I find it interesting that the people who want free university education are the very people most against free, or subsidised education at school level for all.

It becomes all too easy to see the self interest in academics to keep the public spending confined to publicly funded, higher paying state run public schools, where so many of them & their students find a nice income.

If there was any interest in equity in schooling they would be screaming for the funding to be assigned to the child, & the family deciding what school that fund would support.

Greed is alive & very well in the academic sector in Oz.

Yes David, you're right, we are not solely a Christian nation.

As for the constitution, perhaps it's time we took a look at that because there is simply no way Islam extremists should be allowed to draw their hatred from their religion in this country.

Multiculturalised, yes, muslimised, No!

So what's that you reckon *HasBeen* that higher fee charging private schools pay their teachers less than the public sector? I would be very surprised if that is the case. It may be true of some of the smaller struggling schools but, when you are working with State Awards, everything is flat.

As for funding, here in W.A. at least everything now is far more child per child driven than ever it was. For example, my daughter gets a special once a week teacher from the institute of deaf education. She gets hers hearing aids and batteries subsidised. She also gets the benefit of a daily one on one with a special needs education assistant and when she arrives at high school next year, she will also receive the benefit of all of that plus the special ed centre. Quite a package is it not, wouldn't you agree?

But that does not extend to sending your child to a private school. If you want that, pay yourself.

And of course *IftiKhar* is entirely correct, assuming that you think any religion has any place in schools and of course, I and others do not. Otherwise you end up with catholics breeding catholics and Muslims breeding Muslims, and I can't see how that benefits any but those of a vested interest.

Education sector issues:.

1. A fiber optic network will do more than what we can even currently possibly envisage. Certainly the jump from the old modem to ADSL enabled us to start pushing up and down fat files for reading etc which had hitherto been too slow.

And even for the tech challenged, fibre will enable simple, fat buttoned multi video conferencing for all the family at once or quality on line classes and a whole host of additional benefits.

What we don't need in that is the expense of some dead wood, do little agent in the middle to jack up the prices as the coalition is suggesting. Those profits would be better channelled directly back into the infrastructure, at least until everyone is connected including the bush. Tailor the business model to the immediate priority. It can always be adjusted later.

But coming back to it, the curse on top of our economy and education system is property, which in turn is underpinned by too many people, getting paid way too much, to do way too little. Part of that is becsue of the way the tin pot laws are written.

Welfare is not the problem. Do you really think a highly optimised AusStudy student on $450 a fortnight, who goes to prac from morning to late avo, comes home, eats, showers and then gets about writing 1000+ words of theory is?

No, the problem is with a gross excess of over paid, dead wood, pencil fiddling, doddering old parasites. If they've got a financial security solution already, and in the absence of at least 2 compelling reasons, get rid of them and put them out to pasture and let the younger generation in who can use and take advantage of modern tech.

And I can tell you, the pencil fiddlers in the guvment have never really wanted the best of I.T., as it makes a lot of them redundant.

Worse still, the highest paid public servant according to the ABC gets approx $830,000 a year. That's about $300,000 more than t.abott.

Well, you'd think we'd hear from that person wouldn't you? What a joke. I am in favour of taking the axe brutally to the top end of the public service including the politicians themselves starting with the department that sets their wages.

You see, I recently did a language course at one of the unis for which I was a awarded a HD. But not only was there no real transparency about what the course involved in advance (and product disclosure statements across the board is an absolute must in the internet age) all we got for our $1000 was 13 weeks of 1.5 hours contact once per week. If you think most people are capable of learning a language under those conditions then you're playing with yourselves. And what do they want to do, make it more expensive?

The risk now, is even whilst Oz Unis may be cheaper than those in london or the states, that compared to the up and comers in Asia they are a crappy little tin pot rip off which is wanting to price itself out of the market. But that's Australia through and through isn't it?

What we need is internationally in demand product and services not $500 p.h. plus dead wood pencil fiddlers. And that's the real risk of migration isn't because most locals aren't worth a pinch of sh!t in reality and cannot compete. And a big reason for that is because of the crap that they teach in high schools.

Migrants have the benefit of being trained for the job upon arrival. English straight off the bat in the context of the guvment and legal system. Within 3 months of coming out of Indo my Mrs understood more than what my cousins new after 5 years in high school.

Our high school curriculum is pitiful and a big reason for that is because of religious people and their influence upon same.

rehctub wrote: Multiculturalised, yes, muslimised, No!

Exactly how are we going to become Muslimised? I am certainly not going to become a Muslim, and I doubt that you or most Australians are.

What are you really worried about?