[continued]

And of course, great numbers of people with Nursing skills of all sorts - and for that (as well as the mining-oriented jobs) one needs the Maths and Sciences.

How to encourage people to study for those skills that are fairly certain to be needed in the years after they finish ? (Maybe they would have to start early in their secondary schooling, especially with Maths and Sciences.) Maybe waive their HECS ?

And to discourage people from doing easy, pleasant, fun courses which get them nowhere ? Maybe double their HECS, or expect up-front payment of a proportion of it ?

And now the Labor government intends to cut university funding, just when it is presumably most needed to train vast cohorts of new and improved teachers. What's wrong with this picture ?

A lot of issues there to debate, Producer :)

Joe

Producer do you read my posts?I read yours.
From very nearly the start of this thread and about ten others, I want what you do.
Work for all, no dole, strange you may think from a unionist for life.
But that life has been my schooling.
I have been hungry and broke, a job at those times would have been gold.
I too have seen/know folk so work shy they enjoy supplementing the dole with stealing from workers.
Not in rage but in hope, I want to knock this system down and start again.
No dole a job for all, make that job no threat to existing ones.
We could do it.
At some point we must confront the need for true change in our welfare system.

Loudmouth - A lot to respond to and I wish to do so properly. It's late, it's been a long day and I am tired. I will respond in detail in the next day or so.

Hi producer,

No rush, take your time. This may prompt some suggestions against weternal 'sit-down money'"

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nation/veronica-hudson-sentenced-over-killing-of-edward-woody-heron-after-years-of-abuse/story-e6frg6nf-1226629941730

Now, I wonder how we can fit colonialism into that picture. Or Abbott :)

Cheers,

Joe

'Eternal' sit-down money, of course.

Noel Pearson has a great article in today's paper: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/moral-obligation-is-to-save-children-first/story-e6frg786-1226630257959

Here in Adelaide, I don't often get to read The Age or the SMH, but perhaps those journals also carry articles on Indigenous issues ? If you find any that are any good, please put up their URLs :)

I've been doing some work on the correspondence of the SA Protector of Aborigines, 1840 up to 1906, and I'm struck by how similar his priorities are to Noel's, but with a crucial difference - rations were primarily for the sick, the elderly & the infirm, for young children, for orphan children, and for nursing mothers.

Again and again, the Protector instructs the issuers (at around sixty depots across the State - so where was the 'herding onto missions' ? No sign of it in his letters, or on Mission school rolls) not to give rations to able-bodied people if there was plenty of 'natural food', game, fish, &c., or if there was employment in a district.

By the way, none of those sixty issuers ever got remunerated (except the Goolwa issuer for a short time).

As Noel points out, so often, the priorities these days favor perpetrators of domestic violence - if a man is violent, the woman and the kids have to flee to a refuge, leaving that b@stard with the whole house to himself.

How hard would it be for the police to be immediately notified if a woman and her kids needed to go to a refuge, to go around, arrest the bloke, lock HIM up, and let the woman and kids go back to the house, safe in the knowledge that their violent partner and 'father' is on, let's say, a three-month AVO, after he has finished his sentence.

Hopefully, in a sane system, he would be doing some training during his sentence, for a REAL job, once he comes out.

More to get your teeth into, Producer :)

Joe

Loudmouth, Joe I have most non Murdock papers in my favorites, and follow links even to them, from goggle.
A quick goggle sear news papers will get the links.
A current story, about the woman living in a tent murdering her partner has been linked to Noels words, as evidence things are not right.
I hold hope, truly, that as a result of our impending loss Labor will both reform, and be more welcoming to younger inventive people in the branches , hopefully targeting this disgrace.
I understand you call for self steering from these folk.
But remember just a couple of miles from our towns they live in a world far different than us.
Many have no education, not any.
Most are unaware of the idea of self management.