Hospital reform:

Moira Smith writes: Re. Yesterday’s editorial. In commenting on the Government’s new “health plan” your editorial once again (however much in jest, and I wonder) raises the spectre of bureaucracy … no, worse: “faceless bureaucrats” (those UNNATURAL beings … NO FACES! … from outer space apparently). Yes, I know the public sees its very own servants this way. I don’t know what they teach in civics classes these days (or perhaps none of the kids are listening, because it’s SO boring).

The message that I (as one of those unloved, faceless yet surprisingly ordinary, human, fallible but well-meaning, Canberra public servants) would like to get out is: You can’t just DO things, you need to plan and organise first! Try going shopping without a shopping list …. you get back home and discover you’ve forgotten the milk, or the cat food! Try buying a house without at least jotting down on the back of an envelope, what it’s going to cost in real estate fees, stamp duties etc and then adding it up! That’s all “bureaucracy” is. And it is, of course, essential for accountability — yes, at some stage we have to be able to tell people what we did, when we did it, and (more importantly) who told us to.

Any time the “general public” attends an event that is poorly organised, or realises that the buses aren’t running on time or are going in the wrong direction, they will blame the organisers (i.e. the faceless bureaucrats). I wish they’d also realise that we are also essential to any enterprise that goes *well*. But that’s when the bureaucrats are truly faceless, of course. In that case, God made it happen, apparently.

I do hope that in writing this to Crikey I am preaching to the informed and converted citizens of this wonderful country, Australia.

Joe Boswell writes: “Hospital reform: forget state v fed, it’s all about accountability” (yesterday, item 10). Perhaps Bernard Keane was being playful when he remarked “Performance information is, contrary to what teachers and principals might say, always good…” Anyway, I immediately thought of Henry Louis Mencken’s aphorism, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”

With sufficient qualifications in place, performance information can be good. Those necessary conditions are often ignored. In consequence performance information is gathered at disproportionate cost, measures things that are irrelevant to the organisation’s true interests, provides powerful incentives to staff to carry out wasteful or pointless activities and motivates the production of false data. Organisations can switch a vast amount of resources from their official purpose to producing the required statistics by any means they can get away with. Those receiving the data are often complicit, because everyone likes good news.

The statistics are accepted as truth because people often have an exaggerated faith in numbers. To adapt Bismarck, performance statistics are like sausages, it is unnerving to see them being made. If you’ve seen it, you’ll be much less credulous about the output except when you’ve confirmed the quality of the whole process, and even then, you might flinch at what it costs.

As somebody once said about the ever-increasing burden of testing school children, “You don’t fatten pigs by weighing them.”

Carolyn Whybird writes: Re. “Roxon rocks on and gives Health a genuine feel” (yesterday, item 2). If the federal government pays 45% of health costs and the state government get 100% of the GST  how is that equal to paying 60% of health and taking 30% of GST? I feel the states are surely getting shafted. How can the Rudd government run hospitals when they cannot run a pink batt or solar scheme? I feel our health minister has you fooled. Watch parliament — where are her results?

Our new curriculum:

Emily Krisenthal writes: Re. “Rundle: our new curriculum and how deconstruction has ruined finger-painting” (yesterday, item 14). I’m writing in regard to Guy Rundle’s piece.

I thought that Rundle’s article was very witty and informative, and I giggled along to your grammatical corrections. Only problem is, I have no idea what you were talking about.

I am part of the generation that missed out on formal grammar teaching from K-12 so I’m lucky if I even remember what an adjective is, let alone a definitive article. In fact, I’m certain that this letter I’m writing now is strewn with grammatical errors (which is entirely unintentional, I honestly have no idea).

What makes this even more absurd is that I’m entering into my second year of a History Ph.D. and have lately been getting some serious grammar terrors. I even had a nightmare last night that my supervisor sent me back my writing calling me a disgrace to the faculty, to women in general and to historians. I’m expected to have written 100,000 words on my chosen research topic by the end of next year, full of adverbial clauses, noun phrases and ebonics (whatever the hell they/that are/is, sounds like the plague to me. My spell checker didn’t even know what it meant).

I wish the children of the future the best of luck with their grammatical training (and the poor teachers who probably missed out on it in school also). I only wish someone had decked the person who said “children will absorb their grammar naturally through their daily interactions”. There lies the treacherous road to txt tlk and tweets.

Marcus L’Estrange writes: Many good points but we should ask that if teachers are now having to be retrained to teach the basics what were they to teach until now? Answer? Edu-babble.

Secondly why does Julia Gillard have to make these major changes? To me Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd are the Gorbachevs of Australia when it comes to the education revolution. Gorbachev acted bravely to try and rid the then USSR of Stalinism. Now Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, via the My School web site and the national curriculum are trying to rid Australian education of the Educational Left and their Edu-babble automatic promotion, equality of outcomes nonsense.

The changes are a crucial start we have to have in order to break the current logjam between the extra expenditure in education over the years but the relative declining student results.  As John Brumby once noted: “Typically, the kids who are being failed by failing schools are Labor kids in Labor areas”.

The whole reason the AEU and others are taking their position is that they are horrified of Australians finding out the results of their support of Edu-babble. Edu-babble is the doctrine on education formulated by the Educational Left (EL) in the Universities, the AEU and the Socialist Left in the ALP. Its key policy is encapsulated in the “equality of outcomes” nonsense which says in effect that everyone should get their VCE and by the way don’t worry too much if students cannot read or write to anywhere near the VCE level.

