Oh dear! The poor university sector. Serves them right, greedy buggers, turning what was meant to be education for Australians into what they laughably call an 'export industry'. The chickens have most certainly come home to roost.

"Many students have gone home to their own countries". Good. That's where they belong, particularly the ones from the country where the virus started. And, as far as local students go, most of them don't need to be at universities to get the jobs most of them end up doing. Then there are the made up courses bordering on idiocy.

"Universities must change to survive". Obviously. And they should do it themselves, without the help of millions of taxpayers who have never attended a university. Only about 27% of Australians hold a degree, and many of those degrees are useless.

The university sector is going to be scratching for sympathy.

Maybe? I do know that if you're a kid from the bush you do a bit more than struggle, particularly if you come from a small town where it is another disadvantaged, self-perpetuating, postcode poverty trap.

We started this particular problem by changing education from a universal right, to an income-earning, business model heavily reliant on cashed-up foreign students, many of who clearly bought their degrees?

Without that income stream, we are virtually unable to fund very important research! And we are confronted by a current ideological imperative to maintain or even expand the self-funding model!

The only possible way to change this is to throw out the ideologies who created this particular model and who will die in a ditch before they allow a rational change.

And given that is so? Allow the cancer that is Chinese communist influence to grow and infect the student body.

There are answers, but none that the current, imprisoned in ideological straight jackets, science-free zones, that are our parliaments, will allow! TBC.
Alan B.

To get change, we need to change the way our representatives are elected! And starts with primaries where the preselection is done by the registered voters of a particular electorate.

And for all parties and candidates! To eliminate for all time the power brokers and those who purchase political influence, etc-etc.

I mean unions only represent 15% of the workforce, but want to be the tail that wags Labor and all Labor party policy! And then they and other power brokers want to do dirty deals in the dead of night to swap preferences, so we can see particular candidates who up to 85% of the electorate rejected the first time around, winning the seat on traded preferences?

And may be a Labor candidate helicoptered in at the behest of powerful union advocacy? So, do the numbers and then understand what 15% of 15% represents and just who and what they represent or stand for!? And then we wonder why the country is buggered and why we are up shite creek without a paddle.

If we can lift our heads out of the warm and comfortable places they're in? We may be able to understand, we are all in this together and or united we stand, divided we fall and the same old is the same old BS we've been served for so long!

There're solutions, but none of them in the same old, same old BS that's the only item on the menu beside divide and rule politics and greed is good individualism that is sending the country to the nearest taxidermist. We're all in this together, bah humbug! TBC.
Alan B.

Funding trade education is far more profitable in the long run ! Trades people create revenue, Theorists merely squander it !

We might have made a bigger deal about the shonky colleges that Gillard set up and nobody got around to checking up on or restricting.
I guess Michaelia Cash will think it's all about tradies and their utes?

We have to fund the education sector with a means-tested endowment to the parents! That'll ensure all get an equal chance at the starting post of life and succeed on merit rather than the size of the parental pocketbook, or influence.

The diabolically dumb ass prohibition on nuclear energy must be lifted to at least allow some university R+D in this area and for which there will be mucho plenty of research funds and endowments! Particularly if that research is on alternative thorium and MSR SMR's e.g.

If the aim to decarbonize the economy with a solution that will simultaneously turbocharge it and create huge medical tourism in our cash strapped outback!

After that, we need to completely jettison our current tax system in favour of an unavoidable 15% flat tax! Which is already around 2% more tax than the top corporate taxpayers pay in real terms and a whopping great 15% more than the 40% who pay none at all.

This one simple, easy as, solution, will lower the total tax related burden on the average bottom line by 7%. Thus making the real rate of tax-related spending, in real terms, just 8%. And means all the other expensive items like subsidized super, negative gearing, family trusts (tax avoidance vehicles) etc., can be junked along with the annual billions we lose/lose, as we allow these shonky rorts to continue ad infinitum. And then as we currently do, expect the coming generations to pay the piper! And to add insult to injury, without allowing them to call the tune!

