I don't think any sensible person could argue against your article. The key problem with the appointment is therefore not his personal background, but his professional and political background. He has no educational experience and is a political appointee!

Ironically he would not be allowed to teach in the schools he will run. This does not need to be a negative - it simply means that finally all the kids that make mistakes at school and teachers who are themselves reformed will now be given a second chance through this precedent.

In relation to the ongoing pay debate on these pages Mr Della-Bosca has proven that he supports Julie Bishop’s performance pay proposals despite his assurances to the contrary. The appointment of Mr Coutts-Trotter who has no educational experience shows that teachers have relatively flat career progression pathways. The Minister obviously believes that even with the generous pay packet there are no quality candidates with educational qualifications to fill the position. What hope is there for performance pay raising the quality of the rest of us then? What if I argued I am a reformed teacher who has turned his life around from enthusiastic and passionate to disillusioned and alarmed?

He will not receive approbation from many people - probably the majority, who are tired of the double standards in our society.

Thankfully we can all still make up our own minds about such things. All we have to do is deal with the rogue politicians who appoint people with criminal records to responsible and lucrative jobs paid for by taxpayers.

And there is the problem. Australians are chumps who are too complacent and continue voting for the same no-hopers who treat them with comtempt.

I regretfully have to agree with Leigh here. Schooling with kids is in a safety world of its own. The leaders of the department set the tone from the top down. Being a "reformed" user of heroin does not necessarily make anyone the best person for the job.

It is disappointing that they trust an ex-drug user over an ex-teacher for the job.

By the time you clean out all of the criminals and ex-criminals out from the State Parliament and the CEOs, you are left with the people in the background doing all the hard work. Those who know how difficult it is to manage and be responsible in the playground. How to keep drugs out of the playground rather than importing them into the playground through customs. Its a matter of experience from the actual coalface of schools.

Surely there are teachers in the Department of Education that are organised enough to manage the department.

It could be worse. It could be an ALP former MP of Newcastle, from Swansea. God help the kids.

Yes, let’s all applaud the rehabilitation of drug dealer and user Michael Coutts-Trotter. However I fail to see that a place somewhere at the top of the tree has to be found once rehabilitation is complete. It has also been pointed out by one senior teacher that if anyone applying to teach had the same CV as Mr Coutts-Trotter a polite ‘no thanks’ would be issued by the interviewing panel.

Speaking of CVs, Mr Coutts-Trotter’s forms part of the grand ALP harlequinade because of his coming into contact with ALP icon Michael Egan. Three of Egan’s staff have done remarkable well; Coutts-Trotter (married to federal ALP member Tanya Plibersek, who owns very sharp elbows) to Education; Mark Duffy (best man at Michael Costa’s wedding) to Transport Services; and, John Lee (brother of former federal ALP MP Michael Lee) to State Transit. There is no word about Egan’s former tea lady but she is probably waiting in the wings to head up the World Bank or NATO.

I hope that no serious attempt is being made to compare Mr Coutts-Trotter with Nobel Prize winner Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Any attempt to do so would indicate that we are fast approaching that time when the lion will lay down with the lamb.

Mr Coutts-Trotter doesn’t even have within his CV educational qualifications to silence his critics. His appointment is noisome to say the least.

all of the responses assume that pollies should decide this question, and most others. they are masters of society and you should stop questioning them, for it implies a failure to recognize their innate grasp of every question, at a level far above the cattle who elevate them to their true status.

our pollies have inherited their mammoth intellects from god, who decreed they shall rule us as servants of the monarch. we should be thankful that we can play our trifling role in selecting each of them to direct us, while supplying the funds to allow them the lifestyle consonant with their dignity. so do be still silly-billys, this carping and caviling only reveals your deserved impotence and ignorance.

Grow Up Australia!

There is no double standard here.

Mr Michael Coutts-Trotter's appointment as Director-General of NSW Education is completely transparent.

As others have commented, his role is political and requires skills that tap knowledge from in and out side of the school administration. In Mr Coutts-Trotter's case, his life experiences other than those learnt from school could be extremely valuable to us. This is especially resourceful given the types of problems we see our children and teachers have, in attempting to engage with community – in this day and age.

To anyone driven by FEAR or some kind of cultural cringe I ask you personally;

* Are not displacing citizens everywhere through your cold self-righteous judgements.

* Are you not saying indeed; “once a criminal always a criminal?”

* Can you see that your criticisms of this person are a form of "ethnic cleansing”?

We as a society need to show more intelligence, respect and faith.

No one ought be displaced when our greatest need as civilian's (everywhere) is to learn more, understand more and engage more with people from all walks of life.

Trust is a two way process. Learning from others by Listening and Understanding is our only key.

