As the days slowly wind to the next Victorian election, the state opposition is finally remembering what it means to be an opposition. More interestingly, Liberals are going after the Andrews government on what are Labor’s traditional strengths: health and education.
Going for Andrews’ jugular on health should be a doddle: Victoria’s health system is in complete crisis. They can’t blame it on Covid either: it’s the cumulation of decades of neglect. All but four years of it on Labor’s watch. The latest scandal is the revelation that the 000 emergency call system is on the verge of collapse. An independent review found that more than 30 people died in 2021 due to delays in calls being answered.
As a sign of how vulnerable Labor is on health, Premier Daniel Andrews went into hiding for days — after trying the dodgy put-on of releasing the report on a Saturday to try and bury it in the weekend news cycle dominated by football.
The Liberals are also hitting Labor on education.
The Victorian curriculum would be rewritten with a greater emphasis on maths, science and literacy, and schools would have more flexibility to specialise in subjects under a Coalition plan to improve students’ declining performance.
For years, the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) test has shown that Australian students’ basic educational standards have slid further and further behind. At the heart of the issue is an overcrowded curriculum that too often prioritises fluffy wokeism over basic learning. The situation has only been worsened — dramatically — by panicked school closures during Covid. Nowhere more so than in the Lockdown Capital of the World, Victoria.
With less than 12 weeks until the Victorian election, the opposition will on Monday unveil its plan to review the state’s curriculum for prep to year 10 students, which it says is cluttered and needs redesigning as pupils try to catch up after long periods of remote learning during COVID-19 lockdowns […]
Opposition education spokesman David Hodgett told The Age Victoria’s curriculum is “bigger and broader than the national curriculum” and needs reviewing to improve learning outcomes.
He said the Coalition would allocate $200 million to develop a new one and establish an expert panel that would advise on ways to simplify and streamline it to make it easier to teach within the four school terms.
It’s not just opposition politicking: even teacher’s unions criticise the curriculum as overcrowded and unteachable.
One teacher, a primary school principal in Melbourne’s south-east, said schools had become the “cure-all for society’s ills” and were being forced to teach “non-core curriculum areas instead of the basics”.
“Rather than teach history, you might find yourself trying to incorporate an ethical component, which is fine in VCE, but that’s impractical for primary school,” he told The Age on the condition of anonymity so he could speak freely.
Then there’s the “progressive” nonsense like being forced to teach “Aboriginal perspectives” in everything, even science and maths. Which is fine, I guess, if you don’t want kids to be able to count past ten.
The government’s pearl-clutching “Think of the Children!” response is as predictable as it is unconvincing.
In response, Education Minister Natalie Hutchins said cutting cyber safety lessons would put school kids at risk from online predators.
The Age
The bigger risk would be predators in the school system: the groomers and gender whisperers. Cutting dangerous junk like “Safe Schools” and its slimy descendants, as well as race-baiting bullshit, should be another no-brainer for an opposition that wants to win on kitchen-table issues.
Teacher’s unions, of course, will remain firmly glued to Dictator Dan’s underbelly like so many suckerfish. Time to send in the Mama Bears.
