Category: Education

  • Mary Chiarella. Nurses – debt and job satisfaction.

    In the AFR Laura Tingle rightly points out that nurses do not tend to fit the mould as one of those groups of fortunate students who may reap significant income returns for the cost of their university education. She goes on to point out that “modelling released by Universities Australia this week suggest nurses’ uni debts will rise from $19,398 to as much as $37,390 under the budget proposals. This is for a job paying a starting income of $48,729”. She calculates that a nursing graduate who works 6 years full time on graduation, followed by six years part-time before returning to full time work, would have a debt of $66, 195 that would take 22 years to repay.

    So this brave new world of market forces is pretty bad news for nursing recruitment. That is even if you consider that caring ought to be commodified in the first place or whether there are some things that are so important the market should protect them rather than hang them out to dry. Remarkably people often feel quite differently about these matters when they are in need of intensive or palliative care.

    But wait, there are more spanners to throw into the works. It’s also ipso facto bad news for nursing retention. This comes not long after Health Workforce Australia’s report Health Workforce 2025 (HWA, March, 2012) modelled future requirements for registered nurses and identified that, with no changes to the status quo, there would be a shortfall in registered nurses of 109,000 or 27%. As it turns out the government also decided to get rid of HWA in the last budget, so these data won’t bother them for much longer.

    Note this is a report on registered nurses. This distinction matters for safety and quality in health care.  We have an abundance of information about the impact of baccalaureate prepared RN staffing on reduction of adverse events. If the cumulative evidence from these studies were a pill, they would have stopped the trials and given the pill to everybody. Duffield et al’s work (2007) in NSW looked at the relationship between skill mix and adverse events, and governments and their advisory bureaucracies should ignore it at their peril. It is the biggest study ever undertaken examining the relationship between these two issues at unit level and she has received international acclaim as a result of it. For every 10% increase in RNs there is a 27% decrease in failure-to-rescue –we have wards way below that level today.

    But HWA’s report points out that we wouldn’t need that many nurses if we only retained 1 in 5 (ONE IN FIVE!!)  of the ones we currently lose. A 20% improvement in retention would ameliorate the predicted RN shortage –so we really only need to understand why they are leaving and do something about it. Elementary.

    A synthesis of serial investigations and reports demonstrates that the two primary reasons why nurses leave the profession are a sense that they are not valued and a belief that they are not able to deliver high-quality care. Job satisfaction is therefore connected with both skill mix and shortages. The work environment plays an important role in job satisfaction and patient safety as well, as Aiken and colleagues’ multi-country studies indicate (2010). In a number of their studies, hospitals providing “supportive” environments, in terms of staffing levels and organisational factors, were more likely to have better patient outcomes compared to less “supportive” hospitals. These findings are consistent with other surveys indicating the central role of the work environment in job satisfaction and patient safety. So a simple question, will increasing the HECs debts and anxiety improve the work satisfaction of our RN workforce Mr Abbott?

    Mary Chiarella is Professor of Nursing, University of  Sydney.

  • Michael Keating. Part 5. Federalism

    The Government’s Commission of Audit, which preceded this Budget, recommended that policy and service delivery should as far as practicable be the responsibility of the level of government closest to the people receiving those services, and that each level of government should be sovereign in its own sphere, with minimal duplication between the Commonwealth and the States. The Government for its part has insisted that it does not run schools or hospitals and that the States are ultimately responsible for them and what happens to them.

    This conception of the Australian Federation with its emphasis on States’ rights and separate roles and responsibilities is of course not new. Malcolm Fraser enunciated it before he became Prime Minister, and its supporters insist that it was what the framers of our Constitution intended.

    Furthermore, there is considerable intellectual attraction in separate roles and responsibilities for each sovereign government. It should enhance democratic accountability and help improve efficiency if the buck can no longer be passed backwards and forwards between the two levels of government. But why then has our Federation evolved in favour of greater national involvement in the provision of services that were originally the sole responsibilities of the States? The Commission of Audit seems to believe that centralism can and should be reversed, but I will argue below that there are good reasons why the national government has become more engaged in what were originally the prerogatives of the States.  Consequently, although there is probably some modest scope for redefining governments’ respective roles and responsibilities and reducing duplication, we will be best served by preserving the core features of our national system.

    In my view there are three key reasons for the pre-eminence of the national government. First, a fundamental reason why the States agreed to federate was to remove tariffs as a first step towards the creation of a national market. But now that we have a national market and indeed are facing global competition, businesses want common standards and licensing across a wide variety of fields; for example, everything from rail gauges, regulation of heavy road transport, company law and national competition, to food standards and the recognition of qualifications.

    Second, the responsibilities of government have grown. At the time of Federation pensions did not exist, but the Australian government now has constitutional responsibility for income support, including subsidising critical needs such as medical services, pharmaceuticals, and rental housing. Equally since World War II the Australian government has been expected to manage the macro-economy to ensure full employment and reasonable price stability.  Allied to this the Australian government also has responsibility for population policy, especially through migration, and for the growth in productivity and workforce participation which together determine the overall growth of the economy.

    However, these various national functions and responsibilities are not self contained. Today the various functions of government are heavily inter-related in a way that was much less true one hundred years ago, when we were all much less closely connected. For example, productivity is heavily dependent on the skills of the workforce, but these skills are in turn dependent on the quality of the education and training systems of the States. It is simply not possible for the Australian government to meet its responsibilities while being unconcerned about the effectiveness of various State government services.

