The Greens are evidently the devil incarnate when it comes to education, mining and building. Or to be more accurate, they are the devil incarnate to rich private schools, mining magnates and building billionaires.
Their ‘outrageous’ plans to redistribute school spending from rich private schools to poor public schools has got the wealthy complaining and warning parents not to vote Green.
According to Stephen Doherty, the Chief Executive of Christian Schools Australia, speaking on ABC Radio program PM on Wednesday night:
It’s all very well to raise these moral questions about environmental issues but on the questions that matter to Australians about where they can send their kids, whether there’s fair funding, the Greens policies are divisive and would be quite disastrous.
Greens leader Bob Brown reasonably defended the policy as taking from the rich and giving to the poor. But I want to quote from a more remarkable source to defend the Greens – Julia Gillard.
According to Anna Patty in the Sydney Morning Herald in her article Labor counts cash and votes in funding debate:
[In 2000] Gillard challenged the [Howard] government claim that additional funding for independent schools was about providing choice. She said what it was really about was ”creating an education market in which the wealthiest have the most choice”.
What a difference ten years and being Prime Minister makes to truth. Gillard will now keep in place the current funding arrangements which a decade ago she described rightly as flawed. Not least are they flawed because those arrangements reinforce amassed wealth and traditional privilege, ie they continue massive educational inequality.
Here’s Anna Patty quoting the PM in her truthful days:
…we in the Labor Party understand that, if you genuinely want choice, you must support a properly funded government system and a properly funded non-government system with all schools funded on the basis of need.
Gillard’s decision to continue those flawed arrangements is about further entrenching class differences into the school system. It is a capitulation to the rich at the expense of the poor.
But of course that is Gillard’s modus operandi. She capitulated to the miners and is foregoing $14 billion in resource super profits tax as a consequence.
There is a wonderful Sydney Morning Herald video of outraged billionaires protesting in Perth against the mining tax as then proposed. The rich were rattling their pearls.
Gillard gave them almost all that they wanted, but that wasn’t good enough for some of the miners whose total tax bill might – shock horror – increase two percent in 3 years’ time.
It’s the same story with the big polluters. Labor’s proposed Emissions Trading Scheme was a massive transfer of wealth from working class taxpayer to the big polluters.
Then Rudd and Gillard pulled the plug even on that and promised to do nothing before 2013. Other than, in one of Gillard’s many sleights of hand, to promise a citizens’ assembly on climate change.
There’s a pattern here. Labor backs down to the rich and powerful as of course.
It’s the interests of the rich schools, the rich miners, the big polluters and the other billionaire bludgers whom Gillard and her Labor Party serve.