While it is true, as local AEU president L Wright is reported as claiming in the attached Mercury story, that the Coalition has a poor track record in public education, it is also true that teacher unions cosying up to one political party has an equally poor record, and this pathetic charade is symptomatic of that. Can you imagine the AEU supporting a Paint-our-Premier competition if the ALP were in Opposition?

Union members, the rank-and-file of the movement, need to forcefully remind their elected officials (i) why they are members, and (ii) where their officials’ main focus should be.

Yes, Liberal MP S Napier’s citing of totalitarian mass-murderers Mao Zedong and Kim Jong-il is quite OTT, but political polemic is full of this kind of hyperbole: most aware readers would filter out the exaggeration, just as they do when Green spokespeople liken harvesting trees to a ‘holocaust’.

Wouldn’t a sensible campaign celebrating public education have highlighted how efficiently the system is working and how effectively its knowledgeable and committed teachers are performing in their classrooms, how literate and numerate its primary pupils are and how well its secondary students have been prepared for post-school life?

Still, there may be one upside: perhaps more people will now be more fully aware of the shortcomings of public education and start to ask this obvious question: why are so many parents willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars for a service which the government supplies for ‘free’?  And, no, the answer is not that State schooling is not really ‘free’, what with all those fees, levies and charges imposed on it; these charges would hardly buy a month at Hutchins and Launceston Church Grammar, Fahan or Scotch Oakburn.

(Note: a shorter version of this was posted on the Mercury blog; it’s good that in TT one can use paragraphs, and that things such as ‘, “, and ”  . . .  “ don’t get deformed into Spanish-style ¿s.)