    The third and final reason for national government pre-eminence is of course the national government’s domination of taxation, widely described as ‘vertical fiscal imbalance’ or VFI. Paul Keating called VFI the glue that holds our nation together, but for the States and the champions of States’ Rights, VFI is regularly trotted out as the root cause of centraliam. In the past the national government has passed payroll tax back to the States, and more recently they receive all the proceeds of the GST, but it seems unlikely that either of these taxes will ever be changed by so much as to make the States financially self-sufficient.

    In that case the removal of VFI would require that the States have access to the income tax. Legally there is nothing to stop them doing that now, but they have never taken up the opportunity, and indeed there are very important efficiency gains in only one government being responsible for administering any particular tax.  So the alternative is for the Australian government to raise the income tax and then to share the proceeds with the States. But why would sharing a tax result in clearer lines of responsibility than sharing responsibility for other functions of government which require expenditures? There would still be the same arguments about who should get how much and whether the States have adequate revenue. Alternatively if the States were allowed to add a surcharge to the Commonwealth tax, then there is the risk that the Commonwealth’s independent use of taxation policy for macro-economic policy would be compromised.

    In short it is not surprising that proposals to return to the past and increase State rights have got nowhere over a very long time. The truth is that a form of power sharing which we call ‘cooperative federalism’ is the only realistic way of managing inter-governmental relations. In Australia, for good or for ill, we have these two levels of government (plus local government), and power will inevitably need to be shared for a variety of functions where both have a legitimate interest. By contrast one cannot help being suspicious about the Commission of Audit proposals and whether their real intention is to provide a fig-leaf for the Commission’s smaller government agenda, with little or no concern for the impact on the availability and quality of publicly funded services.

    Instead a more productive discussion, than endless repetition of State’s Rights, would be to formulate better arrangements to guide the necessary future power sharing between the Australian Government and the States. To their credit that was what the Hawke, Keating and Rudd Governments were attempting to do with some success through COAG.

     

  • John Menadue. Anzac and hiding behind the valour of our military.

    For those who may have missed this. I have reposted this earlier piece about Anzac and hiding behind our heroes.  John Menadue

    There is an unfortunate and continuing pattern in our history of going to war- that the more disastrous the war the more politicians and the media hide behind the valour of service men and women. We will see this displayed again on April 25.

    The Director of the Australian War Memorial, Brendan Nelson, drew attention to this well-honed way of distorting and excusing our strategic and political mistakes. In the SMH on October 5 last year, he said ‘The more obscene the war, the more inexplicable it seems for us today, the more many [young people] admire those men and women who went in our name’. (See my blog October 11, 2013, ‘The drumbeat grows louder’.)

    It is not only young people who have been drawn into this distortion of history. Governments and the media have encouraged us to ignore the disastrous wars that we have been engaged in and learn from our mistakes. Rather than face the consequences of acknowledging those disasters, governments and the media then change the subject to the valour of our heroes. We refuse to face the fact that these heroes have often died in vain

    By any measure our involvement in the wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan have been disastrous. So what do our governments, the Australian War Memorial and the media do? They avoid examining how we got into such disastrous wars. They do this by dwelling on the heroism of our service people. VC winners are an ideal way to change the subject from a disastrous war to an Australian hero.

    There is no doubt that they are heroic, but the wars they fought in were anything but heroic. These three wars were disastrous but we refuse to acknowledge that fact. The consequence will be that in the future we will continue to make foolish decisions about getting into war. That could occur over the dispute between Japan and China over the islands in the East-China Sea.

    In this cover up of failed policies, prime ministers, ministers, opposition leaders and the media have attended almost every ship taking Australian service personnel to or from war zones in the Middle East. I don’t think the Prime Minister and Leader of the Opposition have missed any funeral of a veteran of those wars. There was even a fly-over in Gippsland for an Australian soldier who had accidentally shot himself.

    Our involvement in WWI was disastrous in every way. We acted like a colony at the behest of England But we didn’t spend time dwelling on the catastrophe as a result of our strategic and political mistakes. That hopefully would discourage us from repeating them in the future. Instead we deluged ourselves and continue to do so in the valour of those who served and died in WWI.

    WWII was much more a war we had to fight in our own national interest and for the freedom of our region. But the recall of that war and the sacrifices of our military personnel is quite small at the Australian War Memorial compared with the coverage of WWI. We had a strong case for involvement in WWII but not WWI. Yet the coverage at the Australian War Memorial does exactly the reverse. Strategically Kokoda was more important to Australia than Gallipoli.

    In his excellent new book ‘Rupert Murdoch’ – a re-assessment” Professor  Rod Tiffen draws attention to the way that News Ltd in the UK covered its mistaken  support for  the appalling  wars in Iraq and Afghanistan . It just changed the subject. News Ltd never attempted to seriously  examine the fiction and mistaken policies which it supported and which led the UK into those wars. It changed the subject by attacking PM Gordon Brown for not looking after the veterans. Rod Tiffen put it this way.

    ‘In one of the last issues of The Sun edited by Rebekah Brooks, the front page consisted of the faces of the 207 British soldiers killed in Afghanistan, with a large headline across the middle, reading “Don’t you know there’s a bloody war on”. The strap at the top said “Message to politicians failing our heroes” … The multipage splash was accompanied by a cartoon of a wounded soldier with the caption “abandoned”.’

    Tiffen added ‘Responsible newspapers such as the Washington Post and the New York Times reflected publicly on their journalistic failings during the period [of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars]’.  

    But not News Ltd and Rupert Murdoch.

    What the Murdoch papers did in the UK is common amongst governments and media generally. They refuse to acknowledge their complicity in disastrous wars. To cover their tracks they focus on the heroism of service people.