Let us circle the probe on real criminals and protect our communities by being Community Safe in the ways we try to solve problems together.

http://www.miacat.com/
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God, there's some sanctamonius rubbish on this thread. As someone who has worked with ex prisoners attempting to find work, the attitude displayed on some of these posts is the precise reason that some of my clients went back to crime.

Its wonderful see that so many respondents have led such exemplary lives that they are in a position to judge those who have at some stage tripped in their journeys.

Personally, I think that this young and obviously talented young bloke will move ahead with his career, ignoring the harping of the self rightious

Bernie Matthews spins a load of baloney with ... "NSW will go down in history as the only Australian state government that re-birthed the traditional “fair go” principle and applied it to an ex-prisoner who had successfully rehabilitated."

Coutts-Trotter, in accepting this position as the state's top educator, is already an unimpressive individual because he has displayed his own gross sense of entitlement. He knows full well that public procedures and processes important for maintaining and deepening public trust in a government, have needed to be totally ignored. There was no public process of gazetting and interviewing for the position. His appointment in fact is the exacto opposite to what our mate Bernie refers to as the “fair go” principle and more like the fascist principle of the inside job. ............. Isn't spin doctoring amazing? Why now you can even have a spin doctor and truth twister as The NSW Director General of Education.

Of course, with a fascist the problem has never been how best to present the truth to the public. Instead it is spin and how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. We know Iemma is reported as a family man and here with this Coutts-Trotter he is certainly keeping it within the family, which all means "we are heading in the right direction" baby.

If Premier Iemma truly believed in the traditional “fair go” principle then he should over-ride his already disreputable Education Minister, Della Bosca, and not appoint this already unimpressive spin doctor mate that has been trotted out. He needs to re-introduce the former proper public processes of gazetting and interviewing for the position. We are talking about the need for a fair and well recognised democratic process to finding the state's top educator from amongst a bulk of qualified applicants who would need to be highly skilled and seriously knowledgeable educators.

There are plenty of instances of appointments of people in the public and private sectors who have all the right qualifications and experience, with no political connections, who prove to be complete duds. Lets judge this appointment on the basis of future performance, not past convictions/

There seems to be an assumption that you need to have been a teacher to run an Education Department. Not so, you need to be a good administrator with a good support team. There is a risk that if you appoint a teacher to a position such as this that they become prisoners of the system and seek to preserve the status quo, because that is what they know and what got them to where they are. Sometimes you need an outsider to shake the system up to effect change.

I have worked in an Education Department as a public servant and seen many teachers in senior positions who have no idea about effective management of people, resources or time. Of course there are good managers with a teaching background but often they become frustrated and leave.

As others have said, Mr Coutts-Trotter's criminal past is not the issue here. I would be far more sympathetic to Mr Mathews's argument if Mr Coutts-Trotter had been an experienced head of another educational organisation or someone with a long career in public administration, rather than so transparently a party apparatchik with little more than a decade of experience as a Ministerial staffer.

As things stand, we have an extremely insensitive appointment which has no justification other than the good old "jobs for the boys" ethos that has waxed and waned (but mainly waxed) in the NSW public service since the advent of elected government in the mid-1850s. I think the fact that Mr Coutts-Trotter would not be able to be appointed as a teacher is relevant, and only emphasizes the fact that he is a top-down political appointment rather than a person on a professional career path. (I'm not saying, by the way, that he will turn out necessarily to be a bad appointment: it's the process I'm attacking, not the man).

Ministers at all levels of government seem to have ever-growing personal staffs. Given this, the growing trend to put apparatchiks into top public service jobs seems to derive from an almost pathological lack of trust of public servants. One feels that Mr Coutts-Trotter and others of his ilk are appointed to their jobs in the hope that they will cajole and bully the public service to carry out their Minister's political agenda, rather than to ensure that their departments are effectively and professionally managed and can provide expert, "frank and fearless" advice to their Ministers.

The only problem with this man's appointment is as meher baba has written. It's a political appointment. Nothing else is relevant.

Any job should be competed for and won on merit. Experience, qualifications and personal skills are what is needed. I include all politicians in this too. Enough of people with no ability appointed or given seats simply because they are blindly loyal.

This man has nothing to answer for as far as his past goes. He has proven himself over a long period and it is really only political opponents and the media who have raised this issue at all.

If you applied the standards some here demand then let's say anyone who has a speeding fine or other driving conviction could never drive again. Whilst that is perhaps a good thing for some it is not for all as most have just made an error, not a lifetime of patterned behaviour.

Some here have criticised this appointment on the basis of Education requiring a higher level of ethics and behaviour. This is not reality, in any way. Teachers are human and Ministers of Education are required to do one thing only. Vote the way they are told.

He is in an administrative role and is apparently very good at what he does. Let him do it and let his performance decide his future, not his politics or his past.

