EDITORIAL WEDNESDAY 03.11.10.
The announcement by Prime Minister Julia Gillard of a commitment to spend $500 million on building 2000 schools should have been greeted with a chorus of approval. Unfortunately, the schools are to be built in Indonesia and so the chorus was singing a different song, with widespread public criticism of the plan. Why spend so much money on fixing another country’s schools when so many of our own schools are in desperate need of better resources, repairs and maintenance? Not to mention our public hospitals and our public housing? Surely, the argument goes, charity should begin at home, and only when we can completely provide for our own needs should we seek to provide for others.
Unfortunately, this argument misses a few very important points. First, foreign aid is an investment, not a gift. The money that we spend assisting other countries in our region helps to foster stability and improves our national security. It helps to facilitate trade agreements providing Australian businesses with greater opportunities. And in many cases money spent on foreign aid is actually spent on Australian contractors delivering the assistance. But in the case of the Indonesian schools there is another even more important bonus. Investing in the education of Indonesian children helps to fill a vacuum which is often otherwise filled by radical fundamentalist schools such as the one run by Abu Bakar Bashir where many of the Bali bombers received their indoctrination.
That’s an investment which is worth making.
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given that most investment in Australia education has been geared to non australians being able to 'purchase' a residency, passport, entitlement, access to work, health care and a pension for their parents and extended family, the net impact to Australia is in fact lower wages, increased debt and declining productivity.
3 of 4 so called 'overseas students' work illegally, many in the duious areas, one infamous instution recorded over 330 students of 1,100 being enaged as prositutes as well as those prostitutes legally gaining entitlement, residency and pensions for their inevitable 'extended family'.
Whole suburbs in Melb and Sydney are now ethnic ghettos' of the failed education passport scam.
This is the congestion, lowsred wages, higher prices, crowding that the voters reject as needed.
Any money 'earnt' here goes back to the money lender in the triads, korean and thai brothel gangs, punjab spivs,to then fund the next wave of arrivals.
Or for the more legal, to get health care or other services they cant in their own country. Very few come to australia for the quality of the education and that is shown in the attendance records, many failing to even attend after registration and paying their fees. Of course for Australian learning institutions this is a goldmine (money for nothing literally) and so they actively assist and recruit full knowing what is going on to try and put the veneer of legitimacy on it.
Any 'learning' is incidental and the whole thing is a back door net loss to Australia's social and productivity standards.
Nearly 800,000 such people gained forms of residency and entitlment, in the last 3 years bringing in an associated total of 1.4 million people where their loyalty and committment to Australian values and society is not the reason they came. Almost all have dual nationalities and many live in lifestyles that are not integrated and they have no intention of ever doing that.
This is Labor and your taxes at work.
So,,, it is much cheaper just to build schools for these countries ? and save our money, jobs and economy and have some form of society and education left for australians. Yes but perhaps the question is why are we having to do that now to stop the rorting.
Is it more christian?. Almost all these people are not christian ahd have no intention of ever being part of a christian community.
Nothing wrong with that, except to state thats now the case.
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