The Price Of An Education

Un-Open University

My significant other has been doing courses with the Open University. She's been using them to skill up in areas of her work to do with research and psychology, and mostly because in order to do the course she really wants to do, they put up all kinds of pre-requisite courses. Some are justified, but others have been head-scratchers. Yet, over the last few years, she's managed to go through most of the maze of courses and navigate her way to the last 2 she wants to do.

Except this year, Swinburne University has raised their courses from under $1000 to $2700. In order to finish her maze of courses, she now has to stump $5400 for a pair of Open University courses. When she queried the price rises, the answer she got from Swinburne University was that inflation forced them to raise the prices.

Think about that for a moment. They had a 300% price rise. As I wrote before, I know that CPI inflation is less than reliable given that they under-report inflation, but all the same, CPI is also less than 3%. The rest of the 300% can't possibly be because of inflation. Nothing is inflating like that in 12months. The clear answer is that Swinburne University has decided to gouge the Open University students. Yet, they are not alone. The participant institutions are all asking for $2000-$3000 per course.

It's enough to make you wonder if these institutions know what they're asking of their students. Let's say you need to do 30 courses for a diploma. That's $60,000-$90,000 they want from the Open University students. A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation says you need to earn a lifetime $600,000-$900,000 gross to pay off the 10% education cost of the career. That 10% seems a bit high. HECS is more like 3%; at least that's the way the ATO went out taking out my HECS repayments in After-Tax dollars (believe me, it hurt that it was After-Tax).

So if we adjust backwards from HECS, you need to earn a lifetime of 2million-3million to justify doing that course. At 150k p.a., that's 12-20years, and that's assuming you can go do a course and land a 150k job (we wish!) and work it for the rest of your career. The average salary in Australia is more like 65k which means you could work a full lifetime and never earn the value of your education based on how the ATO and Federal Government thinks you should earn the value of your education. When you factor in that most participants in Open University are mature age students, it means they've got less time to make the education pay for itself.

In the context where wages are also decidedly not rising, it seems appropriate to say that education at that price is definitely not going to pay itself off. You really can't be telling your kids to go to Tertiary education any more given how much it burdens them with student debt. That's how crazy this has become. Even if you take the position that education must send a price signal to the market, if it prices itself out of being meaningful, then it's just not worth undertaking.

I kind of expect that their revenues from the Open University programme are going to collapse.

View From The Couch - 25/Apr/2016

Sophie Miserabella Is On The Loose

Ugh. Sometimes politics selects for psychopaths and puts them on a pedestal. Sometimes it simply allows psychopaths to display their symptoms in public as a warning to all. Sometimes politics simply is the playground for psychopaths. And then there is Sophie Mirabella, a.k.a. Miserabella.

"I had a commitment for a $10 million allocation for the Wangaratta Hospital that, if elected, I was going to announce a week after the election," she said. "That is $10 million that Wangaratta hasn't had because [independent] Cathy [McGowan] was elected." 

A confession doesn't need to be intended by the confessor as a confession; confessors often don't realise their words have proved their guilt. 

And taking Mirabella at her word, this confession is something else, admitting to a galling example of a political offence rather than a criminal one, the gangrenous pork barrelling which infects Australian politics, which in this case presumably hurt only the sick people of her former electorate. Beyond Indi, the gangrene floods marginal electorates with taxpayers' money, diverting spending on public services according to the political interests of political parties. 

That Mirabella felt so comfortable saying what she did on national television indicates how routine it is. Yet the preference for spending based on electoral marginality rather than demonstrated need is utterly improper.

The clearest sign that the Liberals have learnt nothing from Mirabella's defeat in the 2013 election where hers was the only seat to go against the trend of voters going towards the LNP Coalition; oblivious to the national trend, they swung hard against La Miserabella. Now the Libs want to trot her out again in the same seat where she was trounced in the hopes that people of Indi have clean-forgotten just what an awful MP she was for their seat, and to sweeten the deal, dangle some pork-barrelling money. If this doesn't sound like an abusive partner, then your electors in Indi have rocks in their heads or are experiencing Stockholm Syndrome.

It's all kind of strange when you consider that the Liberals (presumably) want to win back government. Why in the hell would they want to load up with a liability in this seat? Wouldn't they want a candidate who was strong and presentable than trotting out the same La Miserabella who actively cost them the seat? What has this woman got over the party to let her keep running their good name down like this? It's actually indicative of a party that's really short on talent. Just as it struggled to remove Bronwyn Bishop from her entitlement of the seat of Mackellar, they probably don't have a ready alternative to run in Indi instead of Sophie the Miserable.

Malcolm Turnbull On The Hustings

Here's Malcolm Turnbull out on the hustings saying her won't change Negative Gearing.

Malcolm Turnbull has ventured deep into Sydney suburbia to announce, once and for all, his government will not make any changes to negative gearing or capital gains tax in next week's federal budget. 

From the front garden of a family home in the southern neighbourhood of Penshurst on Sunday, he claimed Labor's policy to limit negative gearing to newly built housing and reduce the capital gains tax discount would drive down home values, drive up rents and discourage investment.

"That's why we won't have a bar of it," Mr Turnbull said.

At least he's consistent - he's taking the side of the investors. In doing so, he's saying he doesn't need the votes of people under 30. Maybe that's a good thing for the Libs who have always courted older stodgier crustier folk. - but you'd thank that was a bit different to actively pissing off the under-30s demographic. Sometimes it seems Malcolm Turnbull is just a different flavour of stupid to that served up under Tony Abbott. For all the people's expectation that he'd be a great Prime Minister, he sold his soul to the rightwing nut jobs of his party and so is incapable of delivering any policy that would help people. There's not a day that goes by that doesn't underline Malcolm's deal with the devil.

It's pretty bleak in Australia. There's never been a more bleak and underwhelming time to be an Australian than the circumstances we find ourselves in today.

What Was Wrong With Tony Abbott?

There are some days where I don't even know where to begin writing here because there's just so much to bitch about. Try this.

While Mr Abbott stands by his approach to same-sex marriage, climate change, asylum seekers and national security, he admits to failings on economic policy, including his expensive paid parental leave scheme proposal and his decision to abolish the debt ceiling. 

However he largely stands by his deeply unpopular 2014 budget, saying there was a "moral purpose" to returning the budget to surplus because it would have allowed the government to create a better society. But he admits the government misjudged the public mood on spending cuts and he accepts responsibility for failing to properly sell the blueprint. 

Mr Abbott says his decision to only include one woman - Julie Bishop - in his first cabinet was an "avoidable error". He also admits he misjudged how the public would react to his catastrophic decision to award Prince Philip a knighthood. He also regrets his decision to abandon changes to section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Tony Abbott is trying to analyse his time in office and ends up assessing so many things incorrectly. What was so wrong about Tony Abbott? - we might ask rhetorically for empty effect. It might be that compared to other leaders in the world, he was incredibly lacking in an understanding of the world around him.
Before I start my castigation of the man again, I'm just going to start with this video clip here.



