A champagne socialist reflects on Western culture and the Universe... and whilst gazing at his navel, he comes up with a lot of useless lint. It is the fruits of this navel-gazing that form the substance of this blog.
Published on October 8, 2004 By Champas Socialist In Politics
Refugees
86. Accepts fewer refugees than the UN has asked (and they ask very little)

87. The extremely expensive and innefective Pacific“Solution”

88. Worms were recently found in the food served at Baxter detention centre.

89. Locking up children in hell houses. Many refugee kids have suffered major psychological problems as a result. Australians are well off. We are the first world. When people come to us for help, we treat them no better than the regimes they narrowly escape.

90. Tampa. Using force against refugees who have sent out a distress signal: isn’t that a little overkill?

91. Did not give the Tampa refugee applicants the benefit of the doubt and instead spread xenophobic paranoia.

92. Introduced the Bridging Visa E that prevents refugee applicants from working and contributing to our economy. By Ruddock’s admission, it creates second class citizens. Many of the people now on this Visa were good workers contributing to our economy before we stripped away their right to work, receive Medicare, receive benefits. We have forced them to rely on charity for survival.

93. the dodgy dodgy excising of the migration boundaries

94. Woomera. Lip sewing. Major psychological damage.

95. Has created inefficiency regarding the processing of refugee applications that places a strain on our economy rather than getting these people into jobs and out of hell holes.

96. adopted a guilty til proven innocent policy for people so desparate to escape they come by boat, treating them worse than we treat our worst criminals.

97. Introduced Temporary Protecdtion Visas for more people, which creates insecurity for families trying to make a go of it here. They can be uprooted all of a sudden, sent back home, no matter whether they’ve set up jobs, businesses or families in Australia.

Education
98. Cut Uni funding.

99. Deregulated HECS fees for Universities despite a commitment against it. Almost every University in Australia has been forced to raise their fees for students by 25% as a result of Howard’s education cuts.

100. More $100,000 degrees.

101. Forced Unis to take more fee paying students, which places more pressure on tutors to give pass marks (this has been confirmed to me by Uni tutors), and means that standards for students has been lowered, which means we have a less qualified workforce.

102. has promised to give more power to P&Cs to direct funding, instead of giving this important job to qualified Education professionals.

103. there has been an increased need for public schools to raise funding through P&Cs.

104. has given inadequate funding to preschool and childcare.

105. Their only attempt to get more men into teaching has been to try to allow 12, count em, TWELVE scholarships to males who want to do Education. In the process they would have had to rip apart our Anti-Discrimination Laws and they would have achieved almost nothing. Labor has real policies to get men into teaching.

106. Will cut funding to public schools who do not wave the flag. He considers blind patriotism to be a higher priority than our kids’ educational resources. He’d rather poorer schools spend their money on flagpoles than books.

107. substantially increased private scholl funding while significantly decreasing public school funding to 31% of education funding. Excuse me but shouldn’t the Government schools get the majority of Government funding, especially when they have more students in them!?!?

But hey we all make mistakes Johnny!


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