    It is unpatriotic and cowardly to refuse to examine and publicly acknowledge decisions about going to war. That is surely the most momentous decision that any government can make. But by focusing on the story and the valour of service people, like successive Australian Prime Ministers, Rupert Murdoch and the Australian War Memorial, we are discouraged from looking honestly at our history.

    If we don’t learn from our mistakes we will keep repeating them. We must stop hiding behind our heroes.

     

  • John Menadue. Citizenship and shared experience.

    The recent decision by the NSW Government to evict pensioners and low-income tenants from the Rocks in Sydney highlighted for me the importance of mixed communities and shared experiences.

    We all benefit in society when we have shared experiences. We can then get to know other people’s aspirations and their problems. We invariably find that we have much more in common than we think. We benefit both as individuals and as a society.

    Why should only one part of society, the wealthy, enjoy harbour views? Why should a mixed community that has lived for so long in one area be destroyed with low-income tenants forced out whilst the wealthy join other wealthy to enjoy harbour views and the attractive lifestyle that goes with the Rocks.

    In shared experiences we are drawn in two ways. One inclination is to live in pleasant and attractive areas that are often composed of people like ourselves with the same incomes and even the same ethnic backgrounds. But we also know that we benefit from shared experiences with people who are different. Our most important shared and common experiences are in times of natural disaster – bushfires and floods which tear away social class. We are in the emergency together and we find great satisfaction in banding together. Many older Australians recall the common hardship of the Depression, the War and rationing. For Britishers, the bombings and air raid shelters brought people to a ‘common experience’. Despite the hardships and the danger, there was satisfaction in those common experiences. The fabric of society and trust in each other was strengthened.

    As Ian McAuley in ‘Dissent’, November 2012, has pointed out, the British sociologist Thomas Humphrey Marshall wrote in 1949 about ‘common experience’ as an essential ingredient for good citizenship. This common experience is a richer notion than social inclusion. Unfortunately social exclusion by the wealthy is becoming as serious a problem as social exclusion of the poor.

    It is not just the Sydney Rocks that is being pulled apart. Our health and education institutions discourage the mixing of social groups and denying common experience.

    Ian McAuley points out that government subsidies to private health insurance discourages the well-off in the use of public hospitals. Because PHI, particularly for people on the high tables, is used almost entirely to fund treatment in private hospitals, government policy subsidises a form of social exclusion and discourages common experience. It also encourages many articulate people to opt out of support for public hospitals knowing that when they need hospitalisation, they can turn to private hospitals.

    The trend in the denial of common experience is even more obvious in education. In the 1950s, 75% of Australian children attended public schools. Most of the other 25% went to Catholic schools which had a similar social, if not religious, mix as public schools. Now only 65% of students attend public schools. This trend is even more pronounced in secondary schools where just over 60% of secondary school students are in public schools. This proportion is even lower in early grades of secondary school. And this trend away from common experience in public schools is accelerating despite the fact that there is no evidence that private education secures better outcomes. It will take many decades of Gonski to reverse the unfortunate and divisive trends that are occurring. Common experience in schools is being eroded.

    As more and more middle class and articulate parents opt out of public education, a tipping point will arise where it will be hard to ensure public support for public schools. That tipping point is approaching

    Just as the government subsidies to PHI has driven social exclusion in hospital use, so in education government funding is being skewed in favour of the privileged in private schools. The concept of common experience is being steadily eroded.

    We are also seeing this denial of common experience in our built environment. In my blog of November 28, 2013 “there goes the neighbourhood” I drew attention to the way that some communities are being sundered by the wealthy excluding themselves from common experience. They have private pools within minutes of superb public beaches, private entertainment systems, high walls,roller doors and CCT to keep themselves from a common experience with neighbours. Even when public transport is reasonably available, children get driven to school in private cars.

    It is claimed that these developments in our health and educational institutions and in our built environment is justified on the grounds of choice. But choice is often a one-way street available only to those with high incomes. What choice do the low income tenants in the Rocks have about where they are going to live?

    We all know that common experience in national disasters and volunteering brings a sense of togetherness, community and shared humanity. We must nurture institutions that promote sharing and common experience. The most critical is shared experience in schools and education.

    We need institutions and a built environment that cut through social class. That is the path to shared experiences.

    The more we turn our back on common experiences the more our citizenship and society is impoverished.

  • Kieran Tapsell. Facing prejudice.

    Piedad Bonnett, El Espectador, Colombia 5 November 2013 http://www.elespectador.com/opinion/una-injusticia-historica-columna-466919

    Summary: Alan Turing was responsible for breaking the German enigma code in the Second World War. He was subsequently convicted of the crime of homosexuality, and given a choice of being chemically castrated or imprisoned.  He chose the former and then committed suicide.  The Queen has recently “pardoned” him posthumously.

    When, in 1952, the British mathematician, Alan Turing was threatened with choosing prison or oestrogen treatment to “cure” his homosexuality, the freethinking atheist, who openly admitted his sexual preferences to investigating police, risking public derision, chose what was in effect chemical castration that left him impotent, deformed his body and caused him serious psychiatric problems.

    Two years later, at 41, and at the height of his powers, Turing was found dead in his bed, and by his side was a half-eaten apple impregnated with cyanide. The Coroner ruled it was suicide.

    This cruel sentence, paradoxically, led public opinion, and the English press to start to protest about the continual persecution, convictions, and even executions of homosexuals. These protests ended up with the 1957 Wolfenden Report that declared that these people were not sick, and recommended that homosexual practices amongst adults cease to be considered crimes. It was already too late, unfortunately for the mathematician.

