Ha, yes, I know this line of thought. Everything is going to be privatized and market forces will determine the outcome. It is currently permeating the disability sector. Home Care will be handed over to a multinational like Bupa and everyone will have his or her own "package". The NSW government is divesting itself of all its property and will provide no services when the NDIS starts. The question remains unanswered: where will all those difficult clients that no-one wants go? The same as the difficult children who won't easily fit within the private model. There always has to be a provider of last resort. And who maintains the schools and builds the new ones? In the same way as there is no provision for housing within the NDIS, so where will the people live?

Risible nonsense David, except were you say we need to means test government support.
Compete local autonomy will achieve everything you want and more, and indeed, save the taxpayer a huge bucket of finite funds.
Privatization is invariably followed by the profit incentive; possibly all at the taxpayers' expense!?
And as Estelle has pragmatically pointed out, who will build all the new schools in all the new suburbs!? Well?
There ought to be at least three signs on every pollies desk.
The first should read, "its the economy stupid", and the second should read, "keep it simple stupid"! And the third, "if it ain't broke don't fix it"! Rhrosty.

"The whole of society benefits when children are educated. This is why governments attempt to promote school education by making schooling compulsory for ages six through sixteen, and by regulating schools, including what must be taught. This should continue."

If this is not SOCIALISM, then I have no clue what is!

So because the author fancies living in an educated society, he deems it OK to incarcerate all children for 11 years. Further, the author acknowledges that he wishes to forcibly indoctrinate children by having them compulsorily taught some specific ideas (he didn't mentioned which): if they or their parents attempt to resist, as even allowing one's children to remain in bed is criminalised, then they will be arrested - and if they resist arrest, then they will be shot and killed as well...

If this comes from a senator who is presumably a libertarian... I guess the other politicians would rather send our children straight to Guantanamo - or has our good senator already, within a few months, been infected by the surrounding politicians in Canberra?

As the saying goes, those who have been abused in their childhood, grow up to become perpetrators themselves.

The senator needs to learn some of the history of earlier depredations of the church and private enterprise and the give some thought to the proper role of government. He could start by reading about some of the resistance to efforts to develop infrastructure and make services available which together ultimately benefited the whole of society.

To understand the role of government he could read Professor Mariana Mazzucato's excellent book, "The Entrepreneurial State" subtitled, "Debunking Public vs. Public Sector Myths." That book shows conclusively that USA prosperity from 1938 to the advent of Thatcherism was due mainly to the central government's expenditure and research.

The devotion that the currency issuing Australian Government gives to "fixing" the budget is completely misplaced. Australia's problems are mainly due to our Current Account deficiencies which will only get decidedly worse as the car industry closes, we lose the ability to manufacture rail rolling stock, farm machinery, consumer white goods and to refine our liquid fuel requirements.

We don't need an infrastructure PM, we need a government interested in reviving productive industry and reducing the scale and profitability of the parasitic financial services industry. In our economy's more productive phase, that industry garnered 3-5% of total corporate profits in Australia. That is now around 30% yet it actually produces no real product.

I am very concerned about the thinking ability of many people who believe that they should seek political power in the mistaken belief that they are capable of making a valuable contribution to society.

Estelle
"where will all those difficult clients that no-one wants go?"

You and everyone who agrees with you will provide for them won't you?

Other people are not your slaves and chattels estelle. There is no reason for other people to be herded like cattle into compulsory indoctrination camps, just because you're too selfish and greedy to pay for the values that you think important.

Foyle
Everything you say has been disproved already here:
http://neweconomicperspectives.org/

You need to actually understand modern economic theory, because you're only making a fool of yourself.

After David Leyonhelm had this article published in The Australian Financial Review on 31/10 (http://www.afr.com/p/opinion/fund_parents_by_need_not_schools_UccRWRg81sGFwsbDVuWtiO), I had a letter correcting various of his misunderstandings published on 3/11 (http://www.afr.com/p/opinion/fair_school_funding_model_would_vEdEYYsaazaWJE6pvEXjiO). Yet he repeats the same mistakes today. Like most published on education, he seems to think that Australia = NSW.

The Gonski report has not “led to government schools with lots of poor kids receiving a bit more funding than other government schools” or “to non-government schools with lots of poor kids getting a bit more funding than other non-government schools”.

Government schools with lots of poor kids have been getting extra funding for more than 30 years, at least in Victoria. Non-government schools are not funded on the number of poor kids they have but on the socio-economic status of their neighbours, just like under the Howard government. In fact, under Gonski, those schools still funded on need are to be gradually forced off Labor’s fair educational resources index model and onto the Coalition’s unfair SES model. Anyone still misled by the Gonski propaganda can read my submission to the Senate inquiry into school funding, No. 42 at http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/School_Funding/School_Funding/Submissions.

It is decades since enrolment was “restricted to those who live in certain suburbs”. Victorian children are free to attend any school that has room for them. As Victorian schools have been funded on a mostly per capita basis since 2005, the consequence for a school that loses enrolment is already a drop in income.

To fund schools that charge extra for access to “the best teachers’ is to perpetuate class divisions by segregating children according to the wealth of their parents, the every opposite of what we need to do to lift overall educational achievement.

The issue is not who owns the schools, but who has access to them. That is why we need a funding model that caps school fees and gives the poor the same chance of having the best teachers as the wealthy, something neither the Howard, the Gonski nor the Leyonhelm model can do.

How does this fit with the "mandatory" nature of schooling? Every child "must" go to school/be educated.
How could the government apply this compulsion without providing the means to fulfill it? Government should provide the basic education that they compel us to receive.

This is just right wing hatred of "lefty" teachers masquerading as pseudo intellectual libertarian dogma. Keep these right wing culture warriors with their revisionist history and christian crusader culture the hell away from our children.

I dont want schools to "compete", since as anyone with eyes can see ALL private business only "compete" to make a profit. Students would come a poor second.

Jardine K Jardine
Which particular articles from neweconomicperspectives.org are you suggesting would enlighten me?

Over the last two years or so I have read nearly article on the site by Prof. L W Wray, Dr Stephanie Kelton and my favourite J D Alt plus many by other authors who contribute blogs. I have my own copy of Wray's MMT primer as well as Keynes' General Theory and the books that make up Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. I have read them all.

The primer makes the point that it is not political and that MMT is based on empirical evidence. However any reading of it shows that the theory supports an egalitarian outlook rather than Thatcherism or Reagan's childish trickle down ideas.

You should read about the fiscal space available to any sovereign (currency issuing) government. On a fiscal space diagram plot the Budget and Current Account outcomes for each year and, if you understand the plots, you would realise that the Howard Government was the worst economic managers in the last half century.

Foyle
"The primer makes the point that it is not political and that MMT is based on empirical evidence."

You obviously don't understand what enables anyone to make any conclusion about empirical evidence. Only if you have controlled all the variables can you make any such conclusion; otherwise how do you know whether the result is not controlled by the variables you haven't taken into account? It's nonsense.

"Which particular articles from neweconomicperspectives.org are you suggesting would enlighten me?"

Which ones would you?