The first major review of education in this country for decades, concluding that a new funding regime is needed to ensure more equitable access of quality education and that funding should increase across all sectors, was apparently not nearly as important to our journals of record as playing up to the egos of some Munchausening backbenchers who apparently cannot do the arithmetic on how many seats are required to remain in government but who nonetheless think they’ve got the numbers to spill Gillard.
I’m not going to add up the column inches, but “febrile leadership speculation” easily outran Gonski coverage by a shameful margin.
In the event that the factional rumps within the ALP do actually decide to commit electoral suicide and force a general election well over a year before the minority government’s term ends (in which case the ALP would deserve to fall apart and leave room for a more relevant political party), hands up who thinks that the change in leadership will make much difference to decisions that need to be made about education policy right now?
Most of Australia’s MSM seems bound and determined to just keep on screeching for us to look at the Big Distracting Thing instead of holding up actual policy decisions to adequate scrutiny.
If you want to read some adequate scrutiny, check out Laura Tingle in the AFR.
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- So what else happened in Parliament yesterday? by tigtog
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* Quicklink to recent open threads
CastIronBalcony: 
bluemilk: 
mindyhoyden: 
puzzlement: 
vivsmythe: 
ChallyWrites: 
ilauredhel: 
Oh please just let it all end! I haven’t read the Gonski report yet but I plan to. From what I have gathered it is a bit of a shake-up and private school funding won’t stop but might change. Cue the claims of class war etc. *headdesk* Christopher Pyne obviously hasn’t been in a public school lately, or he just doesn’t give a
shittoss.My fear is that even if Rudd were to declare his loyalty – even if he was 100% sincere – the media still wouldn’t let it go. Rudd would have to resign from Parliament – but even that would bring about a crisis and the hacks would claim it was deliberate to end the Gillard Government. It’s a no-win situation.
Rudd declares loyalty – media claims he is still waiting for his chance.
Rudd challenges and loses – media claims he is retiring to the back bench to wait for another chance and we lose a really good Foreign Minister.
Rudd challenges and wins – we go back to a PM who micromanages and doesn’t the negotiation skills Gillard has which has steered us through a potentially difficult time with a minority government, or the Independents choose not to support Rudd and the GG offers the Liberal party the chance to see if they can form Govt or we go to an election.
My only hope is that the media turns its laser glare onto Abbott once he is PM to see if they can topple another one. But of course now that the populace will have gotten the outcome ‘right’ we don’t need that do we. Fuckers. (sorry Liam muppets just doesn’t cut it atm)
Thanks be to the Flying Spaghetti Monster for Laura Tingle!
I’m sure there will be adequate coverage on Fairfax’s new site for the women-folk. http://www.dailylife.com.au/
Sam, it’s not nice to tease ;)
I’m glad to see some writers I like get a regular gig on Daily Life, I understand that ads for consumerist drivel will be what funds it, I just want them to not talk down to the readers (in the way that they organise their content) just because the ad copy has to be drivel.
I’m so busy this week, has Readers Digest put out a Condensed Book form of the Gonski report? Because it’s 300 plus pages. I commented on LP that I wouldn’t be following my usual stragedy of printing it out and reading on the daily commute, due to the hectares of forest that would need to be chopped down for this tome. Some numpty helpfully suggested double sided print. OH HAI MR MANSPLAIN I had never heard of duplex before!! No, my reason for still not printing the thing is that that’s still around 175 or so sheets of A4. I have managed to get a sense of it but will wait till I can get more under my belt to make a more, er, intelligent comment!
Julia Gillard said something that got soundbyted on the radio that I really liked. Something like, “I answered all these questions yesterday. I have nothing further to add today. Now if you don’t mind, I need to talk about Education.”
Which is of course a much more important course.