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| Your taxes at work. A lovely" Independent school" happily slurping at the public trough. |
I was going to have a whinge this week about the rise of pram parking bays at my local Westfield. They now outnumber the handicapped parking bays by a ratio of about 10 to one. There are big pictures of strollers stencilled in red on the ground and a solemn sign reading “parents with prams” hangs from the roof. These signs have no legal backing, so please please everyone park in them, if only to piss off the smug Bugaboo pushers making their way through our shopping centres.
Some of those Bugaboos cost more than a second-hand car and are so big I think people should be charged a fee if they want to infest a public area with them. We did quite happily with the old Maclaren. You know, the one that told you when you had done too much shopping by flipping backwards, leaving the strapped in inmate staring at the shopping centre ceiling lights. It was very funny and it sure stopped the little tacker’s wailing lament about being refused the lollies that had been thoughtfully placed at eye height at the checkout.
Some of those Bugaboos cost more than a second-hand car and are so big I think people should be charged a fee if they want to infest a public area with them. We did quite happily with the old Maclaren. You know, the one that told you when you had done too much shopping by flipping backwards, leaving the strapped in inmate staring at the shopping centre ceiling lights. It was very funny and it sure stopped the little tacker’s wailing lament about being refused the lollies that had been thoughtfully placed at eye height at the checkout.
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| Chariots of entitlement |
Those pushing these Bugabears look pretty fit. And why not? Generally, they dump the kid in a taxpayer-funded crèche so they can do their three-hour work out with spa, massage, holistic therapy and colonic irrigation, before setting out in the behemoth Porsche Cayenne to give the plastic a workout at the local shopping centre. And now bloody Westfield is encouraging them.
A mate who parked happily in one of these spots copped a spray from some self- entitled yuppie. She told her to get stuffed. What about us older folk pushing laden shopping trolleys? The bloody wheels never work and keeping one under control is a major exercise. Are we to be consigned to the dark backblocks of these subterranean caves? I am sure I won’t be able to help myself crashing into the Bugabears’ four-wheel drives on my way to parking Siberia.
Soon, anyone who has the resources to make enough noise will be claiming special status. As my mate said, “I have one boob bigger than the other. I should get special parking too.” Quite right, although I have to say I hadn't noticed that physical imperfection.
But the parking bays issue faded as I heard the growing whine of the cosseted recipients of barrow loads of taxpayer largesse. I am sure they are the same people who feel it is their right to get pole position in shopping centre car parks because they are pushing a pram. That wonderful noise you hear in the background is the sound of the privileged classes of this country screaming their little middle-class-welfared lungs out, having been caught with their hands in the till.
I refer to the My School Website which went live last week and showed the shocking disparity between what the wealthy schools have by way of resources and what our state school system has.
Out of interest, I looked at my old school − a modest pile on top of a hill in North Sydney and, presumably, enjoying rate-free status as it has affiliations with a church.
It recently purchased, for about $36 million, the old hospital next door and is in the process of incorporating it into the school for another $36 million. Its elite rowers ponce around on the Parramatta River in racing shells made of carbon fibre, which I am told cost around $100,000 each. Their playing fields at Northbridge are vast and lie unused for most of the year, coming to life a few afternoons a week and on Saturdays when the Firsts are playing at home.
I am not envious of this bastion of elitism; all I ask is, please please hand back the bloody money you are getting from the taxpayers. You don’t need it. Dig into your vast reserves and stand on your own two feet. If you are not prepared to do so, then accept the fact that if the government gives you taxpayers’ funds, the government is entitled to publish whatever it likes about your financial status, your sources of income and what a drain you are on the public purse. And stop calling yourself an Independent school while ever you take the taxpayers’ shilling.
As I have remarked before, these institutions seem to turn out hard-right economic rationalists who, in the years after graduation, seek to make names for themselves in the pages of our more conservative journals (that means all of them), with displays of toughness as they talk knowingly about the evils of government spending and how governments just need to be a bit tougher on the welfare sector. By this they mean all those people who have no access to the august journals of the nation; they are the voiceless. These economists who happily live with the fact that the government is subsidising their school fees are never happier than when they are giving the poor and downtrodden of the world a kicking. The gap between the haves and have-nots is canyon-like.
The people on the receiving end of all this public largesse are famous for never listening to themselves. So the headmaster of The Kings School says of course they need more funding. They have lots of clubs and societies they have to run for their boys. How absolutely spiffing for you, mate.
Meanwhile, the public schools remain under-resourced. The kids with behavioural problems who have been asked to leave the great “independent schools” are unloaded on a sagging state system, along with kids with disabilities and traumatised young refugees. It’s as though state schools have the words from the Statue of Liberty tacked to their front gates:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
Unfortunately, no funding follows their arrival.
As we dig more deeply into the My School website, we see rort after rort by these independent schools. It is estimated that public monies going to pupils in the Catholic school sector would be more efficiently applied if it went straight to the pupil, as some of it seems to stick to the walls of the Catholic education office. In The Sydney Morning Herald on Monday, we had this from Trevor Cobbold, the convenor of Save Our Schools and a former productivity commission economist. He said a Federal Education Department report had shown only 40 per cent of Catholic schools are funded according to the Commonwealth funding formula, with the rest “over-funded”' by more than $500 million a year. He goes on to say the discrepancies showed "the government funding of schools is a shambles".
''Government schools struggling against the odds are being denied adequate funding while private schools serving well-off families are funded well beyond what they are entitled to by their socio-economic status score funding rate,'' he said.
Watch the newspapers and television and see whose voice is heard: the puffed-up sons and daughters of entitlement, who clamour for the camera to tell us how hard they work to send their kids to a private school, and how they deserve the taxpayer-funded handouts. Their champion is the ridiculous Christopher Pyne, whose voice embodies that of a generation of middle-class welfare bludgers. Their mouths are always in the perpetual pout of the self-entitled. Their hands are always out.
