OK, when I’m welcoming back Kotter, I’m not refering to that 70’s show which gave John Travolta his start and had more bad jokes than Turnbull’s ministry. Instead, I’m talking about John Kotter. If any of you have studied Business Management in the past few years, you’ve probably come across Kotter’s idea about how to manage change. He suggests an 8-step process:
1.Establishing a Sense of Urgency
2.Creating the Guiding Coalition
3.Developing a Vision and Strategy
4.Communicating the Change Vision
5.Empowering Employees for Broad-Based Action
6.Generating Short-Term Wins
7.Consolidating Gains and Producing More Change
8.Anchoring New Approaches in the Culture
And if any of you have noticed how the Liberals have approached government, you’ll realise that they’ve borrowed fairly heavily from John Kotter. Or at least, the first point or two. When it comes to creating their guiding coalition, it’s invariably been full of helpful fellow travellers like Maurice Newman or Amanda Vanstone, but that’s still consistent with Kotter’s ideas. However, when it comes to points three to eight, they’ve been sadly lacking.
The latest brouhaha over the “blowout” in loans for the higher education sector is classic Kotter. “If nothing is done,” we’re being told, “then student loans are a time bomb!” According to The Australian, the Parliamentary Budget Office is warning “the nominal value of the Higher Education Loan Program would reach $185.2bn by 2026, deepening the nation’s net debt at a time when political leaders could not say when the budget would return to surplus.”
And while it also tells us that about $52 billion possibly wouldn’t be recovered because students would “struggle to repay” their HELP debts, it’s more concerned about the figure of 185.2bn
Shock! Horror! Armageddon!
Well, this is undoubtedly Labor’s fault, so what should we do? I know, let’s deregulate university fees and restrict entry.
Now, there’s so much wrong with this that someone with more time on their hands could probably write a book. Ok, I can see that it’s a concern that $52 billion may not be paid back, because people will struggle to earn enough. But on hearing this, my first question is why on earth do they expect that people will struggle to pay it back? Is it just because of the de-regulation pushing up the cost of a degree by an astronomical amount, or are the government expecting wages to go backwards?
But I’d like to put the $52 billion aside for one moment and concentrate on the way this whole story is being framed. We’re being sold the idea that $185 billion is deepening the government’s debt, even though it’s a debt that the students owe the government. Or to put it another way, this is like saying that the National Bank will be in deep trouble in two year’s time because the value of their loans will have increased by fifty percent. The reality is that – unless there are large number of bad debts – then an increase in its loans would be considered an increase in its assets. (I’m not an accountant, so maybe I’m wrong. Maybe a bank is better off when it only has four loans outstanding to the value of $728-35, but I don’t see any of the majors pursuing that strategy…)
By all means, let’s try to ensure that courses are well chosen and relevant, but the idea that it’s a problem for the government when students go into debt to gain a qualification that should increase their earning power and, hopefully, the amount of tax they pay, seems to me a rather strange way to look at it.
Still, Education Minister, Simon Birmingham has had some weird ideas lately. He’s been telling us that the Gonski funding is unnecessary because a number of schools who had their funding reduced actually had an improvement in the NAPLAN results, therefore money doesn’t matter. (Perhaps he should tell Mr Turnbull who – when announcing his “cunning plan” – suggested that the Federal goverment would still need to fund private schools because they may be neglected under his proposal to palm government schools off to the states. Now that we know that money doesn’t matter, then they can all slash their budgets because, well, aren’t all the good teachers there, anyway, so they don’t need any government funding at all…)
Of course, using Birminham’s logic one could argue because Tom got better without going to the doctor, then there’s no need for anyone to visit the doctor and it’s just a waste of money…
Mm, actually I think that was the logic behind their Medicare co-payment idea!
Whatever, there are any number of reasons why a school receiving less funding may have had an improvement in NAPLAN. For a start, there may have been a change in administration because the school was floundering and losing numbers and the new principal manages to improve the pedagogy. It may have something to do with a change in demographics. Without examining each individual school, it’d be impossible to draw any definite conclusions.
Unless you’re Education Minister. In that case, you can make a rash generalisation on the grounds that some schools somewhere did better. Of he didn’t talk about any of the schools that got extra funding and did better, because that didn’t suit his point.
No, we were meant to understand that we can forget all about that Gonski funding because the money was never there. They went to the money cupboard and couldn’t find any marked “Gonski funding”. There was only a big bag labelled “Defence”. And another bag labelled, “This Should Have Been Spent On Defence”. But there was nothing with a label saying “NDIS” or “Money for the HELP scheme”, so we’ve got a real problem in ten years time.
Meanwhile, we need to make sure that people don’t go onto higher education and that instead, they go down to Holden or Toyota and get a job in the factory… No, wait, perhaps Kodak… Oh, well, they just need to live within their means on Newstart and make sure that they show up for job interviews because I read in today’s paper that nearly a quarter of people on Newstart had their payments suspended, so we need to make sure that they’re not swindling the taxpayer by doing nothing. It’s much better if they go to job interviews every day, in between building skills like digging holes or picking up rubbish on Work-for-the-Dole schemes.
I know. I just had an excellent idea. We can form a company for each person who’s now unemployed and this company can bring in ten people on 457 visas to pick fruit or clean houses, and the unemployed person can get 25% of the wages each worker earns and then they won’t be a burden on the taxpayer and we’ll have plenty of cheap labour. Or that only appropriate to that if you’ve already got a bucketload of money and own a business already?
Anyway, we’ve got to try something… I mean, after reading the Murdoch Misdirection Magazine, I have a real sense of urgency. $182 billion owed to the government in a mere ten years from now!
It makes climate change pale into insignificance … Or is that just the Great Barrier Reef that’s paling into insignificance?
