overshadowed by his contribution to Operations Research (advanced statistical techniques used to maximise the devastating effects of bombing), the escalation of the Vietnam War and the nuclear arms race. A very clever man who was rather late acquiring any moral sense about the consequences of his contributions. There’s an excellent documentary about him, ‘Fog of War’ (2003).
Love the last sentence:
“Dutton’s proposals are nonsense, as expected from a group hardly described as intellectual juggernauts”
One of the previous Coalition Ministers, Taylor, couldn’t even add up and get his numbers correct in his little stoush with Clover Moore.
Taylor is an evil toxic DUNCE.
I believe the technical term is ‘cream of society’ – rich and thick.
I disagree. All cons tend towards juggernautism if used in it’s literal sense.
An outstanding example of innumeracy was Cormann, or as we know him in our house, The Belgian Waffle, a poor mixture of bad ingredients and hot air…
The Belgian Waffle,who in the leadership spill that brought Smirko to power as The Prime Muppet managed to get the numbers wrong.
Having continued to do so often in his official position… when apparently manifesting as a Minister of Finance despite his innumeracy.
And now he is the boss at OECD!
On the contrary, if you take the original meaning of juggernaut – “A juggernaut] in current English usage, is a literal or metaphorical force regarded as merciless, destructive, and unstoppable.”
Apart from the hyperbole about being unstoppable, I think it describes the cons pretty well.
Why would my post be ‘Awaiting for approval” ? Besides; any human or algorithm that uses ‘Awaiting for’ is intellectually not credible.
To the censors – I had a perfectly well documented and presented, coherent argument with no swearing or personal criticisms censored 2 days ago, as well as several others of like kind. It seems Crikey is getting as bad as SMH, which I have refused to pay for for 3 years because of this.
Please buck up !
why are these people so obsessed with being in power and inflicting their views on everybody but so utterly uninterested in actually governing? Rhetorical question. South Gilead is Dutton’s Nirvana. The other way to get into powers and stay in power is to govern effectively and win the contest of ideas. The LNP have no ideas. They are greedy, lazy and selfish. Morrison was the symptom, not the problem.
Lazy alright. It’s not the first time Dutton has poached a culture war from the Republican party and tried to repurpose it for use domestically. They’re not very original, nor are they competent.
Keep the electorate dumb and they won’t question the government, seems to be the idea.
What you dont understand is that what ever ‘side” is chosen the only things they promise to do is spend more money that is not theirs. The public cant do anything because the public wont accept its own failings.
Here is a question if a party when to the election on a promise to make house prices drop by say 15 to 20 percent would you vote for them if you were a home owner with all your capital tied up in your home.
Be honest. The problem is beyond politics, but we seek a political answer so how they want us to dip into super to but a house. This suggest they will not let the prices fall by any considerable amout over 2-3 percent if they can help it, There is no shortage of houses the truth has allway been there but the poiitics of all parties and media cover it up. Where was the ABC, that’s part of their job, one journalist can find that if they look it did. They are not interested.
I’m one myself, but to that muddle of opinion, I can only say – “OK, Boomer”.
Viewed fro the USA, copy-and-paste politics is rife in my birth country of Australia. See critical race theory, voter ID, city vs country, marxist teachers etc.
I am increasing convinced by McGowan’s assessment of Spud Dutton as dim. It is demonstrably dumb to think that parents are concerned about the curriculum, as many dumb ignorant redneck Americans apparently are.
And given the terrifying collapse of civil democracy being engineered by brutally nasty Republicans, why would any reasonably intelligent Australia politician contemplate importing anything fundamentally cultural from America.
Keep going Spud. The path to coalition oblivion is in the direction you and the risable Holly Hughes are headed.
Sure thing. There’s a malign genius in the way so often in politics a real problem is identified, and then a solution, or several, is produced and applied that will make it worse. Here it’s about education, but a complete list would be very long. The crazy-high price of housing excluding so many Australians would deserve a place near the top of the list.
H. L. Mencken recognised the phenomenon about 100 years ago: “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
High house prices are due to the current FIAT currenry systems invented in 1971. This is when inflation
began. We have been living with a targetted inflation rate of 3 percent and now we are above the target.
House prices are not in the CPI. The CPI is what ever govs want in it and is only one part of the measures available. Basically the worlds is ponzi scheme.
There are some who say deficits dont matter, they are the real problem, and may not know it but they are the real problem who allow govs and banks to do as they wish. They dot even know that they are the true neocons as they term it. Neocons want the gov to pay for everything and they are across the politcal spectrum and a lot are in the public sector being good “socialists”.
I’m pretty sure that there was inflation before 1971. In fact it was famously high in most of the world after the 2nd world war. The 70s were also the era of the oil crysis, which was arguably more significant. Inflation has dropped in most countries since the early 80s, until very recently. That’s not consistent with it just being about loss of gold backing.
You forgot about the rise of National Socialism in Germany, Spain, Italy and Britain during the great depression. All fired by inflation.
A point to consider – is it also the reason behind the rise of the modern day fascists, like Trump ?
I just want Dutton to come out and say that what schools need is stronger moral values, and that Alan Tudge is the best person to lead that change. Come on, make our day.
And Taylor overhauls the maths curriculum.