jasonfranks

Crosspost from my geekblog:
This effing country, man.

We call ourselves the lucky country, the clever country. We say other quaint things like "Australia rides on a sheep's back."  A former Prime Minister once called us "the arsehole of the world."

We have a new government this year, a Labor government that claims they want to put education first. Which basically amounts to talking a lot about buying laptops for schools, as opposed to pie in the sky initiatives such as lighting the fiber that's already in the ground so we can have proper broadband internet, or increasing teachers' pay. The minister for education wants  to reduce the cost of Maths/Science degrees, because there is a clear and present skills shortage... but the reason students are deserting technology is not the cost of the degrees. The government needs to invest that money in the industry; our technology business isn't going to reanimate itself. This is why so many Australian techies--myself included--sell their skills overseas.

Then we have the University of Melbourne wanting out of the government-subsidized education game altogether; they want to be our Ivy League of One.  We have the head of Monash University--once the biggest comp sci school in the country--demanding that the  university be allowed to set its own fees, because the current costs are 'not dissuading students from applying.' In other words, he only wants rich kids at his school. Part of the additional revenue gained from those increased fees, he says, will go to disadvantaged students.  I suppose those same disadvantaged students that he wants to dissuade from  applying at his institution, and which he has disadvantaged further by jacking up the tuition costs.

Both of these guys, of course, are violently opposed to the government's idea of cutting full fee degrees for residents and putting those additional places on the government subsidy scheme... which, to be sure, is going to cut into the Universities' coffers. Obviously the government needs to pay for those extra places. We do have plenty of surplus cash for it. Perhaps our Education First government needs somebody to explain basic arithmetic to them--I guess we really are suffering for mathematics people.

Here's another good one: our Minister for Innovation is currently begging Japanese motor vehicle manufacturers to start producing hybrid cars in their Australian plants. Just weeks ago, Mitsubishi  shut down operations here: the cost of manufacturing in Australia is getting too high. Does the minister really think he can persuade the Japanese to expand their operations right now? And why, exactly, is the Minister for Innovation asking foreign countries to innovate for us? Surely he should be speaking to Holden, the Australian manufacturer, about developing their own line of fuel -efficient vehicles? Or funding university research into same? I know Holden are owned by General Motors, but they've always been somewhat independent of their American parent.

We need politicians who can make policy, who can organize and lead and make decisions and innovate, people who know how to make things, how to build things.  I'm tired of these guys who only know how to buy and sell.  We need politicians who are engineers and educators and scientists;  not lawyers and rockstars and MBAs.

--JF