Yes, that's the Prime Minister of Canada right there showing he understands quantum computing and why it's important. Tony Abbott is still trying to deny climate change. You can't exercise leadership when you don't and won't put yourself at the cutting edge of knowledge. In the 21st century, you can't have a national leader who wants to cut budgets for science and deny climate change. Does Tony Abbott need to understand the basics of Quantum computing to be a better politician? Who knows? But if he did, he might view the entire enterprise of science funding in a different light. The absolute vacuity and meaninglessness of even his mea culpa tells everybody plainly that he simply wasn't a human being of any amount of intellectual integrity to be leading the nation and making decisions about science spending. And if he was so unqualified for science, it is indicative of his lack of consideration for other human endeavours that make up a civilisation; Naturally, it draws the equivalent scepticism that he is unqualified to consider questions about engineering or the arts or town planning or farming or mining or animal husbandry or medicine or law. For a man who has a tertiary education, he looks remarkably like somebody who was untouched by its enlightening effects. Stumbling in the dark as a Prime Minister then, he is still stumbling in the dark of his own making.

Be that as it may, the tragedy isn't just his; it was and remains to this day all of our tragedy that he was even in the office of Prime Minister for as long as he was.

"Vote Mal, Eat Pal" Pt. 2

You Have Got To Be Kidding Me

The government wants to claw back some money without raising taxes or closing loopholes for their own rich constituents, so the new idea is to collect HECS debts from the dead.

The Turnbull government is considering the controversial move of collecting student debts from the dead, as well as increasing university fees, as it seeks to find higher education savings in the May budget. 

Former education minister Christopher Pyne backed the idea of recovering HECS from deceased estates two years ago, but was quickly shut down by Tony Abbott to avoid a scare campaign on the sensitive issue. Labor slammed the idea as a "death tax" - even though most other loans, such as mortgages and credit card debt, must be repaid upon death. 

Ending the HECS write-off from deceased estates worth over $100,000 would save up to $800 million a year, according to leading higher education analyst Andrew Norton.

Sources in the higher education sector said the proposal had been raised in recent discussions with Education Minister Simon Birmingham, who is under pressure to find substantial savings in his portfolio. 

Asked if he was considering recovering HECS from deceased estates, Senator Birmingham said: "The costs to taxpayers of higher education over recent years have grown dramatically "Since 2009, taxpayer funding for Commonwealth supported places in higher education has increased by 59 per cent as compared to nominal growth of GDP that has risen by 29 per cent."

It's downright evil, is what it is. I get it that they have pressing needs to shore up revenue but increasing Tertiary Fees, sticking the student with the massive debt, and then chasing them beyond death and into the grave for that debt seems like a total breakdown in the social contract. The model of user-pays and education as vocational training model that successive Australian Governments have been pushing should mean that when a person is dead-but-in-debt, they are no long in their vocation (I can't believe I had to write that just then) and therefore are no longer beneficiaries of the said user-pay vocational training. 

It's bad enough that this government like its predecessors is downright anti-intellectual. Reducing education to vocational training happened under the Hawke-Keating government when they committed to the Dawkins reforms. Connecting up the earning potential of university graduates and then lining up a fee in correspondence to future earnings was a Howard Government decision. None of these decisions understand education at all. The point of education is to understand the world in broader terms - whether it be through science or the arts - so that when they are eventually employed, they can work with a wider perspective on what it means to be doing that work.  

The anti-intellectualism of this government is so deep, it views education strictly as a means of creating taxpayers. Tertiary education is clearly the means of extracting bigger tax money out of Tertiary graduates, and that's it. And should they die young, this government is saying the tax from the unearned money over the career of the dead person still belongs to the government. They don't understand that even talking about this makes for a great disincentive for people to get more educated, when in fact our democracy needs as many educated people it can get - and by educated, I'm not talking about vocationally trained people, I'm talking about people who can do critical thinking and analysis. 

Just when did our government get so stupid and so evil all in the one go? 

Steven Keen Says Recession By 2017

Here's the article. In a nutshell, for all this talk of 25years of constant growth, parts of it were accomplished by going deeper into debt for the private sector to goose demand through the rough patches. Now it has gotten to the point where Australia's private sector is the most indebted per capita in the world. The consequence of all this is that there can't be much debt that can piled on top, and any drop in debt will usher in a collapse in demand. There's nowhere to go with the debt upwards, and the only way for demand is down. 

This is the inevitable debt crunch coming Australia’s way, but conventional economists are oblivious to this danger because they’ve brainwashed themselves to ignore private debt as just a “pure redistribution”, to quote Ben Bernanke. This deluded textbook thinking is why Bernanke didn’t see the GFC coming. 

The day of reckoning can be delayed by encouraging yet more private borrowing, which the RBA can attempt to do by cutting interest rates, and the government can reduce the crunch by running a large budget deficit. But these are likely to happen after a crisis rather than before it, because our Reserve Bank and our politicians are as oblivious to the dangers of private debt today as Bernanke was back in 2007. 

The 2016 election could be a good one to lose.

Yes, it could be a real bugger. I sure wonder what the debt crunch is going to look like in Sydney. 

The RBA is taking a steady-as-she-goes view on the economy. This would lead one to suspect that Glenn Stevens isn't likely to see the next downturn coming over the horizon. Of course, there probably isn't much more he and the RBA can do at this point. They're not going to raise interest rates for a whole gaggle of reasons, and they're not going to cut them any more because the worst isn't here just yet, but chances are we're sill headed towards Zero Interest Rate Policy when this recession arrives. We're just suckers for punishment.

Shutting Out The Scientists

The true hallmark of this Coalition Government is its anti-intellectualism, which is exemplified by its constant shift to appease those who deny climate change is happening or that it is man made. As such, it tends to find itself on the wrong end of science and scientific fact quite a bit. Indeed, they are slashing the budget to actually study the climate at the CSIRO.

One of CSIRO's main climate science units planned to slash four out of five researchers, all but eliminating its monitoring and climate modelling research, a new document reveals. 

The cuts are contained in an analysis for the Oceans & Atmosphere division, dated January 25, 2016. CSIRO handed over the document to the Senate committee investigating plans to slash 350 staff overall, and it has been made public on the Senate's website.

Doubts over the rationale and planning of the cuts flared on Tuesday in another CSIRO section facing deep job losses, with many Land & Water staff walking out of a meeting with chief executive Larry Marshall.

"People got fed up of having their questions marginalised, trivialised, and with being lied to," one senior researcher told Fairfax media. He added the division's head, Paul Hardisty​, had led the walkout. 

"We understand CSIRO scientists are passionate about their science and also about some of the changes to the structure of their organisation," a CSIRO spokesman said, declining to elaborate on the meeting. "CSIRO is committed to continuing to have open and transparent dialogue with staff and hearing staff views and concerns." 

The new document, though, highlights the extent of the original cuts being considered by CSIRO before pressure – including from thousands of international scientists – prompted a scaling back of the job losses.

The rest of the article makes for depressing reading. 

