Anyone can go to the RBA Calculator at http://www.rba.gov.au/calculator/annualDecimal.html and open the Quarterly part of it to do the correct calculations.

But then you ‘confess not to have bothered to try and work out the month by month inflationary difference’. That is why you leave a whole year out of your calculation.

You, who leave a whole year out of the calculation tell me that I can’t ‘do sums properly’. You say, ‘The 1976 figure you offer comes out at $64,953, showing 1975 was higher than 1974, and significantly lower than 1976 (what we call cherry picking, or what we would call cherry picking if you could do sums properly).”

I have already shown that you have the maths wrong because you do not use the period of time that I am talking about, January 1st of one year to January 1st of the other, so let’s deal with your accusation of “cherry-picking”, which is false.

When I first mentioned 1975, this is what I said,
‘Male average weekly ordinary time earnings were $1343.90 ($70,123 pa) in August of last year, according to the ABS. In 1975, after seven years, a teacher reached the top of the unpromoted scale and was paid 166.6 per cent of MAWOTE - $116,825 now.

‘The new top level, which now takes ten years to reach, now pays $81,806 – a relative cut of $35,019 or 30 per cent.’(5.15:55pm, 6/2)

I did not mention the CPI. I was using 1975 as a comparison with MAOTE. (Had I used other years, the comparison would actually have shown an even greater decline in teacher pay relative to the average pay.) It was longweekend who brought up the topic of the CPI (11.23:33am, 12/2), and that is when I did the calculations of the real value of teacher pay now compared with in 1975. I started with 1975 for the reason I have given already: ‘The only reason I chose 1975 is that the VSTA chose 1975 in its 1980 salary case and produced lots of information about it” (9.35:15am, 4/3).

Teacher’s physical conditions are poor relative to the CEO of a multinational company, or a lawyer in a private firm. But they are excellent relative to the general conditions of the workplace, most professions don’t have air conditioning in fact. Should we take money from teacher’s with air conditioning and give it to construction workers and stockman who don’t even have chairs to sit in, let alone air conditioning? Really, your silliness knows no bounds.

There’s a lot of irrelevant ramble in here, but I’ll address briefly the pertinent bits:
1) RE: Has grammar been eliminated.
It is truly embarrassing that you have continued with this. Here is the actual narrative; a) on Feb 4 I said they’ve eliminated grammar/classics from MOST schools, b) you responded 2 days later saying your school had grammar, c) my response to this on THE 8th (hint, it is totally disingenuous to take a reply from 15 days later as “my response”, not the post the immediately followed it on the 8th) said “fact that classics courses "exist" is hardly an argument against the fact that both grammar and classics have been almost wholly phased out of schools” which I followed up by noting “actual grammar classes have been almost totally phased out” (the 9th) and “I've told you that grammar has been phased out, and classics are barely taught, and your rebuttal is ‘they taught it at my schools’. That's not an argument” (the 11th), and on and on (with no response from you). It was only later, after you’d repeatedly dodged this stuff that I asked a DIFFERENT question, which was the one on the 23rd (“do you agree grammar and classics decreased?”). For you to try and rewrite our discussion in such a way, as though I was trying to change the subject, is absurd. If you’d merely answered the original question, put to you half a dozen times, I would hardly have bothered with a different tact.

It’s also silly because my whole point was grammar AS A SUBJECT has declined (as in, it almost doesn’t exist in the public system anymore), not that grammar isn’t a sub-part of English. I repeatedly asked you to clarify this (the 10th, the 11th, the 25th, etc) and to tell me whether grammar was really taught as a separate unit, and you never replied.

