<!-- /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0cm; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman";} h1 {mso-style-next:Normal; margin-top:12.0pt; margin-right:0cm; margin-bottom:3.0pt; margin-left:0cm; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; page-break-after:avoid; mso-outline-level:1; font-size:16.0pt; font-family:Arial; mso-font-kerning:16.0pt;} @page Section1 {size:612.0pt 792.0pt; margin:72.0pt 90.0pt 72.0pt 90.0pt; mso-header-margin:35.4pt; mso-footer-margin:35.4pt; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> The education revolution arrived in Lismore last week.
Lismore TAFE has lost the funding for its popular Language, Learning and Literacy program. More TAFE teachers will be out of work.
This is the education revolution promised by Justine Elliot and Janelle Saffin during the last Federal election campaign in 2007. Now that the revolution is here TAFE teachers and students are experiencing, first hand, just how revolting it is.
During that campaign, the NSW Teachers Federation organised education forums at Byron High and Murwillumbah High. Then Senator for NSW, The Greens’ Kerry Nettle, pointed out that both the old parties were committed to running down government education and investing in private education delivery. She quoted from ALP and education department documents nominating TAFE as an institution that required radical change. They pointed to Registered Training Organisations as the government’s preferred delivery mechanism for cutting costs.
Justine Elliot did not deny the charge. She simply repeating woodenly, as she did on every platform in response to every question, “Labor’s fresh new team will deliver a revolution in education <or the topic under discussion>. Our fresh new team and fresh approach will mean a new start in education, health and the end of Work Choices.”
The phrase still revolves in my head.
Now the team is not so fresh, the revolution has arrived and teachers are horrified that things have worked out exactly as Senator Nettle predicted.
Specifically, in this instance, the Learning, Literacy and Numeracy program will go to Nortec, who run their Brunswick Heads courses out of the CWA Hall, putting away the doilies and plastic flowers on Thursday morning and bringing them out again on Friday evening. Meanwhile TAFE class rooms sit empty, taxpayer’s resources unused so that the government can reduce the wages bill and pay Cert IV tutors instead of Diploma trained teachers.
In 2007, The NSW Teachers Federation almost backed the Greens at the ballot box, but could not bring itself to cut the umbilical cord that joins the political and industrial wings of the labour movement and so gave the Greens second preference.
If we have learned anything in the last three years it is that the ALP is a political machine designed to gain power, not to govern on behalf of the people.
Don’t repeat the same mistake this time, put The Greens first.