Here's what I don't get. This government is pretty disdainful about the Arts. Here it is also having a go at Science, making stupendous cuts. It doesn't really put its money where its mouth is at when it comes to Engineering or manufacturing or any kind of secondary industry - it tells us outright we can't compete and is happy to ship those jobs abroad. They shut down the automotive industry. They won't build VFTs, sabotage their own NBN, but they'll build more unwanted motorways so they can collect more tolls. They won't build submarines, they'll opt to buy them instead. They'll allow agricultural land to be sold off to overseas interests. They tell us our economy is going to be built on construction and housing and service sector jobs. And let's not forget they want to squeeze HECS debt out of the dead. 

Just what kind of country do they think they're building here? On the evidence, you'd have to conclude even they have no idea whatsoever. 

The Education-Jobs Disconnect

The Worst In A Generation

Here's an article that paints a familiar picture. It shows that the relationship between education and employment is a lot more tenuous than assumed by large parts of our society, up to and including the government.

Among tertiary students, one in two said they felt so pessimistic about their prospects that they were considering further study so they could avoid making career decisions.
Their doubts may be justified. Today's graduates are facing the worst job prospects in a quarter of a century - and perhaps even longer, the latest research shows. 

"I wouldn't use the word 'bleak' … but these are the toughest labour market conditions since the early 1990s, that's for sure," says Graduate Careers Australia strategy and policy advisor Bruce Guthrie. 

"The demand for graduates has dropped away."

Ooh, I remember that '92-'93 peak. That was something else. I had experienced the '87-'88 unemployment as a dropout without any qualifications and found that challenging - it took about 8weeks to find any kind of job - and they were relatively benign years for youth unemployment. I spent most of 1993 working at AFTRS, trying to finish my graduation film, and remember being burnt out by September when I finally finished it. As a graduate, it took me until February the following year to find a full time job.

Back in 1993 before the "internets" as GHW Bush derisively called it, you were scouring the newspaper for job ads and applying for things that were remotely related. What was amazing was the utter dearth of jobs. You could go three weeks without seeing a single job in the arts sector. I couldn't get back into the ABC, and there was really nowhere I knew to tug at getting a job. I eventually lucked out and got picked up by a Japanese ad agency in East Sydney, but that was simply blind luck of the sort where a blind squirrel runs into a nut by accident.

When I reflect on the numbers being reported at the time, youth unemployment was hitting 20-something percent as an average across the nation, so having any kind of degree was no guarantee one would find a job. If it's sitting under 1-in-4 since 2010, then kicks up to the same kind of peak (worse, actually), what it's saying is that there is a backlog of graduates who are simply not getting in to the workplace.

It's a little disingenuous talking about this sort of thing as if somehow Gen-Y job seekers are a different category of job seekers to those in the past, and they are to blame for part of this for having silly expectations about their careers. They're most certainly not to blame - it's the entire market place for jobs that's changed significantly as a result of demographics and economic change: Mature economies with slow growth simply don't have the need to take on new graduates; The older workers are still working on; many Baby Boomers are delaying retirement; economic growth is in low single digits, and there simply aren't enough places for new graduates opening up.

"It's a global phenomenon. We're going into a phase where work is precarious," she says. 

"For the first time in history, people who are qualified are struggling to get a foothold ... professionals are now on contracts or doing casual work, whereas becoming a professional of some sort used to mean you'd get a proper job." 

In 2011, 26 per cent of 18- to 34-year-olds had a bachelor's degree or higher, compared with only 5 per cent in 1976, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

In a day and age where universities are asking people to pay huge fees, the same universities are going to come under scrutiny for their graduates who don't get placed, especially if the students are carrying astronomical debt. I don't know how I would advise a young person today about how to go about with their tertiary education or gaining employment. The ease with which you can get an education in, say, media, is in no relationship to just how rare and difficult it is to get a job in the media. Or Graphic Design (the 1980s dream job). Or Marine Biology (the 1970s dream job) before that. It's not surprising that 90% of people who study any given area do not end up working in that area.

The lousy thing about stories like this is that there isn't a political solution for something like this. It's not like some government(s) can put in some policy to make the field more accessible for young graduates. It's something fundamentally structural about our society whereby we have to monetise everything in order to pretend there is real economic growth. In doing so we've monetised education without thinking of the consequences, and one of the unintended consequences is that it is being manifestly demonstrated how there is no real connection between getting a qualification in an area and getting a career in that same area.

The Cost Of Stupid Life Decisions

For People Trying To Talk Down Free Education 

Life's weird in the tricks it plays. I got free education at tertiary for a time. I did two and a half years of med school and quit, back in the mid-80s. I realised half way through my first clinical year that I wasn't exactly cut out to help people; I also realised I was ideologically at odds with my colleagues, and refused to change my views. It was enough to drive me out the school. Because med school in those days really crammed their hours, in the two and a half years I was there, I would've spent about as much time as a normal Bachelor of science in those days. I have nothing to show for those days except that which I retained from things I learned. That's the way it goes with most education, I guess.

Still, I don't regret quitting because if you have anything else to do in life, you probably should pick that over being a doctor. Medicine, more than any other profession I've observed, should be practiced by those who cannot - and will not - do anything else. Conversely, if there's a choice to do anything other than being a doctor, you should do it because doctor-ing requires a certain single-mindedness and an understanding of that single-mindedness that allows one to be a good doctor. All of which is to say, if you're not a good doctor, then there's no point being a doctor.

When it came to quitting, I had to go talk to the student officer, who was alarmed and appalled because it took him completely by surprise that somebody would quit half way through the course. Most people who quit, quit early. Nobody waited until third year in the dead middle of the course. What he didn't know was that I had considerable parental pressure to be there. He didn't exactly make it easy. He berated and insulted me, and he resorted to putting a money value on it. He told me my time had cost the government $300,000, and I was pissing that down the drain.

I still remember the look on his face, flushed red, practically yelling at me. He was in his forties, horn-rimmed glasses and white shirt and dark blue tie. He looked like a character straight out of the early seasons of 'Mad Men'. I remember thinking, "What has that $300,000 to do with with me now?"

It was the faculty's 'opportunity cost' in investing in me instead of another candidate who might have wanted to really be there. For me, it was an expensive bill I ran up on some tab for having to figure out what I wasn't cut out to do. He was trying to pin it on to me as a reason for guilt and the need to stay. I wonder if he'd thought through the ramification - that even if I'd stayed, I wouldn't practice medicine, so the next $300,000 the faculty would spend on me would be good money after bad, one huge sunk cost. I didn't exactly think about things in those terms then, but I recall thinking, "how's it going to help anybody - me, him or the faculty - if I stayed on?"