    Alan Turing was such a brilliant, versatile and exceptional character that he has become a feature of novels and a play, Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code and several biographies and countless speculations, including the hypothesis that he was assassinated.

    His place in history has much to do with the term that seems familiar to us today: artificial intelligence. In a famous article published in 1936, Turing put forward the real possibility of making a computing machine.

    This idea was put into practical effect during the Second World War with the British Intelligence Division with the design of the “Turing Machine”. It used combined calculus, and managed to decipher the secret codes of the Enigma machine that sent instructions to German submarines attacking the allied forces.

    As well as all that, he was known to have liked writing “haikus”, that he was a notable athlete and that he invented morphogenesis, a discipline that brought together mathematics and biology to decipher why animal markings were the way they were. He must have been very curious to have wanted to know, scientifically, why zebras have stripes.

    Turing is recognized as a genius by the scientific community and as a notorious example of how moral cheer leaders have historically damaged innocent people for the mere fact of being homosexual.

    On 24 December 2013, Queen Elizabeth of England, pressured by a section of public opinion exercised her Royal Prerogative of Mercy, pardoning Turing posthumously. Although the terms of the decree are completely ridiculous – there is nothing to pardon Turing for – the decision has a very important symbolic effect.

    It makes us realised that the law is often bound up with religious or social prejudice and that very probably there are some things that today we pursue furiously – like cultivating coca, for example, – that tomorrow, after much blood and suffering, will be accepted without scandal.

     

    Guest blogger, Kieran Tapsell drew to my attention some good writing from Colombia on issues of international importance. Kieran is a Spanish  translator.  I hope you enjoy something a little different. John Menadue

  • John Menadue. Patriots and scoundrels.

    Samuel Johnson in 1775 said that ‘patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel’. That brings to mind the “patriotic” politics that both PM Abbott and the PM of Japan, Shinzo Abe, are playing. In this Tony Abbott will find more confirmation that “Japan is Australia’s best friend in Asia”, a term that irritates the Chinese.

    I am sure that Samuel Johnson was referring to false patriotism, but that is just what Tony Abbott and Shinzo Abe are appealing to in trying to reshape education and public broadcasting in both countries.

    Teaching children patriotism

    In October last year, Shinzo Abe’s education minister ordered the school board in Taketomi in Okinawa to use a text book that the school board has previously rejected. The school board refused because it included a nationalistic view of WWII history, particularly denial of the Nanjing massacre and comfort women. This order by the Abe Government was the first such order by a national government. It was not surprising that it was rejected in Okinawa which suffered enormously in WWII and continues to hold strong anti-war sentiments.

    Then in December last year, a carefully and politically appointed government committee suggested a change to more ‘patriotic teaching’ in Japan by putting local mayors in charge of their local school districts. Many people believe that this would increase political interference in text books and teaching.

    Shinzo Abe has long attempted to force Japan’s education system to be more patriotic. The word that he and his colleagues use is ‘balance’.

    The view of the Japanese people is clearly against giving more authority to local boards of education and to local Mayors. According to an Asahi poll published on February 18 this year, 59% of Japanese preferred a ‘system that is not dictated’ by local political leaders”. The Japanese people are clearly wary about ‘patriotic education’. Despite the clear view of the Japanese people, Shinzo Abe is continuing his cultural war.

    In Australia, Tony Abbott’s education minister, Christopher Pyne, is on the same track as the Japanese Government in promoting patriotic education. Christopher Pyne has appointed a politically biased curriculum review committee which is clearly designed to shape Australian education in ways that the Coalition Government wishes. Christopher Pyne says

    • Our schools curriculum should have ‘a greater focus on the benefits of Western civilisation’.
    • He wants the curriculum to ‘celebrate Australia’.
    • He would like to see ‘more of a focus on Anzac Day (he would presumably like us to ignore the frontier wars in which  30,000 indigenous  Australians were killed and the fact that Australians and New Zealanders did not first fight at Gallipoli, but in the Maori Wars in New Zealand in the 1850s and 1860s).

    In the name of ‘balance’ Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne are waging their cultural war in education in favour of a false patriotism in the same way that Shinzo Abe is doing in Japan.

    Public Broadcasting

    Tony Abbott is also following in the footsteps of Shinzo Abe in his attacks on our own public broadcaster, the ABC.

    In my blog of February 12 this year, I pointed out how Shinzo Abe has stacked the board of NHK, Japan’s esteemed public broadcaster. PM Abe has just appointed five new members out of twelve to the NHK board. The new managing director of NHK, Katsuto Momii, and another board member, Naoki Hyakuta, have spelled out the way that NHK should pursue a more patriotic agenda. They have separately

    • Endorsed Shinzo Abe’s visit to Yasukuni Shrine.
    • Described the Tokyo War Crimes Trials as designed to fool the Japanese people.
    • The recruitment of comfort women was not peculiar to Japan.
    • The Nanjing massacre was a fiction.

    Not content with the drooling support of the entire Murdoch media, Tony Abbott complains about our public broadcaster, the ABC. He has said the ABC.

    •  Was ‘unpatriotic’ in the news coverage of the Snowden leaks.
    •  ‘Lacks affection’ for the home team.
    • ‘Instinctively, it takes everyone’s side but not Australia’s’.

    Tony Abbott has not yet had a chance to stack the ABC board but it is only a matter of time. Shinzo Abe has shown him how to do it.

    The public broadcasters in Japan and Australia are greatly admired for their professionalism and independence. The latest Nielsen Poll (17 February 2014) reveals that 59% of Australians do not believe that the ABC is biased. 67% felt that the ABC provided more balanced news and current affairs than commercial TV. Only 15% trusted commercial TV ahead of the ABC. Murdoch’s Daily Telegraph is the least trusted metropolitan newspaper in the country.