2) You continue to defy the inflation calculator in a way that is frankly bizarre. Do you seriously believe that a single year is throwing off the salary calculation by that much? By $7000? That’s ridiculous. Either you’ve screwed up your calculation, or the benchmark you’re using (Jan 1975) is totally unreliable (assuming for a moment your number is actually correct, the reason would likely be that inflation spiked in Jan 1975 during the financial crisis). Seriously, you can’t be dumb enough not to see this, so I’m going to try it again. Slowly. If the inflation calculator for 1975 AS A WHOLE gives us a number $7000 lower than a number for ONE MONTH then it’s a ridiculous time to select to begin your measurement (should I measure German teacher salaries during the hyper inflation after WW1?). Do you even understand how crazy a $7000 difference for an amount that small is in that short a period? Predictably, a quick google search confirms that 1975 (and 1974) had the worst inflationary crisis in Australia’s history. You (or more accurately, the teacher’s union, whose data you’ve regurgitated like a parrot) have picked not only the highest year of inflation and wages, but you’ve literally cherry picked the exact month in a (almost hyper inflationary) year to make their argument plausible (http://www.google.com.au/images?hl=en&q=inflation+australia+history+graph&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&biw=1024&bih=653 and http://www.tradingeconomics.com/Economics/Inflation-CPI.aspx?Symbol=AUD). Are you really incapable of understanding why an argument which collapses if you pick a different month of the year is a cherry picked and weak argument? Do you know any area of employment, even CEO of a mining company, who gets their salary indexed PER MONTH to factor in for month by month inflationary increases?

It’s such a dishonest argument it’s readily apparent to all but yourself it seems.

MAWOTE is not a useful stat. The fact that the AEU used a bad stat in a case study does not make it a good stat. You don’t refute any of this, and it’s been pointed out dozens of times. End of argument, and end of your response, such as it is. It’s pretty disappointing stuff. Maybe I should come back in a week when you’ve actually replied to some more relevant stuff.

You say, “If it really is so high that there was a $7000 difference in a single year, then clearly a period with this sort of inflationary pressures is a terrible benchmark to use, and faced with believing you or the RBA calculator, it’s an easy choice” (1.56:19pm, 4/3)

1975 was a high inflation year, but you were not faced with the choice of “believing [me] or the RBA calculator”, but with the choice of using the RBA calculator correctly (i.e., by including all 36, years as I did) or incorrectly (by including only 35 years, as you did).

You say in regard to the VSTA’s use of the average male earnings that you “don’t doubt the teacher’s (sic) union used such a flawed figure,(sic) intellectual dishonesty like that is quite usual for them.” The case used lots of material, average male earnings and average male ordinary time earnings being only two factors. This does not demonstrate any dishonesty at all. Nor have you shown that intellectual dishonesty is quite usual for the teachers union. It is just another claim you throw in without bothering to prove it. The only dishonesty I know of is the AEU’s campaigning against private school funding. If you have sufficient examples to prove that it I usual, you are free to share them.

Given that my argument has not been that “there actually has been a decrease in salary”, I do not have any hurdle to clear in regard to it. My argument was about relative salaries. I pursued the real value line of argument because longweekend brought it up, and it does show that teachers at some, though not most, levels do have less real pay now than in 1975.

I have not “dodged” your questions. I am following the priority I set long ago – to correct your untrue statements first. Given that you persist in making untrue statements, it is possible that I will never get to your actual questions. Of course, you could hurry up the process by ceasing to make untrue statements.

It is untrue of you to say that the typo “will doubtless confuse” me (2.17:52pm, 4/3). I saw immediately that you had made mistake in wording and I knew what you mean because of the context.

You then say that I have “taken what is likely the peak salary in the history of Australian teaching”. I have explained why I started from 1975. I have explained that the argument I set out to make from the start was about relative pay. While 1975 is probably the best year to choose to make an argument about real pay, it is not the best year to choose to make an argument about relative pay.

The following table shows the pay of a subdivision 14 teacher (or equivalent before 1972) in terms of the percentage of Victorian male average weekly earnings (not ordinary time, simply because the table does not give ordinary time):
30/06/1963 210.53 per cent
21/06/1964 208.14 per cent
07/11/1965 190.28 per cent
29/01/1967 203.42 per cent
17/11/1968 179.85 per cent
01/01/1970 184.16 per cent
01/01/1971 178.25 per cent
13/07/1971 176.94 per cent
14/05/1972 176.61 per cent
10/06/1973 165.64 per cent
18/12/1973 170.86 per cent
26/05/1974 166.76 per cent (
(“Annual Gross Salaries for Teachers in Victorian Government Secondary Schools”, VSTA, 1988).

Thus, the decline in teacher pay relative to average pay did not start in 1975, but long before it. As Victorian male average weekly earnings were $1390.30 ($72,543.87 pa) in November of last year, if I had chosen 1963 as my comparison year, I would have said that if teachers were still paid 21.53 per cent of male average earnings, they would be paid $152,726.51 now. But I did not choose the best year for relative pay. I chose a year that happened to be somewhere in the middle between the best year and the current year.