This appointment is disturbing if only because there are so many well qualified people out there who are not being employed. Some years ago a previous Prime Minister (Labor) stepped in and denied the appointment of the best qualified candidate for a position. It was never openly said but it was clear that the PM in question did not see a person with a disability as the best ambassador for the position in question. The person who took the job was a disaster. The person with the disability has not been able to obtain paid employment since because a totally false rumour went around about their competence. It was all handled in such a way that there was no comeback.
Give someone another chance yes but this is political correctness gone too far, way too far.

Barry Cohen's article, "Quiet obedience can never serve Labor MPs well" http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=5746 , has, by reflection, put the spotlight right on an aspect of this appointment that so far seems to have escaped attention: the planned eradication of ministerial responsibility and the role of Parliament.

Morris Iemma's outline of a 'ten year plan' for delivery of public services in NSW, published prior to the recent State elections, included a proposal that departmental heads would henceforth report direct to the NSW Cabinet. Not to Ministers! Presumably all of the conventions relating to cabinet secrecy are intended to apply to the new arrangements.

The consequences, so far as accountability of senior public servants and ministers, first to the Parliament, and through Parliament to the public, are concerned, are obviously going to be drastic.

The Minister who made this appointment, John Della Bosca, has so far escaped much attention in this discussion. See this link for some observations http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?discussion=537#10457 .

The observation of meher baba in an earlier post that "One feels that Mr Coutts-Trotter and others of his ilk are appointed to their jobs in the hope that they will cajole and bully the public service to carry out their Minister's political agenda, rather than to ensure that their departments are effectively and professionally managed..." causes concern in this new context. The appointee will report direct to cabinet, so his performance in his public office, be it good or bad, will not be subject to public scrutiny. Should questions subsequently arise on these matters, the Minister may not necessarily be in a position to obtain answers for the Parliament or public, or, if he can, may claim cabinet secrecy prevents his revealing what he knows.

Should the subject of bullying come to have relevance, the link supplied by Dealing With The Mob in Barry Cohen's thread, http://www.badapplebullies.com/ , provides a chilling insight into the potential situation of departmental subordinates under Iemma's new arrangements.

This appointment abandons proper process!

as i said on my blog, "the questioning of coutts-trotter is a real kick in the face for the premise that criminal justice is rehabilitative. it seems to me that this is more party-politics mud slinging than an actual commentary on whether people who have served time for a criminal conviction should hold positions of high public importants. if one of the intentions of the criminal justice system is to reform or rehabilitate individuals, this instance certainly casts a long shadow on that ideal."

view the entry: http://plastikkpoet.blogspot.com/2007/04/prision-institution-is-rehabilitation.html

What kind of message are we sending if we decide that a criminal conviction will disbar you from life from fully participating in civil society?

This seems positively vindictive.

He comes across as a very focussed, talented individual, who is dedicated to public service. We need people like that.

Breaking the rules should not be taken lightly. But neither should it condemn you for ever more.

This person is a convicted drug dealer which should point him only in the direction of execution.

As usual, the ALP, being the champion of criminals be they paedophiles(of which the ALP has many amongst its ranks), drug dealers, etc. The issue here, is that children now have in charge of its ranks, a person who sold drugs, most likely sold drugs to children to children to feed his filthy habit.

Also, his only experience in education is teaching children how to stick a needle in their arm is yet another reason why he should not allowed within reach of any education facility. Not to forget that execution is where he should be.

I would like to comment on the appointment of Michael Coutts-Trotter. The appointment of someone from within the Department would have been disastrous for the honesty and integrity of this department. Please read the documents on wbde.org to see how the Department has in the past, acted corruptly in relation to whistleblowers and the government medical office. I believe there may be a genuine attempt by Iemma to clean up the Department of Education. Believe it or not, we have evidence that people in high positions within the Department are guilty of crimes under the N.S.W. Crimes Act in relation to public documents. We have evidence that shocking lies have been sent to the government medical office HealthQuest about whistleblowers in order to persuade that organization to certify people insane when they are not. Whistleblower Val Kerrison is a prime example but there are dozens of others. If a senior departmental official had been appointed to this position, such as some of their dishonest 'legal officers' and so on, the cycle of lies, deception and abuse of power would continue. I would like to think Michael Coutts-Trotter has the courage to put an end to this once and for all, and to sack all those currently holding top positions because they are ALL GUILTY. They cover for each other. They lie for each other. When the Minister for Education writes inquiring about some case or other, they write back telling him blatant lies about the situation. If it is a whistleblower trying to avoid the sack or trying to be re-employed the lies are all the bigger. This is one disgusting government department and I want to see it sorted, so go Micheal Coutts-Trotter and good luck. With the Teachers Federation backing the Department in their lies about HealthQuest what hope have you got.