We can properly fund our universities or some of the above! Your choice? If we choose wisely, then those paying the bill will get some say in how their cash is spent! Or who's hand is deepest in their collective future pockets! Let's fund the future, not the past or unadulterated, abhorrent, undeserved greed.
Alan B.

Sorry individual, you have that totally wrong mate.

It is the drastic oversupply of building trades people that force the continual excessive migration onto us.'

Government has no idea how to employ this excess of trades people, other than to import migrants to build housing for. With out this increase in population tens of thousands in the home building industry, & as many again in the building supply industries would be out of work, with no prospect of any future employment.

I think many in politics are as unhappy with our high migrant & refugee intake as we are, but have the tiger by the tail, & can see they will be eaten if they let go. This is highlighted by the huge increase in hand out to builders in the increased home builders grants.

Perhaps some good can come from this coronavirus, if it downsizes both the utterly wasteful university sector, & the building industry.

Phil,

How do you expect to get the economy restarted if you do not bring in millions of cashed up Chinese from the PRC (which now includes HK)?

No Chinese coming any time soon

Why?

no planes ....

Hasbeen,
Over supply of Tradies ? You could have fooled me by the quality of workmanship I've seen over the years !
Anyhow, it's not about building more houses, it's about reinvigorating all mechanical manufacturing & servicing in Australia.
If this Govt relied on fewer experts & more pragmatists then would it not be a fantastic thing to build vehicles again here without the insanity of the electronic dependency but insane unreliability of imported cars ?
Just this morning I tried to buy a ¾" keyed shaft for a little experiment & I almost cried in frustration. Not a single outlet to be found on the net in Australia. I called Bearing shops in Cairns & Townsville & Brisbane & none I repeat None, had any. "We can sell you the keys but not the shaft" was the reply I got from all of them ! ?? It's like saying we can sell you a car but we can't supply the wheel nuts.
We need to reintroduce common sense & competency in favour of tertiary Degrees ! Same goes for Politicians !

Waverley,

Why do you think Soot and the boys are so eager to get the States to open their borders?

They need the internal borders open before they can open the external border in order to give the green light to the millions of cashed up Chinese migrants they need to flood the country with in order to get the economy restarted.

Hello OLO Workers & Peasants

As a new-fangled fawning fascist reader of China's glorious "Global Times" http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1192262.shtml I am particularly heartened by OLO's own fossil, Peter West's, incisive:

"Brazil and the USA suffer worst, their leaders denying reality. US President Donald Trump, having called the virus a hoax and a plot engineered by his opponents, is planning large rallies again with no regard for the social distancing many of us are trying to live by in the time of the virus."

Which brings China to:

TRUMP'S TULSA TANTRUM: "The People Failed Me"

Trump's father, Frederick Christ Trump ( his real name ), once told his fuming son that Hitler, in the Berlin Bunker Blamed the German people for failing Hitler's vision - see http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/defeat/enter-bunker.htm :

"The German people were about to learn the harshest lesson of all. The Führer's contempt for human life was not exclusive to the Slavic peoples or the Jews, but would soon be visited upon the Germans themselves, because of their inability to achieve the things he had set out for them."

"Throughout his life, Adolf Hitler had never been able to admit a single mistake or accept responsibility for any failure. And as the thousand-year Reich he founded teetered on the brink of collapse in early 1945, he blamed it on the weakness of the German people and a military organization riddled with timid, disloyal and incompetent officers." [remind anyone of Trump?]

"If only they had really listened to him and let themselves be inspired. If only they had possessed the same will and determination as him – certainly everything would have turned out differently...."

And now we have Trump's Tulsa Tantrum... http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2020-election/trump-furious-underwhelming-crowd-tulsa-rally-n1231674

And to think in China's Gobi Desert http://sg.news.yahoo.com/amphtml/china-hopes-play-leading-role-220307940.html China's workers and nuclear peasants are making 2 MSR THORIUM REACTORS

Sorry- your point is...?