I imagine that he didn't get free education under Whitlam's reforms. So he was appalled that I would walk out. I didn't get it at the time, because I was an entitled little shit; but it was a lot more complicated than that. I was failing. I was failing because I missed time from an ankle injury; I then had a bad bout of flu and missed exams, and then got penalised. The faculty seemed to delight in telling me I had blown it. I had just had a bad breakup and was totally messed up. I was not interested in the career let alone in helping sick people, I had discovered in the hospital wards. If I had to repeat the year, I was going to drop into the year that was doing a 6 year Medical course, which would mean I would be at the faculty for 7 years. That was 7 years for a degree that I knew I wasn't going to use. If I were going to get out, then I just had to get out right then and not 5 years further down the track, just for the piece of paper. (and I look back and shudder because in the end I'd finished my 3year AFTRS degree roughly around the time I would have graduated, with a 1year stint at the ABC as well).

To this day it remains one of the most important decisions of my life. Because of that decision, I got the most important life education in the things that followed. It is unfortunate that it took the faculty $300,000 to find out I wasn't going to be any kind of doctor. It reminds me of 'Moneyball' when they signed Billy Beane as a top draft pick and it didn't work out, although the faculty would be a bit too dense in understanding that analogy (and I would be praising myself too much in likening myself to Billy Beane). A good mark in the HSC is not 'due diligence' enough in selecting candidates for Med School. If the system is deluded in thinking this is sufficient, it gets everything it deserves.

The faculty did very badly out of it, if indeed the cost was $300,000. But they did do me over. Instead of putting me down as "withdrawn without fail" as agreed, they put me down as 'fail' - which removed any chance I would have returning to study anything else at the tertiary level under the UCAC system at the time. So the life lesson there is, "don't piss off the powerful". Since then I have been very suspicious of universities in this country as a result. I sure as hell don't buy into the self-allocated esteem these institutions hand themselves. I am still largely hostile in sentiment towards the University of Sydney and its Faculty of Medicine (may they all rot in hell). If the place was on fire, I wouldn't cross Missenden Rd to piss on it.
And even then, and even after my terrible experience at the University of Sydney, I stand for free education. Think on that for a moment!

Studying at Med School for me, was a big mistake. The mooted sum of $300,000 for that bad decision was a costly mistake, but I don't think that sum rests entirely with me. And in that sense I would posit that saddling enormous student debts is a very bad thing for society. I didn't arrive at my $300,000 decision lightly. I suffered and agonised greatly and it was in the final count that I had to push forward with it. And if the faculty punished me for it, well, that's life too. But if students are shouldered with this debt on the front end, they won't be able to make the decision I made; and I would contend it is important that people make ethical decisions when it comes to important things like this.

I have no doubt that I would have made critical errors as an uncaring, unmotivated, lousy doctor; I have no doubt I might have let somebody die on my watch by mistake or incompetence. I have no doubt that the craptacular efforts of my endeavours in medicine would have cost somebody much more than $300,000. People ought to be able to make decisions about their lives - important decisions - without getting penalised with money or encumbered with ridiculous debt. Those are the decisions that are going to contribute positively to society. No matter what the man in the horn-rimmed glasses says, you can't put a price on that. In turn, one should be very frightened of the doctor who is only there because he couldn't get out because the money was too much. I can tell you from first hand experience that most doctors are social idiots, but they are well-motivated social idiots. You wouldn't want to put your lives in the hands of anybody worse than a well-motivated social idiot.

We Live In Messy Times

The Mess Age

Years ago, when I was in a band called... okay I'll just call them 'Mess Age' for now. In Mess Age was the lead singer who was a long-suffering person with LSD - Lead Singer Disease of the Ego - and during the 196 election he quipped that if he ever won the election he'd nationalise everything and bunker up in Parliament, surrounded by the army. When I pressed him on why he thought nationalising everything would be a goo idea, he said he didn't really know but it was the sort of thing Hitler might have done. When I asked him if he aspired to being like Hitler, he said, "not the killing Jews bit, but nationalising everything would make society equally unfair."

Now, I'm not a communist nor a Stalinist, but I found it interesting that he thought true equality entailed being equally unfair on everybody. And the ramification was that people would hate him and so he would probably have to go to Martial Law and bunker up in Parliament House. It's a peculiar vision from a peculiar person, but I'm sharing it with you now because it seems oddly relevant.

If you come to power and forcefully enact a raft of policies that are deeply unpopular, you can expect the peasants to revolt, so you may even have to mobilise the army for Martial Law. Tony Abbott isn't exactly nationalising everything, but he's ripping whole planks of our social contract to shreds. He can legitimately look forward to people coming together forming unlikely alliances to confront him. In the same sense, if it should go to a Dismissal, he may actually be the sort of person lacking in common sense that would mobilise the army against its own citizenry.

The Price Is Wrong

I know I write about education a lot but with each passing day I have yet another reason why the current budget is wronger than wrongness itself when it comes to education. The Coalition is trying to put in a $7 co-payment for every GP visit. This is a deliberate plan to put in a disincentive for people going to the doctor. If $7 is supposed to deter you form the doctor, then presumably $20,000 is supposed to deter you from your education. It strikes me that a government that could do with more knowledge workers want to put in even bigger disincentives for education than already exists. The world is only going to get even more technologically demanding, be more in need of scientific rigour, in need of wider understanding of our humanities; none of these demands upon people is going to be less in the future. Why in God's name would you be erecting serious barriers for getting an education?

The downside of such policies beyond the evils of inequality and locking in privileges for the rich is that through the lack of mobility in such a society, our academies will genuinely wilt in quality and output. For all this talk of competition, it is in fact diminishing genuine competition for the best minds. I'm certainly no friend of the sandstone monstrosities we love to hold up as our glorious universities, but I have to say our lives and future would be much worse if their doors narrowed so that only the rich can get in. Unless we want to be like a third world nation, it's really not an option that should be countenanced by a major party - even a seemingly brain dead conservative one.

But Who Can Take Over?
Yes, that is the question as Dear Leader Tony Abbott continues in his unsustainably unpopular ways; it's almost like a bad parody of Julia Gillard's time as  Prime Minister. At approval ratings of 30%, L'Abbottoir is hitting the same kind of nadir as Julia Gillard. Naturally we must ask ourselves whether this is Malcolm Turnbull's Kev-Return moment. If one were a tea-leaves reading prognosticator, one might be persuaded that there was a game afoot, but seeing that these are conservatives, it is against their very nature to rock the boat in government. It was certainly the case with Peter Costello who mumbled complaints about not getting a go as PM, all the way to a quick retirement from Federal politics. These conservatives just don't do spills with the exhibitionistic fancy-pizazz of the ALP or an award night for porn stars.

The other candidates that might or could replace Tony Abbott are actually not that inspiring. You can count Joe Hockey out for he too is tainted by this lousy budget. Julie Bishop inspires no hope (which makes her hope-less by definition). Morrison, Pyne and Hunt simply won't do because they're the faces fronting for divisive policies, while Kevin Andrews is too inane. So that leaves Malcolm Turnbull once again but you can sort of see the right wing hard cases squirming in their seats at the thought of the member for Wentworth lording it all over them again. In other words, they're talentless as well as gormless.

