Where are all the education dollars spent?

Paul Murray takes aim at politicians who talk the talk but fail to walk the walk

IF politicians ever wonder why our eyes glaze over when they tell us about record funding for education, it’s because our lived experience of schools is far from record breaking.

Take, for example, a school in Sydney’s west — they are demolishing existing classrooms that have airconditioning, but parents have been told they will need to raise $300,000 to put it in the new building.

Thousands of kids are in demountables and we are about to go into another winter where heaters don’t work and windows won’t be properly sealed.

So, where is all this record spending on education going? If it’s not on the buildings, where is it being spent?

Let’s spend a little less on head office and a little more on the classrooms our kids deserve.

Right move on live exports

COMMON sense has prevailed for the live-sheep trade. While there are still very loud and determined voices who want to kill thousands of Australian people’s livelihoods, the Federal Government has made sensible changes that make life better for the sheep on the ships.

Under the new rules there will be fewer sheep carried on the boats, with more space to move around and a hot weather plan to take care of them.

On the enforcement side, independent observers will be paid to travel with the animals on every voyage and will report back any problems.

There will also be an automatic review of animal standards if more than 1 per cent of the sheep die in a trip.

None of this will satisfy people who want to pretend that every journey is like the one we saw on 60 Minutes earlier in the year. It’s not, they know it, but they don’t care. They have an irrational hatred to this industry and no understanding of the people who make it up.

Good on the Government for not giving in to the outrage machine that couldn’t care less about the consequences of killing this trade in regional Australia.

Triple-0, we have a problem

OUR national 000 emergency system needs a major upgrade.

This week we learnt a man died waiting for four hours for an ambulance to arrive.

He had made 11 calls to 000 over the past two years complaining about chest pains, but because he didn’t make 10 calls in the past six months there wasn’t a clear note on his file. On his final call he struggled to speak and his moan was put into the nonurgent pile that police eventually got around to later that day.

But it was too late, he died while waiting on the phone.

Surely we can have a system where every call made from a number, home or mobile is logged, and if you have been calling 11 times about chest pains there’s a good chance you are calling about that on the 12th time.

When you disconnect that number, because you move house or change phone plans, the record can be wiped, but not before then.

How can 12 calls in two years not be considered as urgent as 10 in six months. Clearly both types of callers have a major medical problem and need urgent help.