A New Kind of Candidate, A New Kind of Politics

Lately, I have become polit­ic­ally depressed.

It seems that Australian polit­ics these days isn’t about gov­ern­ment, policy, or right and wrong. But rather about spin, sound bites, five second grabs, and mud slinging.

Don’t get me wrong — I know that polit­ics has never exactly been pure, however lately it all just seems to be worse.

It is a very unfor­tu­nate situ­ation when you feel like both sides of polit­ics are lying to you. And so, the decision when casting your vote becomes about choos­ing the lesser of two evils, rather than the best can­did­ate for the job.

However, I would go as far as to say that the problem is not just the politi­cians. The media, also has its role to play.

Hunter S Thompson — not exactly a beacon of journ­al­istic integ­rity, I know — wrote in 1972, “there is no such thing as Objective Journalism”. This is cer­tainly true in Australia. Each of the media outlets has its own polit­ical leaning, and I will refrain from naming them here.

So again, when decid­ing which paper to buy, website to visit, story to believe, it is about the lesser of the evils, rather than object­ive inform­a­tion upon which to base an opinion.

When it is not a biased story, or stra­tegic pieces of inform­a­tion missing, it is the pop­u­list fluff about which journ­al­ists are forced to write.

Declining advert­ising rev­en­ues in news­pa­pers, news web­sites, 24-hour news cycles and job cuts in news and media outlets, mean that stories are less about news, and more about atten­tion grabbing and what is going to attract the next mouse click.

Take, for example, the recent Rudd v. Abbott health care debate. The stories to come out of that were not policy, or who will be better off, but rather that of The Worm, and ‘who won’.

Can I say right now, that if I hear some­body say that they decided their vote based upon The Worm, I will jump out of the nearest window.

The problem also lies in media advisors — the people who say, “don’t stand like that, or people won’t relate to you,” and, “make sure you emphas­ise the broken prom­ises from eight years ago”.

These people are undoubtedly tal­en­ted and intel­li­gent indi­vidu­als. But imagine what our society would be like if they used their powers for good, rather than evil. If, instead of trying to make the other side look bad, the polit­ical parties focused their atten­tion on cre­at­ing better policies. Making them­selves look better through good gov­ernance, rather than just making the other side look worse.

A senior politi­cian once said, “public policy is what gov­ern­ment does, and polit­ics is just the crap you have to put up with,” however that won’t help anybody when Australia goes to the polls this year.

How are we, the voting public to decide who would best govern this country, when our polit­ics is about spin and mud sling­ing, rather than policy and governance?

Clay O’Brien, 23, is the National Programs Director of the Left Right Think-Tank, Australia’s first inde­pend­ent and non-partisan think-tank of young minds to involve young people in public policy.

Posted Saturday, March 27th, 2010 05:11 pm Written by Left Right Think-Tank

My Private School

While the intro­duc­tion of the Federal Government’s newest website designed to provide more inform­a­tion to con­stitu­ents has been met with wide oppos­i­tion, notably from the Australian Education Union itself, the My School website cer­tainly serves as an inter­est­ing tool for parents who are weigh­ing up non-government school options.

The My School website, launched on the 28^th of January this year, gives parents access to the results of national lit­er­acy and numer­acy testing (NAPLAN) at their child’s school. This unpre­ced­en­ted level of inform­a­tion is designed to allow parents to make com­par­is­ons between similar schools from both gov­ern­ment and non-government sectors. However, it is this very point that has caused such fric­tion between Education Minister, Julia Gillard, and the nation’s teach­ers and prin­cipals, with the con­sequences of the pub­lic­a­tion of Australia’s worst per­form­ing schools, most notably on student and teacher morale having come into public focus.

According to its critics, the site sets up a ‘league-table’ leading to the ver­it­able ‘naming and shaming’ of the country’s worst per­form­ing schools, often gov­ern­ment schools located in areas of socio-economic dis­ad­vant­age. This has sparked outrage from the AEU, led by the vocal prot­est­a­tions of its President, Angelo Gavrielatos, who has called for the banning of what he sees as “mis­lead­ing and simplistic league tables” brand­ing the launch of the site as “a sad day for edu­ca­tion in Australia.” Added to this ill-sentiment, came the recent rev­el­a­tion that the Victorian Education Department spe­cific­ally instructs its teach­ers to teach for the NAPLAN tests, the results of which form the basis of the My School website.

At this point one might appre­ci­ate that the argu­ments against the My School website and the Government’s policy are many and varied, par­tic­u­larly relat­ing to public schools and the lack of choice avail­able to parents con­fron­ted by the reality that their child may be enrolled at an under­achiev­ing insti­tu­tion. Pledges from the Government to up funding to schools in this cat­egory may do little to allay the con­cerns of such parents who are under­stand­ably looking for solu­tions in the here and now, rather than money in the pipeline for use at a time when their child may have already gradu­ated. For fam­il­ies in this situ­ation it all seems too little, too late.

However, despite the con­cerns raised by a range of interest groups, one part of this equa­tion has not been adequately addressed. With regards the non-government school sector, one thing is certain; the My School website will see teach­ers and prin­cipals at Australia’s inde­pend­ent schools take notice. For the first time our non-government schools can be easily and accur­ately com­pared on the basis of the aca­demic pro­fi­cien­cies of its stu­dents. The website takes parents inside the classroom to dir­ectly measure the per­form­ance of pupils. As a result, would-be private school parents now have a key tool to assist them in sifting through the often hefty jargon of non-government schools’ paraphernalia and advertising.

The My School website, though maligned for its poten­tial neg­at­ive effects on under­per­form­ing public schools, stands to aid the decision-making pro­cesses of parents nation­wide who are con­tem­plat­ing the non-government edu­ca­tion option. This may be an unforseen but poten­tially welcome side effect non­ethe­less, for a Labor Government that has received much cri­ti­cism regard­ing its, in some cases, overuse of web­sites as tools to solve or alle­vi­ate issues they identify within the community.

It must also be noted however, that the site only takes into account the com­pet­en­cies of stu­dents up to the year 9 level, and only out­lines the abil­it­ies of such stu­dents in the rigid cat­egor­ies of lit­er­acy and numer­acy. For this reason, attrib­utes examined by the NAPLAN testing may not fully rep­res­ent other key areas of focus that a school might value includ­ing the cre­at­ive arts, or extra cur­ricular activ­it­ies such as sport or com­munity involvement.

The take home message being: simple col­lec­tions of results in basic aca­demic tests can give some inform­a­tion about a school’s per­form­ance, but they cannot pos­sibly reflect the full exper­i­ence that an insti­tu­tion offers. This last point is espe­cially poignant in the realm of private edu­ca­tion, where parents often elect to enrol their child at a school based on its reli­gious or philo­soph­ical base as well as extra cur­ricular activ­it­ies undertaken.

Nonetheless, to a large number of parents, aca­demic per­form­ance is the key issue which motiv­ates their choice of school­ing, to which end the My School website can only serve to help.

Any inform­a­tion is good inform­a­tion when it comes to making choices regard­ing the edu­ca­tion of one’s chil­dren. Therefore, and as far as the private edu­ca­tion sector is con­cerned, the end result of the My School website is choice. All that remains is for the Government to engender the same level of choice in the public sector — a dif­fi­cult but no less worthy task, and one that would make this website all the more relevant.

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Posted Sunday, March 14th, 2010 05:08 pm Written by Left Right Think-Tank