Thus we may yet be stuck with Tony Abbott thanks to a spineless clueless Liberal Party room. They may therefore stick with this lousy excuse for a budget, much of which likely won't pass this Senate or the next, thanks to its enduring intrinsic lousiness. They might find themselves backed into a double dissolution even without Governor General Peter Cosgrove having to sack Tony Abbott (although that remains a fat juicy fantasy shared by many bloody-minded observers). We can only hope and dream.

 

 

There's Even More Not To Like

Future Brain Drain

Last night I went out to dinner with Walk-off HBP and his family and eventually the conversation turned to the politics of this budget. His daughter's finishing up high school this year, so tertiary education and its cost became a hot topic for conversation. Fortunately (and I use this word loosely), Mrs. HBP is from Denmark, so up for consideration was the possibility that the younger HBP might be better off claiming her heritage and citizenship, and heading to Denmark where tertiary education is free. It occurred to me that there might be a lot of this sort of thing going on.

The logical ramification is that Australia might be about to witness  great brain drain in the not too distant future, as well as an acceleration of the aging population issues. Consider for the moment the number of people who could devise a way back to the countries of their heritage to get a less expensive tertiary education. Places like Ireland and Scandinavian countries are not the only places that offer up these option. Then think of the likelihoods they meet their spouses and setup families elsewhere on the planet and not Australia. It's like Australia is willing to give up its younger, smarter population when in fact they're the people that are going to be needed to support the aging baby Boomers and eventually Gen-X.

In the mean time our universities will be filled with stupid rich kids who will be there only because they can afford to be there, so this notion of more competitive universities seems like a pipedream on the part of the Coalition. Walk-off HBP thinks it's more of a smokescreen to entrench privilege in such a way that only the Liberal voting types get to go to University.

I've already covered the problems of carrying a 100k student debt into a professional career - you're worse off than not going to university and getting a tradie's job. We may actually be looking at a future where the ranks of varsity graduate professionals will be much lower in quality than today. I don't know about you, but I don't think these rich types are going to enjoy going to doctors and lawyers pulled from the third best minds of their generation.

Nepotism As A Way Of Life

One of Tony Abbott's daughters got a 60k scholarship. The people who gave her the scholarship claimed it was purely on merit. Another one of Tony Abbott's daughters has a plum job working fro DFAT in Geneva. A lot of people have pointed out how unqualified she is for the job, but no, her boss is an old Liberal Party member who has told us that Tony Abbott's daughter got the jobon her own merits.

In each instance the insistence on the merits of Abbott's brood seems to stretch the definition of the word 'merit'. It' a really bad look when your government is about to make tertiary education more expensive to then have a daughter get a freebie. It's a really bad look to have your daughter get a plum job in DFAT over other genuine candidates of actual merit, when your government is about to cut off 16,000 public sector jobs. Both instances speak volumes to the absence of character in his daughters, which, by extension reflect badly on the parents, who in this instance happens to be the Prime Minister. These are big favours being handed to his family.

When you consider that there is a Royal Commission into Julia Gillard's conduct as an IR lawyer and claims of $7000 for renovations of her house coming from a union slush fund; and how Abbott himself hounded Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper relentlessly through digging up dirt; not to mention the fact that all it took was for a $3000 bottle of Grange Hermitage to bring down Barry O'Farrell, it seems abundantly obvious that Tony Abbott should quit. $60,000 worth of scholarship dollars and a plum job at DFAT seems far in excess of what normal people would consider a favour for a mate.

Really, Tony Abbott should quit on this alone.

But he won't quit. Which means he's an unabashed crook. now he's saying he wants family kept out of it. I think it's a bit much that a man who would go after Julia Gillard with a Royal Commission, and hounded Craig Thomson and Peter Slipper in the manner that he did, to want his family kept out of it by the media.

No, no, no Mr. Abbott, it's much too late for that. You lowered the bar forcefully - you can try doing your limbo dance under it.

The End Of Enlightenment

The Dark Ages Beckon Once More

I've been thinking that maybe one of the things the Abbott government wants the Federal government to do is get out of education; And as with such ideas, it always is worth asking what one might mean by 'out' and 'education'. The growing trend in Australian society since the reintroduction of fees in the early 1990s has been to measure the value of a course against the earning capacity of the graduates. Then, trying to figure out "if it is worth doing the course." Unsurprisingly, a great many courses cease to commend themselves once you apply the Return-On-Investment line of thinking and if one is truly driven by money alone, it is easy to suggest arts courses are not worthwhile. Why would somebody do Fine Arts if it were about earning capacity? How many jobs can there be, in something like curating for a gallery?

There are any number of courses for which graduates would find an inordinate amount of difficulty in placing themselves in employment in that field. Like, graduates in music or archaeology or theatre or literature or philosophy. In fact there is a vast shortage of jobs that specifically require arts education and pay well enough. The dirty secret of the stat that approximately 90% of graduates do not work in the area of their tertiary study is that the jobs simply were not there to absorb those graduates.

The great irony is that in trying to put a value on education, we've managed to destroy the worth of education. It didn't exactly start with Tony Abbott's current horror budget. It started when we started conflating vocational training with getting an education - and for that we can lay the blame at John Dawkins and his reforms where they started to hand out bachelors  degrees for test-tube washing. With the Dawkins reforms came the vast delusion of mass professionalism in the workforce when really, the politicians just wanted to keep Gen-X off the unemployment statistics.

The legacy of it is the expansion of tertiary places accompanied by the devisement of fees to off-set the expense. While it might have been the smart move at the time it commodified the education into a grand vision for vocational training for everybody. It was 'Educating Rita" on a grand scale as part of that bargain. And with it came the unfortunate other irony that you can put a price on the education through projected future earnings. It was a crock - but for some reason we all bought it. Maybe we didn't choose to look too closely lest it reveal the fundamental asymmetry that the education you get has very little to do with the money you end up making.

The thing that really stands out with this notion of  deregulating the universities so they can charge whatever they like, is that it squarely places education out of reach from people. The only way in which you can successfully assess the worthiness of a course hinges on it vocational merits. And if our society were to commit to that vision of education, then we may as well kiss the enlightenment goodbye. Of course, this would suit the fear mongers and hate mongers of the Murdoch press; They keep baying for this kind of vision that locks in inequality.

IPA Stands For 'Ideological Propaganda Agency'

If you watch 'the Drum' like I do occasionally, you'll notice they always aim to get some commentator to explain just what is good about the so-called *thinking* of the Liberal Party. They usually get some right-wing toad from this 'Think Tank' (and you would have to use the term 'think' very loosely when it comes to these people) called the Institute for Public Affairs to parrot the official line. It's often unapologetic Thatcherite pap that it makes you scream at the television set the way Sophie Mirabella used to make us scream whenever she was on TV.

The IPA is full of terrible suggestions and explanations it makes you wonder if they actually grew up on the same planet as the rest of humanity, let alone in this country. Just how crazy are these people? You should look at a sample. Walk-Off HBP was kind enough to send this link today and well... it's pretty self explanatory.

