As if we needed any more evidence that you can screw over young people but not their parents, this week furnished it in spades. A day after revealing that $2.8 billion would be taken from universities and students, the government has revealed it will spend an extra $2.2 billion on school funding, in an effort to finally end the incessant war that Labor has waged against it on school funding since the Gillard years.
Even combined with the $1.2 billion it deployed in a similar effort in the last budget, this doesn’t match Labor’s commitment to go the “full Gonski”, but Turnbull’s response to that is to hire David Gonski himself to review funding allocations. It’s not Gonski’s undoubted expertise that Turnbull is hiring, though — it’s the right to use his name as a kind of human shield against Labor’s attacks.
What in effect has been a near-complete surrender on school funding by the Liberals is being lauded as a stroke of genius by plenty in the media, although the really savvy play is a different kind of backflip: the Liberals will now be the party of the “private school hit list” with 24 schools targeted for “negative funding growth” and other private schools receiving lower funding growth than government schools.
The Liberals have backflipped so many times on this issue that it appears to have infected Labor, which has performed its own backflip and has gone into bat for Catholic schools that will miss out on funding. Labor might imagine relatively poor Catholic systemic schools as being the beneficiaries of this defence, but it looks a lot like a defence of bloated institutions like Joeys and Riverview in Sydney. They’d be smarter to let the angry right within the Liberals go into bat for their alma maters, which is a definite possibility.
Either way, no one’s talking about higher education cuts now, even though, in the end, many parents will cop it one way or the other as kids whose families can afford it turn to the bank of mum and dad to avoid even bigger student debts.
Why didn’t the government wait until next Tuesday to reveal the extra $2.2 billion, like it did last year with its extra $1.2 billion? That more or less sunk without trace amid the focus on the looming election, other budget measures and the government’s insistence it was all about “an economic plan”. A repeat of that mishandling was out of the question. And it wants next Tuesday to be all about infrastructure — in particular, the ridiculous boondoggle of the inland rail line between Melbourne and Brisbane. The government is already getting static on this piece of pork barrelling, so selected journalists with short memories and no grasp of rail economics have been briefed to puff it up — according to one Australian reporter, it is a train line no longer, but an “inland rail network” (can “steel Mississippi” be far away?) that private investors are ready to back. Peculiarly, none of these investors have at any stage been prepared to front money for the project, but that’s always been the way of the inland rail line — the insistence from backers that the private sector supports it, but the absence of even a single dollar of actual money to demonstrate that.
It should be interesting to see how billion dollars (at least) to be wasted on this project will be treated in the budget — it’s not investment in productive infrastructure that will yield an asset, but more akin to a bribe to the National Party not to make trouble for a precarious government; in that sense, it is very definitely recurrent spending, because this is hardly going to be the last time the boys from bush demand the waste of taxpayer money in their electorates.
Where does this leave the deficit? Clearly the government will be (literally) banking on higher growth forecasts to offset its additional spending, the deletion of its zombie savings from the budget bottom line and the retention of its tax handouts to multinationals — plus shifting as much infrastructure spending as it can credibly manage onto the budget capital account. So take next Tuesday’s deficit figure with plenty of salt and a giant asterisk.
To quote Tolkien, “The wise Grima speak only of what they know”. Unfortunately, though there is much of interest in this article the inland freight system is outside your ken. We have been working on this for 20 bloody years! There is no comparable country to Australia with such crap rail systems. Even one we think of as inferior. We rely on exports and freight and that means railways, not the pissy little things you see in Sydney or Melbourne but trains a couple of km long. I remember looking at the CPR freight yard in Toronto with 300 trucks per train and the sulfur trains in Alberta that needed a loco in the middle to keep the air up.
The idea that you send interstate freight of bulk on the roads is absurd and the notion that you send it via Sydney’s sclerotic system is even more so. Whay is you transport solution Mr Keane?
I’m not going to debate (for or against) the points you’re making here, but rather let you know of the existence of some rather long trains.
Not many Australians along the east coast are aware, but there is more to Australia than most realise. This mysterious and rarely spoken of land, is about a third of Australia’s land mass, is on the other side of South Australia and Northern Territory, is named Western Australia, is part of Australia and has been since federation (1901).
In the mid north of WA are large deposits of iron ore. This ore is mined for export and carted around by trains several Km long, hundreds of cars/trucks, and 2 or 3 or 4 or more locomotives. There’s a lot more info available via Mr Google, so I won’t put it all here.
Just thought I’d let east coast readers (who were not aware) know about the existence of WA, and let you know about these very long trains in WA.
Cheers
Mick
There’s a perfectly good railway line across the Nullarbor, yet there is a constant stream of trucks, whose drivers have to stop to sleep a couple of times at least, taking freight along the highway. Buggered if I know how they can compete with rail freight.
So true !!
Back to education, the Greens seem to be back flipping better than anyone else saying they are considering supporting gonski2. Hard to follow their decisions these days, just as well they are against wars as you wouldn’t want them to defend your back.
Why would the Greens NOT support an increase in school spending? They will continue to push for more, and bigger cuts to support for private schools too, but to reject this proposal would be just playing politics, surely.