An exception is Julia Gillard,Education and Employment minister,who had the courage to face down the very powerful education unions and academia and set about improving and unifying our woeful education system.
The blue collar classes in England and Australia have an inverted snobbery when it comes to educating their children they seem to believe that a good education will improve their class level and alienate them from their parents. These people have no wish for their children to succeed at school.
Ms. Gillard speaking at the launch of the report,Australian Workforce Futures;A National Workforce Development strategy,by Skills Australia,(The Advertiser,6.3.10) said “In future I don’t want us to be in a country where we are desperately scouring the world for skilled labour—-while at the same time young Australians are unemployed and can’t get a start”. She continued “The global financial crisis had reduced the need for trade workers and created a demand for more professional jobs’and that would require lifting literacy and numeracy skills and encouraging Australians to further their education”. Unfortunately her reason for the change is wrong. The policy of creating a Post Industrial World in the Western Nations by the transfer of Western industry and technical expertise “The Lima Agreement”to the third world is the real reason not the global financial crisis.
The union movement may be proud of it’s control of Labor party policy but investment capital is not controlled by the government and money goes where the work force is not so agressive.
If we want to employ our young we had better go back to making things better than anybody else and keeping our processes a secret from China and India,and with the help of tariffs and quotas of course.
Jobs in mining are not safe ask the 54 Australians retrenched in the Pilbara instead of the Filipinos migrants and 457 visa workers employed with them. (The Weekend Australian 6-7 March,2010,p8).