Meanwhile, the voiceless work two jobs, try to give their kids breakfast before they leave them with a relative who takes them to school when it opens. The kids often have to go home to empty houses. The school parent group battles for a quorum because most people are working. Simple things the “independent Schools” take for granted are raised by way of funds raised at sausage sizzles. The teachers work their bums off juggling the needs of all pupils and for their troubles cop a hiding in the conservative press if they happen to ask for a pay rise.
“Look at all the holidays they get, ” these shrill grubs scribble in their columns.
Every day is a battle but, according to the self-entitled, it’s their own fault; they deserve it. And while we are at it, let’s see if we can hack a bit away from the few benefits they do get.
Why do they put up with this crap?
A mate who parked happily in one of these spots copped a spray from some self- entitled yuppie. She told her to get stuffed. What about us older folk pushing laden shopping trolleys? The bloody wheels never work and keeping one under control is a major exercise. Are we to be consigned to the dark backblocks of these subterranean caves? I am sure I won’t be able to help myself crashing into the Bugabears’ four-wheel drives on my way to parking Siberia.
Soon, anyone who has the resources to make enough noise will be claiming special status. As my mate said, “I have one boob bigger than the other. I should get special parking too.” Quite right, although I have to say I hadn't noticed that physical imperfection.
But the parking bays issue faded as I heard the growing whine of the cosseted recipients of barrow loads of taxpayer largesse. I am sure they are the same people who feel it is their right to get pole position in shopping centre car parks because they are pushing a pram. That wonderful noise you hear in the background is the sound of the privileged classes of this country screaming their little middle-class-welfared lungs out, having been caught with their hands in the till.
I refer to the My School Website which went live last week and showed the shocking disparity between what the wealthy schools have by way of resources and what our state school system has.
Out of interest, I looked at my old school − a modest pile on top of a hill in North Sydney and, presumably, enjoying rate-free status as it has affiliations with a church.
It recently purchased, for about $36 million, the old hospital next door and is in the process of incorporating it into the school for another $36 million. Its elite rowers ponce around on the Parramatta River in racing shells made of carbon fibre, which I am told cost around $100,000 each. Their playing fields at Northbridge are vast and lie unused for most of the year, coming to life a few afternoons a week and on Saturdays when the Firsts are playing at home.
I am not envious of this bastion of elitism; all I ask is, please please hand back the bloody money you are getting from the taxpayers. You don’t need it. Dig into your vast reserves and stand on your own two feet. If you are not prepared to do so, then accept the fact that if the government gives you taxpayers’ funds, the government is entitled to publish whatever it likes about your financial status, your sources of income and what a drain you are on the public purse. And stop calling yourself an Independent school while ever you take the taxpayers’ shilling.
As I have remarked before, these institutions seem to turn out hard-right economic rationalists who, in the years after graduation, seek to make names for themselves in the pages of our more conservative journals (that means all of them), with displays of toughness as they talk knowingly about the evils of government spending and how governments just need to be a bit tougher on the welfare sector. By this they mean all those people who have no access to the august journals of the nation; they are the voiceless. These economists who happily live with the fact that the government is subsidising their school fees are never happier than when they are giving the poor and downtrodden of the world a kicking. The gap between the haves and have-nots is canyon-like.
The people on the receiving end of all this public largesse are famous for never listening to themselves. So the headmaster of The Kings School says of course they need more funding. They have lots of clubs and societies they have to run for their boys. How absolutely spiffing for you, mate.
Meanwhile, the public schools remain under-resourced. The kids with behavioural problems who have been asked to leave the great “independent schools” are unloaded on a sagging state system, along with kids with disabilities and traumatised young refugees. It’s as though state schools have the words from the Statue of Liberty tacked to their front gates:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
Unfortunately, no funding follows their arrival.
As we dig more deeply into the My School website, we see rort after rort by these independent schools. It is estimated that public monies going to pupils in the Catholic school sector would be more efficiently applied if it went straight to the pupil, as some of it seems to stick to the walls of the Catholic education office. In The Sydney Morning Herald on Monday, we had this from Trevor Cobbold, the convenor of Save Our Schools and a former productivity commission economist. He said a Federal Education Department report had shown only 40 per cent of Catholic schools are funded according to the Commonwealth funding formula, with the rest “over-funded”' by more than $500 million a year. He goes on to say the discrepancies showed "the government funding of schools is a shambles".
''Government schools struggling against the odds are being denied adequate funding while private schools serving well-off families are funded well beyond what they are entitled to by their socio-economic status score funding rate,'' he said.
Watch the newspapers and television and see whose voice is heard: the puffed-up sons and daughters of entitlement, who clamour for the camera to tell us how hard they work to send their kids to a private school, and how they deserve the taxpayer-funded handouts. Their champion is the ridiculous Christopher Pyne, whose voice embodies that of a generation of middle-class welfare bludgers. Their mouths are always in the perpetual pout of the self-entitled. Their hands are always out.
Meanwhile, the voiceless work two jobs, try to give their kids breakfast before they leave them with a relative who takes them to school when it opens. The kids often have to go home to empty houses. The school parent group battles for a quorum because most people are working. Simple things the “independent Schools” take for granted are raised by way of funds raised at sausage sizzles. The teachers work their bums off juggling the needs of all pupils and for their troubles cop a hiding in the conservative press if they happen to ask for a pay rise.
“Look at all the holidays they get, ” these shrill grubs scribble in their columns.
Every day is a battle but, according to the self-entitled, it’s their own fault; they deserve it. And while we are at it, let’s see if we can hack a bit away from the few benefits they do get.
Why do they put up with this crap?
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