    The cultural warriors Shinzo Abe and Tony Abbott are on a unity ticket to try and force more patriotism from our education systems and public broadcasting.

    Neither PM is showing a sense of realism or integrity. They tell those close to them that they are right and much better than the rest of us. They are suggesting that they are patriotic and their opponents are not. They hold to a false and dangerous view of what it is to be a patriot.

    I have one qualification to the above.  I am less concerned about the swing to the right in Australia with its false patriotism baggage than I am about what I see stirring in Japan. In earlier decades the nationalist right was a silly and really harmless fringe parading around Japanese cities in grey vans with loud speakers. The patriotic and nationalist right is now occupying the centre of Japanese political life. The mood is changing after almost two decades of economic stagnation and frustration and now the rise of China. Shinzo Abe is facilitating this upsurge of patriotism and ultra-nationalism. There is a history he is drawing on, a history that brought tragedy to so many, including the Japanese people.

  • Asylum seekers – Tony Abbott and I share a Jesuit education. John O’Mara

    Like many Australians, I look on the way the Abbott government is handling the matter of asylum seekers with ever increasing dismay. Tony Abbott’s mantra “stop the boats”, is unprincipled, contrary to signed UN agreements and impractical. It is hard to erase the pre-election memory of the Western Sydney interviewee..”I’m going to vote for Abbott, because he’ll stop the boats “.

    What dismays me most is that Tony and I shared an educational experience at the hands of the Jesuits and then a friendship that reaches back almost 40 years.

    Like Tony, I’m very grateful for my time at a Jesuit school. In our day a substantial number of our teachers were Jesuits and we had the benefit of their highly trained minds, sharp moral sensitivities and educational method that always emphasized evidence over rhetoric. Even though the Jesuits were strong on presentation skills in argument, the argument had to have substance.

    Their clarity of thought and pursuit of learning for its own sake sets them apart from all other educators especially those I encountered at Sydney University. Their ability to look at all sides of an argument prior to coming to a conclusion was both stunningly simple, and at the same time extremely thought provoking.

    Surprisingly, our religious education in latter years included a look at many religions…Buddhism, Islam, Judaism, Taoism, Protestantism and others. We were shown the merits of these religions and taught an all encompassing view of life and peoples.

    We were taught quite simply that the major requisites of Catholicism were: love, inclusion, and protecting or looking after those more needy…of any denomination. Fr Gerald Drumm went further, stating that as we were boys starting life from a privileged position in a Jesuit School, we owed it to our God, the Jesuits and ourselves to put our teachings in to practical effect if we were ever in a position to do so. It was as black and white as that!

    Tony and I were, from our earliest days taught people had an inherent dignity and to use them as a means to an end is the antithesis of anything the Jesuits taught us.

    Tony and I were both members of the SRC and had many battles with “the lefties”, both verbal and physical. We both enjoyed playing Rugby for Sydney Uni, if not for Australia. It was a time of great frivolity and for forging life-long friendships. But those playful undergraduate days are long gone. And now in government, the play is for real.

    Instrumentalizing desperate human beings for political advantage is absolutely unacceptable. As I said to Tony a couple of years ago over dinner…”Mate, you and I would be the first in a boat with our families were we to encounter the atrocities they have had to face“.

    The solution is again very simple. We must embrace these poor desperate souls, get them in to our communities and enrich our lives, and theirs. Give them the dignity to live without fear, give them the dignity to work and pay tax. Let us take the lead in a regional resettlement program to accommodate these people. No more detention centres, political bottom feeding, refugee camps or queues. Let’s get the Australian psyche back to where it should be.

    As Tony should know, playing to the xenophobes in Australia just flies in the face of well known facts about people movement and its cause in our region.

    Asylum seekers ARE NOT ‘ILLEGALS” they are our brothers and sisters.

    Tony’s and my Jesuit teachers are turning in the graves for the lack of logic, human sympathy and compassion let alone any reflection of what Jesus had to say about welcoming the stranger and going the extra mile. Bad luck for the Good Samaritan. He was a mug and would never get endorsement as a Coalition candidate.

    John O’Mara is Managing Director of Big Image Sydney Pty Ltd

  • Repost: The Asian Century and the Australian Smoko. John Menadue and Greg Dodds

    The Asian Century and the Australian Smoko was first published in April 2012. This repost might be interesting holiday reading.

    The Gillard Government has commissioned Ken Henry to report on Australia and the Asian Century. Our trade with China, Japan, India and other Asian countries is booming.  Our luck is still holding.  But our key sectors – business, education and the media – are no more Asia-ready than they were two decades ago.

    This may seem counter-intuitive with the superficial signs pointing in the other direction – the number of Asian faces on our streets, staffing in our hospitals, our holidays in Bali and foreign students at our universities. But the quality and depth of our relationship with the diverse countries of Asia is quite superficial. Dig below the surface and we find a worrying situation.  We have booming trade but little real engagement.

    Reading the submissions to the Henry Review one has a sense of deja vu.  The dates and the figures are different, but the concerns raised are substantially the same as those that we ‘debated’ in the 1980s. Lee Kwan Yew joined in the debate and warned that we risked becoming the cheap white trash of Asia. Paul Keating warned that we could become  a banana republic

    That debate culminated in the Garnaut Report at the end of the decade in 1989 – ‘Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy’. Garnaut pointed to the sustained growth in Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong, and how Australia needed to respond. Rather than seeing Asia as a threat, he argued that we should see it as an opportunity. We needed to reduce trade barriers. We needed to back this with greater efforts in education, language and research. Our immigration policies should also be more sensitive to the region.

