AUSTRALIAN COUNCIL FOR THE DEFENCE OF GOVERNMENT SCHOOLS - D.O.G.S.

PRESS RELEASE 122#.

 12 SEPTEMBER 2005

KOSKY, GUIDED BY HER PRIVATIZATION SCHOOL ADVISERS IS HELL BENT ON DESTROYING

PUBLIC EDUCATION IN VICTORIA

THE AGE FLIES HER KITE

The Minister for Education in Victoria, Lynne Kosky, has used the Age to soften the Victorian public to her hidden education agenda- the destruction of public education in Victoria through its integration into the private system .

There has been no "White Paper" provided as yet, and no Press Release, yet the Age Education Editor, Shane Green is promoting wide ranging proposals that will destroy our public system.

Under the guise of "registration procedures" and "standards" the Minister is proposing to place public schools alongside private religious schools in legislation which will turn the 1872 Act of Free, Secular and Compulsory on its head. It is significant that for Lynne Kosky and her private school education apparatchiks, the 1872 Act appears to have fallen off the historical map. For her, Victorian education started at the turn of the century with Frank Tate and State involvement in secondary education. This has enabled her to place all schools equally under a separate registration authority which can "fail" schools.

This means that the Bracks Government is following the Blair Government with the concept of "failed" schools. In England such schools, usually those which are under resourced in disadvantaged areas, have been closed and handed over to "Faith Schools" " corporate bodies" and even individual businessmen who are prepared to put up $2 million to run a publicly funded school. These academies have caused great controversy in the English situation .

Proposals put forward by Minister Kosky would do credit to enemies of public education in the past .Archbishop  Mannix and Santamaria would be delighted with the hidden agenda.

Public school supporters must oppose at all cost, the attempt to bring public and private education under the one body. In the end result, this will mean the death knell for public education which is free, secular, universal and open to all children. No private school apparatchik, agent, or acolyte should have any oversight in public education. Yet it is almost certain that public education will be under-represented in any common registration body.

The private school system has proved itself a cancer in the body politic and if it is introduced, by legislation into the public school system it will become more deadly.

Private schools and public schools should be dealt with under separate legislation. One Education Act should be for public education and one should be for private religious education. Public Education should not be unequally yoked to the private sector. The whole strategy of the anti-public education persons advising and guiding Lynne Kosky involves the attempt to wipe out the vital and fundamental differences between public and private education - and in the process the privatization of public education.

This strategy has been initiated and followed by private religious school interests for the last twenty five years. It surfaced in the DOGS High Court case where the Roman Catholic representatives  said that their submission that their schools were not run for confessional purposes. In support they said that the aims of the State and Church Schools were the same. At least 90% of the content in both systems were secular and "fundamentally identical"; of the remaining 10% only 1% was specifically catholic: and the "atmosphere" of Catholic schools - that of care and concern was, as Justice Murphy pointed out, common to the agnostic and the atheist. Consistent with this evidence, it was asserted that classroom professionals were selected on professional and not religious tests.

All of the above is good reason for abolishing State Aid to schools which duplicate State school facilities and divide children on social, economic and ethnic as well as religious criteria.

Yet Lynne Kosky is following her private school and privatization mentors within and without the public education system itself to force the public system into an unequal, invidious , perfidious and disastrous amalgam.

Wherever this formula has been applied, the fight for public education has been destroyed.

It is tragedy for public education that two of the persons in leadership positions are reported in the Age as appearing to give approval to the initial legislative propositions leaked to the Age on 12 September 2005.

DOGS WILL FIGHT THESE PROPOSALS AND INVITE PUBLIC SCHOOL SUPPORTERS TO JOIN THEM.

PETITIONS WILL BE PREPARED AFTER THE WHITE PAPER HAS BEEN PRESENTED FOR DISCUSSION

DOGS ALSO REFER YOU TO OUR ADVERTISEMENT IN THE AGE, 26 april 2005 produced on

www.fightingforpubliceducation.info

For further discussion on these matters, listen to 3CR, 855 on the am dial

at

12.30 p.m. next Saturday.