All will be well in the EL heaven. Students can then attend remedial courses at universities (a huge growth industry) and / or undertake Mickey Mouse ‘degrees’ in order to keep the youth unemployment figures artificially low and the huge education industry in comfortable existence. Isn’t it strange that nearly all schools claim a 90% – 93% VCE success rate but massive differences occur between schools re their VCE TER Entry scores? Talk about handing out VCE passes like confetti.

School based assessment is too often not worth the paper it is written on with subject ‘passes’ too often handed out like confetti at a wedding. Julia Gillard is a member of the Socialist Left faction of the ALP. A faction that is neither Socialist nor Left and is / was a protégé of Joan Kirner or Mother Russia, the High Priestess of the EL. Consequently it is surprising that she has taken her current stand but then she has seen the ‘light on the hill’ and, unlike the crocodile tears from the AEU, is one of the few heavyweights now really interested in working class children’s educational prospects. Ben Chifley would be proud.

Finally, we must have a Royal Commission into why the ALP Labor Unity faction were allowed to give the ALP Socialist Left faction control of education department’s in return for Labor Unity running Treasury, Finance Departments and the Office of Premier. Liberal Governments never really cared that much about state education and argued amongst themselves that the best way to destroy state education was to let the Educational Left do it and what a “magnificent” job they did.

Bob Innes writes: If Crikey didn’t have a daily column linked to this site riddled with misplaced apostrophes and sloppy English, it would be better qualified to criticise the not so precise use of language on the curriculum site. I find it much more annoying to have so-called journalists dashing off daily blogs of careless writing.

I note that yesterday, possibly because you are passing judgement, the punctuation was impeccable. Keep up the good work!

Alan Strickland writes: I went to Grammar School where we had daily English Language lessons and thought it unfair that gross grammar and spelling errors were beaten out of us. However friends at Secondary Modern School reported that they were caned simply for using the word “get” in an essay.

I noticed this was quoted by yourselves “… click on the key questions to get further information on the Australian curriculum and how to use this website’ without comment. Of course it should read ‘to obtain further…”.

So much for “spare the rod…”.

Roof insulation:

Georgina Smith writes: Following on from John Kotsopoulos (Wednesday, comments) regarding the relationship of downlights and insulation, I wanted to offer my experiences from the industry back in 2007. Back then I was working on an energy efficiency campaign which, amongst other things, helped householders to get subsidised insulation.

The consistent result from households with downlights was that their insulation had been either piled up in one corner of the roof and never put back by the downlight installers (thus negating any benefit of having insulation), or the batts had been dropped right back onto the top of the downlight fittings without the proper installation of downlight hoods. This second option created an enormous fire risk, as anyone who has ever had the misfortune to touch an illuminated downlight will understand – the heat they create is incredible.

The proper way to mix downlights and insulation is either to install the aforementioned downlight hoods (around $20 a pop, at least back then) or to cut holes in the insulation so that the heat from the downlights can vent.

Alternatively, do your insurer and your power bill a favour and have the downlights removed. They are a colossal waste of money for a poor lighting outcome.

Crikey‘s birthday:

Kelvin Lamb writes: Dear Those readers who piggy back a sub. One small but important aspect of the Crikey 10th anniversary celebrations is the time when Mr Mayne was in serious strife in early 2000.

Some devoted readers responded to his interminable pleadings for cash and plunged in with various amounts ; all I could afford was $1000. We all thought that Crikey was finished so it was an easy decision at the time.

We may be nostalgic for the old days (is there an option for an old school email that doesn’t induce RSI from all the scrolling — it once looked like a Chief of Staff’s daily news list geddit .. and that’s why the nothing design worked just fine.. ) But 10 years on, Crikey has now achieved squatter’s rights amongst our fourth estate. Us anonymous lifers are quietly proud.

Buy a sub for yourself and you too can look back in a few years with a glad heart. Don’t forget to demand in your subscription that Crikey should never publish David Flint again. Those years were a low point for us all.

Coates Hire:

Craig Iedema writes: Re. “How debt-laden Coates Hire takeover hurt Kerry Stokes” (yesterday, item 22). Stephen Mayne’s article on Coates is spot on.

Not only did Stokes buy it at the top of the market, he promptly gutted the senior management who had in the previous five years turned Coates into the most profitable hire company world and replaced it with the same team from National Hire that had overpaid for AH Hire in another related party transaction some 18 months earlier and are one primarily responsible for its woeful performance.

Carlyle (the other party in this transaction) must kicking themselves for getting into bed with Stokes — then again I suppose so are KKR.  Seven Shareholders should turn this down flat.

Do Not Call Register:

Blake Murdoch , Media Officer, Australian Communications and Media Authority, writes: Re. “Tips and rumours” (yesterday, item 7). In response to an item in Thursday’s “Tips and rumours,” regarding apparent technical problems with the Do Not Call Register, please note your contributor has taken down the wrong contact number: it’s 1300  792 958.

As for on line registration, an ACMA test taken Thursday afternoon took under two minutes from start to finish with no errors. Perhaps your contributor could resubmit their registration.

Ziggy Switkowski:

Robert Stephenson, Lecturer, Film and TV, The Victorian College of the Arts and Music, writes: Ziggy Switkowski (Wednesday, comments) is right to say that with the quality and volume of submissions the committee will be properly informed and it’s good to see some extensions for submissions taking place.

As to predetermined outcomes, this suspicion could have been alleviated by having “VCA” staff elected representatives. The composition of the committee, how its members are selected by way of selection criteria and association to the people who selected them is not “dated or irrelevant” but is, as with any committee,  germane to the arrival of the committee’s findings.

These concerns are not meant to be a frivolous “insult” but ones that many staff and students hoped would have been addressed.