Top of their list is abolishing the 'Carbon Tax', followed by abolishing the Department of Climate Change and the Clean Energy Fund. Clearly they're climate change deniers. What other possible explanation could there be? And this is an important point. Climate Change deniers have no science to back them up except for those soul-less sell-outs in the employ of the oil lobby who cherry pick stats to make it look like the world is cooling. It's not a scientific position. So it really makes me wonder why 'The Drum' has to invite such intellectually deficient cretins to argue this kind of insane oppositional view just to make it look balanced. Especially when the same said cretins are calling for funding cuts and breaking up the ABC. Why give this bunch of Morlocks any airtime at all? Would the ABC give a Holocaust denialist or KKK member 'equal time'?

No.

Then why this mob? The only thing that makes them respectable enough to talk to is the fact that they haven't hurt anybody - yet. But if they had their way, they would hurt a whole bunch of people. If we were to follow their pan-Galactically stupid recipe, it would cause so much damage to our society we may never recover. I don't know why the rest of Australia is being made to take this cretinous collective seriously.

Everybody Hates This Budget

Everybody Except Ballerinas

Who decided that out of all the arts practitioners that ballerinas in particular were the most hard done by and could not be cut any more? Who's daughter or niece is studying to be a ballerina? Didn't they think we'd notice that everybody in the sciences, arts and manufacturing gets funding cuts but the ballerinas are going to get a special scholarship fund for their boarding needs? Has there been a bigger joke and probable cause for investigating a conflict of interest than this item in this year's budget?

But no, there won't be a federal equivalent of an ICAC, so we may never know. I sure hope the findings in the NSW ICAC about this North Sydney Forum brings down Joe Hockey. Screw him and the tutu and shoes he came dancing into town with.

How Do The Nats Cope?
It struck me that the budget would hurt the rural base of the national Party as much, if not more than people in urban areas. Consider youth unemployment is higher in rural areas, so these cuts to the dole and changes in arrangements would affect more rural families than city ones. Making tertiary education more expensive adds a burden on to families that have to send their university student children to cities to board and study. If at the same time the Federal government is pulling 80billion from healthcare and education from the states, then clearly they're more likely to feel the pinch when the State governments cut health and education in far flung rural areas before they cut in urban areas.

Which ever way you dice this, this budget is not good for the bush at all, and even if they built all these roads, it's the sort of spending that is one-and-done with nothing to follow up. There's really nothing in it that helps the bush at all, and so you wonder what exactly keeps the Nationals in the fold with the Liberals except for an extreme kind of social conservatism. Even then you wonder how much the bush can take of this before they say, "bugger the principles, we're not going along with this crap"; It may already be happening because the amount of support given to a rogue national party member like Bob Katter teaming up with mining magnate Clive Palmer suggests the rural vote is already looking away from the Coalition in search of a better choice

I spoke to Pleiades today who tells me people on the backbench on the government side are hopping mad at Tony Abbott. Tony Abbott is putting it on the MPs to go and sell this to their electorates, but the MPs weren't consulted about any of these radical changes. If it's not a fiasco, it sure is a looming disaster.

OMG, A Medical Research Fund?

It's pretty clear the current Libs have attitudes that date back to when Galileo started moving the earth and Darwin conjured humanity from monkeys. The thing that has Pleaides incensed is that this mob have come to power and shut down the environmental agencies, cutback the CSIRO, and research areas an starved science of funding in the name of budget surplus. They say it's about the budget surplus, but actually they just don't like science for embarrassing the church. Pretty soon they'll be ramming (un)'Intelligent Design' into the classroom and wanting to support the church through public funds - in fact they're already paying for chaplains to be in schools.

These people don't really believe in science. Think about that for a moment. They don't even have a minister for science. Their vision for the future revolves around building roads and presumably keeping driving fossil fuel vehicles as if the world does not change. Not only are they in denial about Climate Change, they're in denial that anything changes at all. so how much credibility is there when the very same people who have taken an axe to science turn around and say they are going to have a medical research fund?

It immediately begs the question qui bono  - who benefits? It's no conspiracy. It has got to be the pharmaceutical companies who have been lobbying the government to keep their entitlements under the current medical entitlements even if the Australian people lose theirs. Oh that, and maybe Joe Hockey doesn't want to die of an obscure cancer.

It will be too late to reach for your torches and pitchforks when they start giving out textbooks with humans and dinosaurs cavorting together. You heard it from me right here.

Captive To Idiocy

I know name-calling doesn't help but it's worth calling things by their proper name: The Liberal Party in Australia has transformed itself into the Conservative party and are decidedly Tory in their bearings. Just as with their overseas conservative counterparts, there's nothing terribly liberal about this Liberal Party at all. It's no coincidence that Tony Abbott wanted to bring back Knights and Dames. However when it comes to economic policy the only textbook they had to go on was the austerity practiced by the UK Conservatives and the sort of belt tightening imposed on Greece.

Of course, austrity has not worked at all, and Greece saw its economy shrink to such an extent that it ended up owning more money as against their GDP. The experience in the UK has been such that they couldn't run austerity program enough to sustain infrastructure so they only half implemented it and mostly talked about doing it. The very notion that austerity would lead the economy back to health is built on the simple assumption that if government debt is reduced to zero and goes to surplus, the economy would once again be free to make capital investments.

It's a lie. It's stupid. And quite frankly it's so wrong and stupid, it's evil and a danger to society. And yet that's our federal government

The problem with our economy and what has hindered our recovery is that people have not been able to deleverage their private debt from their peak in 2007. That's it. Even if the Australian government went back to zero debt, as long as Australian households are in debt up to their eyeballs and Australian industry is in debt up to their eyeballs, there won't be any more big capital expenditures in the wake of the mining boom subsiding. That's really it in a nutshell.

But the desire of industry is always to privatise profits and socialise losses so to this end they lobby  governments for special treatment. In the current government we have a bunch of idiots who want to do exactly as the lobbyists ask, believing this is the remedy to a problem that does not actually exist, when in fact it utterly fails to address the problems that do exist. And if that's not captive to idiocy it's hard to imagine a better example.

Why Education Opportunities Will Fade

They've Faded In America, And We Want To Be Like Them!

I got asked why I was so pessimistic about the future of education in this country. People keep on saying that education makes for better people and better people make for a better society.  While I agree with that principle, I've been having difficulty telling 18year olds and 19year olds why this might be the case. The truth is, the value of education itself is going to be eclipsed by the value of the HELP debt. It's increasingly hard to say it's financially viable to go study arcane or obscure or interesting things.

Christopher Pyne's thing is telling us that our tertiary sector should be allowed to charge what it likes, and the competition would make them better courses. His model for this line of thinking is the American Tertiary sector which to date has two trends; one is increasing fees and the other is the increased indebtedness of the students. When you analyse this rationally, you understand that the competition that Christopher Pyne talks about only exists in a way to burnish the reputations of the various schools, which they then turn around and turn into higher fees because that would be more profitable. So the universities can give scholarships to students who they think will make them proud but they pass that cost on to other students who want to be brand-consumers of the school's prestige. The students who cannot get a scholarship in turn have to borrow from their futures to purchase the prestige value of the tertiary institution together with their education.

