But that's not exactly what ...
"We are going to keep the promise that we made, not the promise that some people thought that we made," the Prime Minister clarified.
At this point, the lights were switching on and off so rapidly that some educational experts actually began to fit.
But it seems someone, somewhere had made a mistake, because on Monday the Prime Minister and his audacious minister announced that, actually, the original (Labor-created) funding model would be substantially honoured.
The trouble is that Pyne confuses so convincingly. He pinballs out policy backflips so quickly that even the most ordered of brains are boggled within minutes.
And the very audacity of his ability to say one thing, and then its opposite, and then its opposite again, is so taxing on the senses it's enough to send you hiding under the bedclothes.
It's enough to drive you mad.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-opinion/gonski-reversal-christopher-pynes-switches-leave-us-all-in-dark-20131202-2ylph.html#ixzz2mIbSFLFN

...

However, it is clear there is more behind the Abbott government strategy. From the recent weeks it is clear it is also driven by deeply ingrained disdain towards the Canberra press gallery.

The Coalition’s disdain for the Canberra press gallery is by no means unique in Australian public life in recent times. However, it becomes dangerous when the barely concealed belief they can ignore the Canberra gallery and talk over their heads starts manifesting itself as belligerent arrogance and conceit at press conferences.

Prime exhibit was Education Minister Christopher Pyne on ABC Radio last week. ”It’s not my fault if some people in the press gallery don’t understand the complicated nature of the school funding model,” he said.

There can be no other explanation for the public performances of ministers like Pyne and Immigration Minister Scott Morrison other than basic arrogance and conceit. Abbott’s ham-fisted initial response to revelations of spying on Indonesia’s President seems similarly driven by a belief that what matters is not the perspective of political journos but those of listeners to talkback radio. In so doing he completely missed the serious diplomatic implications of his actions.

While many voters dislike the Canberra press gallery, I reckon they hate even more the recent displays of belligerence by Pyne and Morrison. Not a great deal that fascinates the press gallery tends to filter through to average voters. But I bet they would have concluded two things this week: the Coalition has broken its promise on school funding, and Pyne is an arrogant pillock. For a government elected on the promise of no surprises and a pledge to keep its election commitments, Pyne’s efforts this week were just breathtaking, especially on an issue of such high importance to so many voters.

http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/12/02/inside-the-canberra-feedback-loop-abbott-and-the-gallery-examined/

Whatever the motives, the Gonski backflip by Tony Abbott and Christopher Pyne has left the country with a failing schools system still in need of reform, writes Barrie Cassidy.

Good work guys. Gonski's gone. Now what?

Years of work by an expert panel, drawing on thousands of submissions, has come to nothing.

For that furious educators and parents can blame the Rudd and Gillard governments for taking too long to address a decline in standards that the OECD now confirms is only getting worse.

And they can blame the Abbott government for finally throwing some of the most meticulous homework ever undertaken into the bin.

The mood in the media all week has been that somehow the Abbott/Pyne backflip solved a problem. It did nothing of the kind.

The problem was not so much money as a commitment to reform. That commitment has been shredded.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-12-06/cassidy-gonski/5137668

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Sorry, Barrie, but it was Julia Gillard who commissioned Mr David Gonski (an Australian public figure and businessman... a leading philanthropist and Patron of the Australian Indigenous Education Foundation) in APRIL 2010 to find a new way to improve education. It took a year and a half (till November 2011) for Mr Gonski to formulate the best solution and Julia Gillard had then to find ways to finance the scheme and to make sure the States agreed to the new scheme. NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia saw the many advantages, but the opposition led by little shit Abbott and his prancing queen Pyne did all it could to sabotage the plan. Tony and his cronies eventually managed to stop Queensland and Western Australia to sign onto the deal which would have been super-good for them too.. They chose to play play politics. Now, Pyne has tried hard to destroy the scheme and unless we vote his mob out at the next election, he might succeed in his sewer ratty non-solution mostly designed to benefit private schools with the destruction of public education.

“In a sense, if you’re not a Group of Eight university that should be good news, because what it means is it’s going to free up in the future more capable students for other institutions. I think there will be a trickle-down or a flow-across effect as a result of that and I think that will be good for the quality of education we provide and indeed for the quality of research we provide.”

