Kevin Rudd's 'To Do' list

Without excellent people going to teach in public schools, how will we ever lift Australian kids out of mediocrity? The economies of China and India are booming, as is South Korea’s; and all are mass-producing goods using cheap labour. Many Australian industries have collapsed. Who wears Australian shoes or drives an Australian car any more? Half our furniture is now manufactured overseas.  We need to back up teachers and help them make Aussie kids smarter.

So first, a Rudd Government will have to start again with teacher education and come up with a way to make teacher education more practical, get good kids into teaching and keep them there. Universities have become too bureaucratic, with more and more layers of Pooh-Bahs set up in more jobs, finding more ways to justify their exalted salaries by issuing more decrees. At some universities subject outlines, packed with regulations and "in case ofs" now exceed 39 pages. Federal funding of universities has fallen; and the fat amounts of money taken from foreign students seem to vanish into the woodwork. If the universities can’t prepare teachers efficiently, then we will have to find some other agency that can.

Second, a Labor Government would have to encourage state governments to take the axe to state bureaucracies. They are paralysed by inertia, political correctness and fear. Cut down the multiple levels of public servants and find people who can help teachers teach.

Health

Private affluence and public squalor is again the pattern in health. There are excellent medical practitioners, but their cost to patients approaches American proportions. I gave up one medical specialist who was charging me $600 for a one-hour visit. On the other hand, the never-ending story of disaster at Royal North Shore Hospital is one tiny aspect of the train wreck that is going on in public hospital emergency wards. Sleek, new private hospitals are camped next to decrepit public ones, sucking the life out of them. My father, who used to run a hospital, said the private hospitals took away all the people who paid their fees, leaving the public hospital all the poorer patients, the infirm and terminal.  I wonder if public school teachers might find this a tad familiar? Howard’s botched attempt to take over one hospital in Tasmania simply shows what a mess we have got into.

Nursing is hard work. Instead of being cheaply trained in hospitals, kids have to study at uni and end up owing thousands in HECS. Why would you do this instead of leaving school as early as possible and going into a trade? Plumbers, carpenters, and tilers work hard and get good money. You can’t find one to do a job and they all want to be paid, in cash, now. Why would anyone become a nurse? Are the benefits of a university education worth it for the mess we are in now? In the words of Robert Pike’s thesis, nursing, like teaching, is a Cinderella Profession. Both pay poorly, yet make heavy demands on their members in terms of stress and responsibility. Nursing education needs a complete rethinking and more Federal support.

The drug companies are making more and more profits, for we medicalise health instead of solving problems through better living patterns. In many cases (not all) we don’t make people healthier by pouring more and more drugs into them. People who are overweight or obese probably need to rethink their exercise pattern and diet before they start taking pills to reduce their food intake and medication for their depression. Yet anti-depressants are given away every day as if they were lollies. Over-active boys are routinely prescribed Ritalin. Working people need better eating, exercise and living patterns more than most. But they are exhausted from long journeys to work, raising kids, fighting interest rate rises and leaps in electricity costs, trying to pay taxes on taxes and waiting for the Federal Government to get GST on the lot.

Vast amounts of our taxes are going into keeping this inefficient ‘health’ industry going; but too much is falling into the hands of those who provide health. In the literature, this is called "provider capture". Surely it is possible for a Rudd Government to sort out a better arrangement with the states and help people become healthier. Surely a Federal Government can stop the advertising of junk food on children’s TV. Too many of these key decisions (or non-decisions) have been a capitulation to powerful interests.

Media

We need a good public media, just as we need public education. SBS TV used to be good public television. It was ground-breaking, exciting, fronted by people of gravitas and dignity. Now it looks and sounds like a commercial station. It is increasingly staffed with people who used to work in commercial current affairs programs and the like. Silly programs like ‘Pizza’ have driven out  quality, despite awards for a few programs.  Educated people commonly used to praise SBS; now they groan and complain about a loss of standards. Why did the Federal Government allow the changes to happen? SBS has gone dramatically downhill and has been dumbed-down in a search for ratings - as I argued in an earlier article, I wonder what a study of ratings would reveal?

The Federal Government funds SBS TV. A Rudd Government should make a wholesale review of the Board and move the current managing director on. US media are poor, but the USA does have a great public television sector which has given us the best there is on US TV.

Other public TV and radio stations could be established and supported. Teenage kids could do a better job than most of the people we see on current affairs shows and travel shows in which the aim of the show is to give maximum attention to the presenter. Even on ABC TV, tired 'celebrities' endlessly promote themselves. The much-trumpeted feature on James Cook was little more than a voyage of discovery about the presenter, with her face forever on the screen and her peculiar British accent. Are we not capable of doing our own story on Cook? A Rudd Government could promote good Australian TV shows, not issue demands as Howard did for schools to teach Australian history. We need to revitalise public media.