    The Hawke Keating Government’s opening of the Australian economy forced change. We saw rapidly growing mineral exports to Japan and Korea. The back of White Australia was broken. Government and business responded with more skilled people working in the region. The media became more interested in Asia. Exchange programs with the region were established. Asian students flooded into our universities. Protection was reduced.  Productivity growth lifted to 2.1 pa in the 90’s

    But in the mid-1990s we went on smoko, even as we continued to dig up more of our ores and coal for export. We are now less dependent on Japan but more so on China and India.  Today, 48% of our exports are fuel and mineral products, a proportion way ahead of most comparable countries. Coal, our second largest export (19% of total exports), is a major contributor to greenhouse gasses. We are dependent on a few markets and a few exports.

    The economic changes of the Hawke-Keating years, whilst beneficial, were painful for some. On top of these changes there were considerable social and ethnic changes brought about in part by the Fraser Government’s successful Indochinese settlement of 240,000 people. Some populists saw it as a chance to take us back to what Garnaut had warned us about – fear of Asia. Today the populists continue to promote fear of Asia but now call it border protection.

    The Queen of England continued as our Head of State and we remained at the beck and call of faraway and fading empires at the expense of attention to our region.

    John Howard gave us permission to be ‘relaxed and comfortable’, to have a break from the Asian challenge and opportunities.

    In the two decades since Garnaut, the performance of our businesses, universities, schools and the media has been disappointing. DFAT and Austrade have done better and have more Asia trained staff in the region, but nowhere near enough.

    Let us look at the performance of key sectors in this Asian readiness.

    Business

    Only four Australian companies in the top 150 bothered to put in a submission to the Henry Review. They were ANZ Banking, ASX Group, IAG and Rio Tinto. BHP didn’t make it! That says a lot.

    Far too many Australian businesses see Asia as customers rather than partners.  In the long term trade and investment is about relationships of trust and understanding.

    • At the most there would only be a handful of Chairpersons or CEOs of any of our major companies who was born and educated in Australia, who can fluently speak any of the key Asian languages? This failure is stark. It is obviously too late for them now, but it is not at all clear that they are recruiting executives for the future with the necessary skills for Asia. It is hard to break into the cosy club. A recent survey by The Business Alliance for Asian Literacy, representing over 400,000 businesses in Australia found that ‘more than half of Australian businesses operating in Asia had little board and senior management experience of Asia and/or Asian skills or languages’.  There are now tens of thousands of Australian-born citizens of Asian descent at our universities. But they are likely to be recruited for their good grades and work ethic rather than their cultural and language skills.
    • Maybe we don’t need an Asian language or indeed much business sophistication to dig up and sell iron ore and coal to very willing buyers, but we certainly do to sell wine, elaborately transformed manufactures and services, particularly tourism.
    • Some Australian expats in Asia have developed Asian skills and sensitivities, but there are downsides.  Coming home for an expat is often harder than going offshore. His or her world has changed, but the culture of head office has not. Some join foreign companies or leave Australia. We know of many such instances.
    • Tourism boomed but we did not get enough repeat business. We skipped from one new market to another – first Japan, then Korea and now China. Not surprisingly, the Australian Tourism Export Council told the Henry Review that we needed to improve our tourism product.
    • Success in Asia requires long-term commitment, but the remuneration packages and the demands of shareholders are linked to short-term returns.

    Asian Languages and Education Funding

    In the 1980s Professor Stephen FitzGerald and several others of us campaigned for a national language policy. In October 1982 the department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs organised the first National Language Conference. In 1985, the Senate Committee on Education endorsed the need for a national language policy. In 1987, the Hawke Government adopted a national policy on languages. This was followed in 1994 by a COAG commitment to fund Asian languages in Australia. Later Kevin Rudd supported this, but the renewed interest and commitment was short-lived. Asian language learning in Australia is in crisis again today as it was in the 1980s.If anything the situation is worse.

    This is spelled out in spades in the submissions to the Henry Review. The Australia-China Council advised that ‘for the last 20 years successive Australian Governments attempted to boost Asia literacy and particularly the study of Asian languages in schools… these attempts produced limited results’. In its submission, the Australia-China Council quoted from the Business Alliance for Asian Literacy 2011  ‘50% of schools teach very little about Asia, only 6% of Year 12 students study an Asian language and just 3% pursue these studies at university, and only 2.5% of Year 12 students study Chinese.’

    Tertiary education funding is also a key to Asian competence. As Ian McAuley has  pointed out, our public funding of tertiary education fell sharply between 1995 and 2000, and has stayed low ever since. The shortfall has been covered by income from foreign students. Teaching and research has suffered. Instead of adequately funding education from the budget, we have diverted public funds to middle-class welfare e.g. superannuation and private health insurance subsidies. This has crowded out funding for our future preparedness in Asia.

    Media

    Australia’s media relationships with the world are embedded in our history of relationships with UK, Europe and then the US.

    Our TV news, commentary and entertainment are heavily dependent on the BBC, CNN, et al. Media programs about Asia shown in Australia are often recycled UK or US material. Our media is full of it. Just compare the current coverage of the US Republican primaries and the much more critical National People’s Congress in China. Japan, except for disasters, India, Korea and Vietnam are covered intermittently, almost as an after-thought. It will require a real wrench to change the nature of Australian media that history has laid down.

