Photo: Sydney Morning Herald

Dear Christopher,

I have gone over your press release and made some changes.

“PRESS RELEASE FROM THE OFFICE OF THE RE-EDUCATION MINISTER, MR CHRISTOPHER WHYNE:

We intend to honour our promise to maintain the arrangements as we promised before the election, but only for the first year because that’s enough to say that we did keep the funding arrangements. All your talking about is how long we kept them for, which is really just nitpicking!

Change this to: “We intend to honour our commitments in full. However, we will be looking to improve the funding model for 2015 and beyond, and no-one should have a problem with that.”

I know some people will try and accuse us of breaking a promise, but when we made the promise, we worked on the assumption that Labor had laid out a very clear plan and that they’d left plenty of money. Imagine my surprise when I found that this plan was far too complicated for me to understand. Now I know some of you will say that as we were suggesting that they were incompetent, so we should have expected the plan to be a mess, but that’s a bit unfair, because even though we said that, we didn’t mean it all the time. Anyway, it seems that they were wasting a lot of money fixing up classrooms in areas where the kids aren’t worth educating, but we’re prepared to cut our losses there. These are the sort of adult decisions that are hard, but necessary. They were pretending to be adults, but we’re the adults, and we’re in charge now, so “Electricity Bill” this is your fault.

Change this to: “The Labor plan was a shambles and unimplentable. We will try to keep the essential features, but it would be wrong to expect us to be bound by what, after all, was a Labor plan.”

Who is this Gonski anyway? As I said before the election, sounds more like a Conski to me. I know that he wrote some sort of report, but no-one’s had time to read it to me. We’re all very busy with the business of Government. And “business” starts with “busy” so you can see we don’t have time for reading old reports. Really, have any of you read it? Exactly. Really, we don’t need a report to tell us that a good teacher can inspire his or her class even if there is a leaky roof or no heating. Kids today are too soft. It’s about time that the cane was introduced.

Change this to: “There are many interesting features in the Gonski report, and we’ll be responding to them in good time, but the most important thing is ensuring that students have a good teacher, because a good teacher can teach anywhere.”

Frankly, if parents really cared about the education of their children, they’d put them in a private school, so I don’t see why they complain when public schools don’t have the same facilities. It’s just class warfare. I went to a private school and look how I turned out.

Change this to: “Education is one of our priorities, and our model will be better. We’ll give the same amount of money, but we won’t have the same central command policies. We’ll allow the states to distribute the money to those who need it the most.”

Thanks,

Peta.

P.S. Actually, I’ll just get someone in my office to re-write for you. We’ll send you a copy. Whatever you do, don’t answer any questions on it.