What crisis?

The more serious coronavirus flu was in Australia well before December 2019 so how can Wuhan and China be blamed?

What's more, while that virus was in Australia killing a few unfortunate people during 2018-19, there were no face masks, no lockdown and no crisis, so why the covid nonsense destroying the economy and livelihood during 2020?

I suggest be aware of dates, here;

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-08-18/influenza-spike-may-be-climate-related/11406980

JF Aus,

This is alarming information you have about Australia being the origin of the WuFlu.

I think you should bring this to the attention of 4 Corners and the WHO and while you're at it make sure you lodge an application with the CCP HQ in Beijing for a reward for discovering the truth about the WuFlu.

" Covid nonsense"? What does that mean? Aren't people dying? Shades of certain politicians in well-known countries.........

@Waverley

You should know by now the reigning religion of most OLO commenters is Murdocho-TRUMPism.

If Trump, OLO-mob's thought boss, says COVID is merely a Chinese invented, fake news, US economy

slowing, distraction to Trump's goose-stepping to reelection in November, then who are

you, Waverley to be a free will doubter of the OLO Party line?

Poida
http://gentleseas.blogspot.com/2020/06/donald-trump-does-have-incredibly-high.html

Laborites, take note of plantagenet's links. Can you see history repeating itself ?

Thanks individual

Another planta link is http://gentleseas.blogspot.com/2020/06/trumps-tulsa-tantrum-people-failed-me.html

for "Trump's Tulsa Tantrum - The People Failed Me"

Regards

The only thing that will stop the WuFlu from being a threat is the development of a vaccine.

Until that happens we will just keep seeing outbreaks of the WuFlu with no end in sight.

I heard a rumour that the Covid-19 virus is a genetically modified strain of SARS produced in China.

Rumours multiply in times of plague, virus and Trumpism

The only thing that will stop the WuFlu from being a threat is the development of a vaccine.
Mr Opinion,
So does restricting willy nilly roaming by travel junkies !

Yeah, I can almost work out what some of you guys mean, if I think about it a bit :)

Mr O,

Its good you see the point of the so called covid virus being in Australia prior to December 2019. I expect Australia's mainstream media and the prime minister and state premiers also know but are announcing nothing.
What motive/s could leaders have for ignoring the situation? Could Trump seek to use Australia to spin the Wuhan December lab story to upset China, and maybe provoke a war to upset or even defer the US November election? Ukraine was to be used for political gain.
Anyway, mass death due to covid has not occurred as said it would and the data that led to panic and the lockdown make no sense to justify the draconian measures imposed.

Waverley,

Covid nonsense seems obvious in more ways than one. Covid-19 is a name that is unacceptable, the virus is a coronavirus, coronavirus was occurring prior to December 2019, data used to declare the Covid-19 pandemic lacks scientific substance.
Has anybody noticed most mainstream news items begin using the word coronavirus and then later in the item there is brief reference to Covid-19? There is no mass hospitalization or mass death.
There is no sense in spinning data into fear when in reality there is need for truth about contagious disease such as coronavirus.
There is no sense in locking people in isolation that is deprives many people of essential sunlight, while others are deprived of nutritious food required daily.
There is no sense in social distancing rhetoric while nothing is said about eating nutritious meals to strengthen natural immunity to fight disease.

Coronavirus is a flu, isn't it? You know, flu, the colloquial term for viral respiratory disease including influenza and coronavirus.

Anyway, if there is any false or untrue or fake matter at the following link it would be good to hear about it.

http://jamesfetzer.org/2020/06/swiss-research-report-facts-about-covid-19/

There is no mass hospitalization or mass death.
JF Aus,
I recently saw a report stating that in the three months since this virus started, some 21 million phone users have stopped using their phones in China.

Fem is another form of the flu. The ABC is especially guilty. ABC News highlights the feminist agenda- it's a very close match. Will these radical feminists ever give up their campaign against men?

Feminism, I wrote.... (what is this auto-correct stuff? or cold fingers....)