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.