Anyone who describes education as an 'industry' has no real appreciation of the true value of education. The role of any country's education system is to educate its citizens. Education is not a commodity and it shouldn't be put up for sale to the highest bidder. Educational facilities who've been progressively starved of funds ever since the Neo-liberal reforms of the Dawkins era shouldn't have to rely on selling an educational 'product'. Covid-19 provides the perfect opportunity for governments to start properly funding our educational institutions and ensuring access to them is based on academic merit and not on market forces.

We made a mistake commodifying education and turning our economy into a service-oriented one! And just plain daft as the pandemic demonstrates as does our absurd reliance on totalitarian communist China! Along with the idealogical imperative of dismantling all our cooperative industries in favour of (insane) aspirational individualism!

Or if you will, insanity personified that turned a formerly egalitarian nation into a divided rabble ripe for the plucking, given the demonstratable, consequential lack of social cohesion! As we sort to privatise our top money earning public amenities and entrench unearned privilege!

Allowed our most productive manufacturing to be off-shored due to ever increasing electricity charges and as those industries went, so did the company tax they used to pay!

All while patent numskulls like the proud author, watched in admiration at the changes! Changes that all but guarantee, we will emerge from this pandemic/economic crisis in the thrall of a prolonged depression!

Something we might avoid if wwe sign over/sell our entire economicc sovereignty to China? If we haven't already curtesy of the third colomn in our midst! A Darwin port anyone?

I believe the pandemic is the wake up call our, sleepwalking toward disaster, leaders have needed. So we can start down a new pathway not nearly as dependant on offshore nations for our value-added/manufactured commodities!

And given that change, we can reinstall sanity into education, decommodify it and return it to its former status as a basic human right! As is shelter! And a living wage!

Let China persist with slave wages and gulags where slavery is rife and needed in order for communist regimes to survive!

I cannot conceive of any right-minded person being proud of our current assosciation and economic dependence on a totalitarian state for our domestic education outcomes, save individuals that lack normal human empathy and or have made the dollar their God?

We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine.
Alan B

The role of any country's education system is to educate its citizens.
Bronwyn,
So, why is this not done here ?

Judging by all preceding comments in this thread the money making industry that Michael Baron etc built has severe popularity problems.

Is the criticism fair?

Why yes.

In this severe health crisis:

- farmers are screaming for low paid backpacker picker labour and

- educational money makers scream for foreign student cash cows.
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1. Michael Baron needs to remember that many foreign students subsidise part of their high fees by being part-time casual workers. Many such workers in Australia need to get JOBKEEPER paid by Australian taxpayers.

Once foreign students are in Australia they too would demand JOBKEEPER.

Michael Baron, Australian tax payers should not be required to subsidise foreign student-part time workers with JOBKEEPER.

2. Michael Baron, many other foreign students operate by flying to/from China and India several times a year.

Michael Baron - should the Australian taxpayer be subsidising QUARANTINE for foreign students as they re-enter Australia 2 or 3 times a year?

3. Michael Baron should all Australians be exposed to a higher COVID HEALTH RISK as foreign students re-enter Australia 2 or 3 times a year?
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You'll be OK Michael Baron. There are still 100,000s or millions of Australian students the money making from student sector can take from.

Well, it's pretty clear then, the worst event to befall the Australian education sector, was Hawke and Keating.
Many of the forward thinking like myself, recognised this immediately as industry fled the country and the great Australian slide began.

Where is Keating now? Draped in a rainbow flag and living in a Pots Point mansion with his boy friends.
These sort of animals should not be given oxygen.

Dan

diver dan,
As far as I know Keating wasn't Uni educated so it came as a real shock how little pragmatism & common sense he had as PM.