    People exchanges

    The first working holiday agreement in Asia was with Japan in 1980. We didn’t have another one in Asia until the 1996 agreement with the ROK. In the last 10 years there have been another six working holiday agreements with Asian countries, but most of them have caps of 100 persons per annum. We still have no agreements with China, India or Vietnam. Outside the four key North-east Asian countries identified by Garnaut in 1989, fewer than 1% of working holiday makers to Australia come from the new and rising developing countries of Asia.

    Getting ready

    To take advantage and integrate ourselves in the region will require continuing openness in trade, investment, ideas and people. It will require substantial investment in skills for Asia and a new generation of business leaders who see the opportunities in our own region, and not a region they fly through on their way to Europe. We need to reengage in economic reform alongside reengagement with Asia beyond the superficial.

    We are both enriched and entrapped by our Anglo-Celtic culture.

    Postscript: There are follow up posts on this subject on April 2, 2013 and June 13, 2013.

    John Menadue AO is Board Director of the Centre for Policy Development. He was Australian Ambassador to Japan, Secretary Department of Immigration, Secretary Department of Trade, and CEO of Qantas

    Greg Dodds was Director, Australia Japan Foundation in Japan, Senior Trade Commissioner Japan and Executive General Manager, Austrade, North East Asia

    Edited versions of this article were published in The Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald on April 5, 2012

  • Japan’s war memory. Guest blogger: Walter Hamilton

    Japan’s struggle with the issue of war memory has been brought into sharp relief again amid a controversy over what children should be taught about the past. Last week the Matsue city board of education confirmed a ban placed on a famous comic book (manga) series called Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen). The board’s decision allegedly was based on the fact the series contains scenes considered too violent for school children. Behind this explanation, however, lies a different story. 

    Barefoot Gen was first serialised in 1973-1976. Set in and around Hiroshima, it tells the story of a six-year-old boy during the final months of the war and is loosely based on the experiences of the serial’s creator, the late Keiji Nakazawa. Barefoot Gen has been translated into several languages and spawned action films and anime adaptations. Wikipedia describes the story’s underlying themes: 

    Gen’s family suffers as all families do in war. They must conduct themselves as proper members of society, as all Japanese are instructed in paying tribute  to the Emperor. But because of a belief that their involvement in the war is due to the greed of the rich ruling class, Gen’s father rejects the military propaganda and the family comes to be treated as traitors. Gen’s family struggles with their bond of loyalty to each other and to a government that is willing to send teenagers on suicide missions in battle. This push and pull   relationship is seen many times as Gen is ridiculed in school, mimicking his            father’s [critical] views on Japan’s role in the war, and then is subsequently               punished by his father for spouting [patriotic] things he learned through rote    brainwashing in school. 

    Many of these themes are put into a much harsher perspective when portrayed             alongside themes of the struggle between war and peace.

    As suggested here, Barefoot Gencriticises the Japanese blind loyalty to the emperor and the Japanese flag, hinomaru, during the war. These aspects of the story – not its violence – formed the basis for the original citizen’s complaint to the Matsue board of education last year. Though the complaint was not upheld, in considering the matter the board’s secretariat conveniently found another, less blatantly political, reason for taking action. In December it instructed the 49 public schools in the city to remove the manga from the open shelves of their libraries and restrict access to teacher-supervised usage.

    I say the reason for the decision was ‘convenient’ not because of any public explanation offered by the secretariat at the time ­– there was none – but because of certain suggestive aspects of the case. The violent content singled out for mention was, on closer inspection, hardly apolitical. One consisted of a scene of the beheading of a Chinese prisoner by a Japanese soldier; another showed a naked woman being sexually assaulted and bayoneted. There is a great deal of horror depicted in the manga, mainly to do with the effects and aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and including a reference to American researchers harvesting the internal organs of bomb victims. No objection apparently was raised to these elements. In other words, the sole aim was to keep away from young eyes the depiction of wartime atrocities committed by Japanese. Another telling aspect is that when the board members met last week and decided to ratify the ban, they acted without consulting school principals or taking professional advice whether reading the manga series would cause children psychological harm.

    Educational authorities at several other places in Japan followed Matsue’s lead and also had Barefoot Gen removed from their school library shelves.

    This week, in response to adverse publicity and feedback from the affected schools – many of which opposed the ban – Matsue reversed its stand. At an ad-hoc meeting on Monday, board members agreed that the manga ‘conveys the tragedy of war very well and has educational value in teaching about peace’. The board, however, did not instruct schools to return the books to the open shelves; it left the matter at the discretion of each school. Although, according to media reports, only 10% of principals supported the ban, other information suggests a higher proportion of primary and junior high schools could ultimately place a limit on free access to the manga series.

    The episode illustrates a change in the Japanese approach to war memory that has occurred since Barefoot Gen first appeared. In the 1970s the generation born during or immediately after the Pacific War ­– with actual memories of the devastation and cruelty of war – engaged in a comparatively vigorous public discussion of Japanese misdeeds, particularly those committed in China. A period of introspection occurred at the time Japan and China normalised diplomatic relations. Sadly, in recent decades, conservative forces have gained the ascendancy in the ‘history wars’ – not only in Japan but also in South Korea and China. Separate, highly selective and incompatible accounts of the same events are being taught in schools of these neighbouring countries, poisoning people-to-people relations.

    Barefoot Gen is not perfect history, but what surely recommends it to a new generation of young Japanese – who I can confirm from personal experience know almost nothing about what their country did between 1931 and 1945 – are the very qualities which led, albeit briefly, to its removal from library shelves: its unflinching depictions of what war really involves and its preparedness to record some of the worst excesses of Japanese militarism.