More closely, you only have to witness the skyrocketing private secondary schools' fees in Australia to see how such a market would play out. And while Christopher Pyne insists that students should pay because 60% of their fees are funded by 60% of the population who do not get tertiary education, it seems rather obtuse to insist that the students transfer their future earnings to present day bottom lines of tertiary institutions. The problem is twofold - going to a prestigious tertiary institution is no guarantee you will get a better education than at a lesser school, and the workplaces the graduates will be applying for will more often than not be looking at the school's prestige as much as the marks. The asymmetry is such that the tertiary institution is far more assured of receiving money than the student receiving a good education, and then a career based on that education.

This is made worse by a statistic that came out some time ago that pointed out that 90% of university graduates end up doing something unrelated to their courses in their careers. While I would not argue that this is a bad thing, it sort of shows that the eduction being offered actually has no correlation to the imagined earnings of the graduate. If it's not 'working' now, how on earth does Christopher Pyne think the sector is going to do better than it has to date to justify the money it is charging?

Anyway, I want to point something else from the American experience that doesn't seem to get discussed all too much. Two of the areas where costs have skyrocketed in the USA are health and education. This is not totaly unrelated to the fact that they are untransferable services. So while exporting jobs that can be transferred to places like Chindia has resulted in cheaper imports, the jobs that can't be sent overseas have seen their costs rise. If you average it out, you can claim the inflation has been 3% (or whatever central banks want it to be) but taken individually, health and education have increased at a much higher rate.  The question is, is this unique to America?

Australia is fast losing its manufacturing sector (with great assistance from the Abbott government). We keep counting inflation lower to encourage investment, but this investment has ended up in housing as a bubble. Tertiary institutions will opt to charge more for courses that lead to lucrative careers. The private debt carried by the Australian public is putting a huge brake on future growth. Chances are you won't be able to find a job in the area of your choice. You can just see the opportunities for education fading rather than widening. And if they fade, we won't be doing much good with it before long. The outlook is pretty bleak - and I don't even work in that sector.

Dumbing Down The Future

What Good Is Tertiary Education If You Can't Afford It?

After days of commentary regarding the Commission of Audit's report, I'm a little stuck on the notion of education being possibly irrelevant in this country's future. When you consider that this country used to have free education, it's pretty alarming to see that the thinking behind the conservative, economic 'dry' people is to jack up the price of Tertiary education and saddle more people with HELP debt. The kinds of fees have gone up considerably since the days of HECS.

Just as an aside, I had an early HECS debt from my time at AFTRS worth $6,600 when I left. I had no obligation to pay any of it back until my annual income hit $30k. It was indexed to CPI, which was measured the old way and by the time i was making $30k, it had ballooned out to $12,700, which is roughly double. It took me about 5years to pay it off, but when you look at the total time it took from when I graduated, it took a decade.

The worst thing about paying it off was that it was money that got taken out after tax, but before you made any financial decisions. If you were earning just over 30k, the take home pay would be substantially less as a result. It became a sort of disincentive to earn the $30k, just to keep your finances going. It seemed unfair that the tax man got 2 bites of the tax out of you. The only reason you get an education is so you can get work, then it seems only fair that they take the HECS out first as if it were a business expense, and then figure out the income tax. I had this argument with the ATO a number of times to no avail, but at least I got it off my chest. It was a right pain in the rear and all it did was just start off at a measly $6,600.

Christopher Pyne - the minister for Poodles and limp Noodles - was on Q&A tonight making the claim that the average HELP debt of university graduates was in the order of $16k, so it's not a big deal for graduates to pay back. His argument was that 60% ever get Tertiary but they pay for universities through their taxes so university students ought to be more grateful for the very low loan they are getting

When I look at some of the sums of debt people are being hit with for HELP, I am left staggered. A lot of specialist arts courses like animation or design are running at about $40-50k. You wouldn't want to do a course like I did at AFTRS for $50,000 (not that it exists any more). Given the figure there, I would think it would take a good lifetime to pay off a specialist arts education. When you take into account how terrible your employment prospects would be, you'd have to wonder just what in the name of all that's good you are doing, lumbering yourself with the pricetag of a family sedan before you even enter the rat race.

Then there are careers in things like social work where you would be hard-pressed to earn the $50k salary before you start paying off - but based on my experience it would mean that the social worker would only start paying it back when their pay reaches $50k through inflationary adjustments and bracket creep; and by then their HELP debt has ballooned out to several times the original sum. If vocational courses present such problems, then you sure as hell would be wary of doing a general arts degree.

The point of all this is to say what we've got going is financially disincentivising education. And the more we try and slug money out of students, we're going to skewer higher education towards the wealthy. Contrary to Christopher Pyne's rant about competition being good for the education sector, the competition would be for students willing to take on the debt - and if this population is diminishing in numbers through disincentivisation, then we can expect the "second tier teaching colleges" to hit a financial wall. In fact, that's exactly what's happening to many US teaching colleges.

Christopher Pyne's argument that students can pay more is also misleading. By that argument, the rich can afford to pay more because they have the most capacity to make money through ownership of capital. But you sure don't hear that coming out of Pyne's mouth or the IPA spokespeople. What's really clear is that the conservatives of this country strongly desire a future where Australia is less educated, with fewer opportunities for people as being the ideal. To that end, they'll make education more expensive and less rewarding, except for those who come from wealthy families. While it is no surprise, it does seem to be one of the many things that are going to entrench inequality.

 

 

They Sure Hate...

They Hate the Unemployed

Here's an interesting experiment. A WA Greens Senator is attempting to live a week on $35/day.

WA Greens Senator Rachel Siewert is trying to live on $35 a day in a bid to highlight that the meagre dole was causing jobseekers to be sucked into a cycle of poverty.
Rachel Siewert has $12 in her wallet for the rest of the week.
She went shopping on the weekend and bought some basic food items and toilet paper totalling $53, but if she runs out of toothpaste, she will just have to go without.

This week Ms Siewert is living off the average weekly Newstart Allowance payment in a bid to highlight what she says is a system which makes it even more difficult for job seekers to get out of unemployment.

The $244 she started with on Saturday has quickly been taken up by the essentials.
While in reality, she will remain in her four-bedroom, two-bathroom house in the northern suburbs, $125 has been deducted from her budget to pay for the one bedroom unit in Bentley or Armadale, which would be all she could afford on Newstart.

Thankfully for her, the amount has been subsidised down from $185 due to the rent assistance that she would be eligible for as a jobseeker.

The rest of it makes for some painful reading on penny-pinching. Clearly this experiment is trying to highlight this figure of $35 per day.

According to a survey of 500 Australians conducted for the Australia Institute, the amount, when averaged, is $454 a week - about $65 a day.

When 500 people in a separate survey were asked how much unemployed Australians should get from Centrelink they settled on $329 a week, or $47 a day.

But the less-impressive truth is the Newstart allowance peaks at $243 a week - $34.70 a day.