(Professor Ian Young) http://www.theguardian.com/education/2014/jul/30/australias-top-eight-universities-push-for-higher-fees-fewer-students

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The funding model proposed by the Abbott regime is flawed, but "possibly" beneficial to the group of eight major universities while being crook for smaller universities, despite what Professor Ian Young says... I say possibly because in the end, the Abbott-Pyne model is not so much about quality of education but about cash. What graduates can do with a BA degree can be not much or a lot, depending on other factors than cash... Universities have turned into reasonable sausage factories and the new Abbott system won't change this, apart from creating elite continental style bangers and your average sawdust butcher snags. It will also allow a discreet politicisation of learning in the higher bracket of teaching.

And we all know about the trickle-down effect: It does not work well in finance. All it does is increase the gap between rich and poor. Thus it won't work in university education... Professor Young should know that. There are better ways to improve university education and create top notch research than the stingy Abbott-Pyne narrow-minded model. 

Poor graduates would pay about 30 per cent more than their richer counterparts for their degree under the federal government's plan to charge real interest on student debts for the first time, according to the architect of the HECS system.

Leading education economist Bruce Chapman, who has conducted the most detailed modelling of the government's proposal, says the ''unfair'' policy undermines a fundamental tenet of Australia's internationally-lauded HECS repayment system.

It emerged this week that students from Harvard University lost when competing against a group of New York prisoners, beneficiaries of the Bard Prison Initiative – not in a bare-knuckle boxing match, but in a competitive, intellectual debate. The Harvard name alone rings bells worldwide and the team in question had just won the national debating title.

For the inmates it’s an incredible achievement that should not be underestimated, but I feel as if we are impressed by it because of our stereotypes of criminals being a) irrational and b) stupid. I’m an ex-prisoner who happens to be writing for a national newspaper and yet I am still partaking in the same judgmental behaviour as the rest of the law-abiding world.

read more: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/09/prison-skills-debating-harvard-empathy

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Not surprising... For many years, centuries maybe, education has been used to dull the senses into conformity with perversion as an aside entertaining diversion, while the uneducated can throw street-smart punches. Add a dash of streamlining about the rule of the game to the inmates and they will pull your pants down in a debate...

Dreamers on both sides are manipulated by their ability to survive their circumstances in their own mind. Rather than teach the freedom of thoughts, institutions like Harvard promote the slavery of acting like previously awarded accountants. They mould minds to a particular set of values that suit the system-continuum of suited men with adding machines for brains, but nothing much in clever inventions or promotion of new ideas. New ideas are anathema to the American (think also Australian) education system, while the prisoners have to think outside the square in order to survive and get out, while doing a lot of lateral thinking about why he's/she's been jailed. 

And there is so much to learn !

History is full of this outcome: 

We are faced with the paradoxical fact that education has become one of the chief obstacles to intelligence and freedom of thought. (Bertrand Russell)

The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction. (William Blake)

Mind you one could see oneself go to jail for being educated:

Public schools are the nurseries of all vice and immorality (Henry Fielding)

But the cake as to go to:

To Eaton sent, o'er every Form you leapt,

No studious Eves, no toilsome Mattins kept,

Thence Christ's Quadrangle took you for his own;

Had Alma Mater e'er so true a Son!

Had seven Years spent in Billiards, cards and Tippling,

And growing every day a lovelier strippling;

With half a College Education got,

Half Clown, half Pig, half pedant and half Sot.

 (James Miller — 1700s)

Meanwhile, education should be a priority as long as it promotes greater understanding, rather than parroting parrots...

According to the OECD, Australia now spends more public money on private schools than any other advanced economy and that was before Prime Minister Scott Morrison's extraordinary announcement yesterday that a further $4.5 billion of taxpayers' money is to be thrown at fee-charging schools.

Contrast that with another OECD report released about a year ago, which revealed that Australia — even post the Gonski funding — is the third lowest funder of public schools in the OECD with only Turkey and Colombia doing worse.

Yet our new Prime Minister suggests his latest cash-splash to the education sector that indisputably mostly educates the children of the better-off is a solution to the schools funding wars.

Then he attempts to justify it as part of the sector blind, needs-based funding scheme that once was Gonski.

How can that be? Most of the children who attend fee-charging schools are not, in fact, very needy.

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-23/catholic-school-funding-scott-morr...

Of course, Morrison's generosity (with public money/deficit) towards the Catholic schools is designed to split Labor... Labor was the one party that stepped up on the plate and devised the (fair) Gonski method of properly finance education in this country. But the Labor party is the "home" of many Catholics, while traditionally, apart from Turdy Abbott, the Libs-party has been the "fort" for the Anglicans... There are more private Catholic schools in Australia than of other denomination put together, thus you can see the way ScoMo is throwing more burley at the Catholics in the Labor party — despite the Gonski eduction funding having already been approved by all concerned.

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