     

    Walter Hamilton reported from Japan for 11 years and recently published ‘Children of the Occupation: Japan’s Untold Story’ (New South Books).

  • Japanese language learning in Australia – declining and mainly for beginners. Guest blogger: Professor Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson

    Japanese has been Australia’s most studied foreign language in schools for a number of years. Japanese is neither a traditional school language subject such as French and Latin, nor a community language such as Italian and Greek. Japanese is distant from English linguistically and culturally. Thus it is remarkable that Australia is fourth place on the world map of the number of learners of Japanese by country, and in second place in terms of the ratio of learners in the total population. The 2009 Japan Foundation survey reveals one in 83 Australians were currently learning Japanese. Considering that this trend has been lasting for well over a decade, cumulative numbers of those who have at one point studied Japanese must be quite large.

    This picture of a large number of learners and past learners of Japanese however needs to be looked at closely to find two trends. The first is the decline in numbers. Two Japan Foundation surveys conducted in 2006 and 2009 on Japanese language education in Australia showed a 25% decline in overall learner population in the three years. The second is the concentration of learners at beginner proficiency level. Of the 280 thousand learners of Japanese in the country, 96% are in schools, which produce beginners or at highest, lower intermediate proficiency speakers of Japanese. Of the three percent of the learners who are located in universities, at most, only one third are estimated to achieve advanced professional proficiency. That is less than 1% of the total learner population.

    For a nation, foreign language education serves two major purposes. Firstly, learning a foreign language provides young learners with a different language system, new ways of thinking, links to foreign cultures and people, and as a result, broader and more critical perspectives of their own world and beyond, i.e., basic ingredients of becoming a global citizen. For this purpose, Japanese is perfect for young Australian learners, as it is vastly different from English. Secondly, foreign language education will produce those who are professionally proficient in target languages and who can contribute to nation building in government, business and other areas using the language. For this purpose, Japanese is critical for Australia, as Japan is Australia’s significant partner both economically and strategically.

    So far, Japanese language education in Australia has done very well, especially in the above-mentioned first purpose. One in ten Australian school children are currently learning Japanese. We need to stop the decline of the learner population and to maintain the good work of providing our youngsters with the basics to become global citizens. For the second purpose, we have not done enough in developing high proficiency speakers of Japanese. We need to provide both learning pathways and career pathways to young learners so that they can envisage their future Japanese speaking selves and work towards their vision.

    Chihiro Kinoshita Thomson
    Professor of Japanese Studies
    School of International Studies
    University of New South Wales.

  • The blame game over schools: a way through the impasse. John Menadue

    The Commonwealth and the States will blame each other for failure to agree on Gonski ‘light’. It is a pattern we have seen so often over many years, particularly in health.

    Federalism is just not working for us. It has become an obstacle to good government. The Commonwealth financial dominance will continue. The States are poor but proud and reluctant to concede jurisdiction.

    Kevin Rudd threatened to hold a referendum in association with the 2010 election to give the Commonwealth power to fund and run State public hospitals. But he was persuaded not to persist as it was very likely that a referendum would fail. The Government’s health ‘reforms’ have since turned out to be a continuation of the muddle or a ‘dog’s breakfast’ as Tony Abbott used to describe divided responsibility and the blame game in health.

    But I suggest a compromise is possible that would improve the funding and operation of schools in Australia. We should establish a Joint Commonwealth/State Schools Commission in any State where the Commonwealth and a State Government could agree. It would require the political agreement of the Australian Prime Minister and at least one State Premier to get the ball rolling in a particular State. With political will such a Joint Schools Commission (JSC) would be relatively easy to establish. Hopefully with success in one State/Territory, others would follow.

    In my view, a Commonwealth takeover of Commonwealth funding and management of all schools in Australia would be the best course, but it is just not politically possible.

    The key features of a Joint Schools Commission in any State would be:

    • The JSC would consist of say three Commonwealth and three State representatives with an independent Chair from outside the State who would be appointed by the Federal and State Ministers for Education.
    • The JSC would pool all school funding from both the Commonwealth and State Governments. There would in effect be a single funder in the State.
    • The JSC would have a clear governance role in the coordination of all school funding, its distribution and oversight  within the state
    • Existing providers-public, private and Catholic – would continue to operate and provide services within the JSC state wide plan.
    • The administrative funding for the JSC would be kept to a minimum consistent with the JSC’s essential but limited responsibilities. The small increase in bureaucracy must be strictly contained. It would however be a small price to pay for improved state-wide funding, governance and performance monitoring of schools.
    • The JSC would be guided by principles agreed by the Commonwealth and the State Minister for Education, e.g. equal opportunity for all children, social solidarity and subsidiarity whereby administration would be as local as possible  consistent with State-wide standards.
    • There would be maximum transparency in the work and reporting of the JSC in order to involve public comment and public confidence in the process. There would need to be agreed dispute resolution procedures.

    Under such a proposal we would still have separate JSCs in each State/Territory. But it would be a significant advance on the divided responsibility and blame-game that dogs federalism in Australia

    With political goodwill between the Australian Prime Minister and at least one State Premier, I suggest that these bilateral type arrangements are the best and perhaps the only way forward to improve governance and funding for all our school children within a particular state.

    The Commonwealth Government should not provide any additional funding to the States except through an agreed JSC.

    Six years ago, I proposed a similar arrangement to address the blame game in health . I called my proposal a ‘Coalition of the Willing’.   (See publish.pearlsandirritations.com, Click on ‘health’, March 2007)  That proposal could be updated and applied in a Joint Schools Commission in any State where there is political agreement.

    John Menadue