''Most Australians have little idea what unemployed Australians actually get,'' the executive director of the Australia Institute, Richard Denniss, said when releasing the survey results. ''They know what their own cost of living is and they think unemployed Australians should get something approaching it, but they would be shocked to find out what a Newstart recipient actually got.''

The $86 gap between Newstart itself and what Australians believe it should be exceeds the $50 increase proposed by a coalition of business, welfare and union organisations led by the Australian Council of Social Service. ACOSS says the increase would cost $1.2 billion a year.

Talk about disconnect. The first paragraph is interesting. People would budget for themselves $18per day more than they would for an abstract stranger. The second paragraph shows that the real figure the government is comfortable with is $12.30 meaner than what the average person dishes out to a stranger. ACOSS then steps up and tells the government it should do something about this gap but it too is $5-6 short of what people think is required.

There are 379 comments under that article, and it is surprising how many people are scornful of the unemployed for being unemployed, as if the unemployed are unemployed by principle. Clearly conservatives hate people they do not know, with as much hatred they can muster.

Think about all this for a moment. What the hell is it to you really if there were 10, 1000, or 10,000 dole bludgers out there, eking their lives out on 35 or 47 or 65 dollars a day? Especially if you are well off? What could it matter?

Now, conservative people? They want them shamed in public, made to work the most humiliating jobs. Why? One can only presume it is because it gives them some kind of sadistic satisfaction. And there's a mainstream party out there who think this sort of thing is great. The really disappointing part is that the ALP ain't doing much better than the sadistic psychos.

They Hate The Young

Amanda Vanstone had this opinion piece last month which was so odious I didn't bother to read it at the time, but seeing that we're talking about this kind of thing today, I thought I'd have a read and bring it up.

I have no quibble with the investment we make in higher education or in students. I just think that, to be fair, they should have to start paying it back sooner.
The full adult pension, including supplement, is about $19,000 a year. The minimum wage is just under $30,000. So why do we say to students, who get a massive loan at no real interest rate, that they do not have to pay back a cent until they are earning just under $45,000?

Now, if I cast my mind not too far, it is obvious to me that Amanda Vanstone is of the generation that got the Free Education from Gough Whitlam's Labor government and didn't have to pay *any* HECS, unlike the Gen-Xers. She writes a whole bunch of personal anecdotes about how some dude driving buggies in Rome taught her a life lesson but seriously, how can a person who didn't have to suffer the HECS repayments ask this?

The comparison to a pensioner is a spurious apples and oranges argument because pensioners tend to already own stuff, while graduates do not, but it is better for the economy if they spent their money on those things, rather than be taxed as if they did.

The time I was repaying my HECS really sucked. I wad fortunate in that I was repaying it with a job I was trained to do, but it still hurt not to have that bit of money. What it taught me was how difficult it is accept one's education as having a concrete dollar value. But be that as it may, it incenses me that somebody who didn't have that experience thinks that these back of the envelope calculations are sufficient justification to make these ambit, loaded political claims.
It's not just in Australia that the old conservatives are trying to scare off the young from education through taxes. here's an article in The Economist.

AS I begin this post, the president is across town buttering up University of Iowa students with promises to keep federal student-loan interest rates low. The College Cost Reduction and Access Act, a measure from 2007 that, among other things, lowered the interest rate on federal student loans from 6.8% to 3.4%, is set to expire in July. Messrs Obama and Romney both have come out in favour of supporting an extension of the subsidy for student-loan debtors.

---

This sort of giveaway may be good politics, but it's terrible policy. Extending the programme just one year would cost $6 billion. The measure is promoted as a way of making college more affordable, but it will mainly benefit those well out of school, many of whom are relatively well-to-do, mid-career professionals, such as your indebted correspondent. There is a movement afoot to get the government to forgive student-loan debt entirely, and when compared to this, the cost of the scheme to keep student-loan interest rates low looks quite small. Stilll, it's bad policy for many of the same reasons it would be bad policy to forgive student loans.

Look, maybe they're right and it's bad policy, but here's the thing. Wall Street and the big end of town are getting 0.5% interest charges from the Fed. Why is it even remotely fair that students continue to get slugged with even 3.4%, let alone 6.8% in the current economic climate? What makes the students magically immune from the GFC fallout? It's easily arguable the big end of town are far more capable of dealing with tough times through the high salaries and established assets and savings compared to university students - and they're getting 0.5% interest rates!

You wonder about the brains of these conservatives.

They Hate Foreigners

Here's the latest on Asylum seekers.Ever since the 'Malaysian Solution' melted down thanks to the High Court, it's been weathering the storm of bad press and spin ever since. Even so, if the Liberal Party had any heart, they'd negotiate so that the government can do its proposed Malaysian Solution in exchange for being able to do it Nauru Solution when (I'm pointedly not going to bother saying 'if') they get in power.

But no. Tony Abbott has put his kaibosh on any understanding over the legislation and keeps carping that Julia Gillard's government can't stop the boats. Well, no, she can't because Tony, you won't let her. It gets sillier than that with this:

The Coalition spokesman for border protection, Michael Keenan, welcomed the government's response but said the potential for a repeat of the tragedy remained until people smuggling was stopped.

Good God. Have they no shame? No embarrassment? I know one needs a thick skin to be a politician, but this is breath-taking.

Oh, look, there's another boat!

I'm wracking my brains as to when exactly the Liberal Party started playing dirty pool in divisive race politics. Malcolm Fraser as hated as he was in his heyday didn't stoop to such depth and has since departed the party he led. I don't remember a single moment where Andrew Peacock or John Hewson saying anything that seemed unseemly; it really did start with John Howard and somehow he's entrenched it into the Liberal Party culture that it's okay to play subtle dog-whistle race-baiting. There are days I look at Gladys Berejiklian and I think there's hope yet for the Liberals and their acceptance of ethnicity, but most days I feel like the Liberal Party has allowed itself into the company of xenophobes.

In case you think I'm just talking out of my rear end, here's an article you should look at.

Mr Abbott wants to link in the minds of former Howard battlers the asylum seeker issue with a growing population, tapping into community anxiety about urban congestion and water scarcity.

He’ll run these two arguments in parallel, but invite voters to make their own connection with unauthorised boat arrivals and a growing population.

Shadow Attorney-General George Brandis falsely claimed this week that there has always been bipartisan support for immigration, air-brushing from history John Howard’s shameful effort of 1988 to harvest votes by claiming there was too much Asian immigration.

Senator Brandis went on to say that the Coalition wanted a return to the immigration levels achieved when it was last in power, as if this would lead a lower population figure by 2050 than 35 million.  Yet in the last year of the Howard government, net overseas migration was 232,800 – much higher than the 180,000 per annum assumption that Treasury used in the Intergenerational report in arriving at a projected population of 35 million by 2050.

It's chicken or the egg whether the race-baiting politics of John Howard works because the electorate is racist already, or whether the electorate allows itself to give into their inner xenophobe because there are politicians that enable them. Still, the stench of Xenophobia hasn't gone away from modern conservatism, and you wonder how in their god's name they pretend they can have any moral high ground in any of these kinds of policy areas.