The Guardian 11 May, 2005
Dingo bytes
You may have noticed the increasing numbers of charities with people on the street asking
passers by for donations. Their rising numbers are almost in inverse proportion to those of the
homeless living in bus shelters and begging on street corners. It is part of John Howard's charity
and corporate philanthropy vision which form the cornerstones in his post-union, post-welfare
vision of Australia in which it is intended that we will all be begging the rich for money and
favours. So it was with some irony that Dingo observed in last week's Murdoch rag, The Sunday
Telegraph, a report of a charity lunch to raise funds for a cancer foundation, involving the likes
of James Packer and, ominously, a Dr La Salle, who is an advisor on diseases to George W
Bush. So, the rich have lunches to raise some money and give themselves some flattering PR,
while the government spends $55 million a day on the military.
Maybe the University of Newcastle should give James Packer a call. A steering committee
report into the financial state of the university has proposed that it cut 20 undergraduate
degrees. This includes a number of science courses and fine arts. Also, it calls for no more
students to be admitted from next year into the combined bachelor of science and bachelor of
law degree specialising in forensics. The vice-chancellor has announced that 450 staff jobs will
be cut because of a $23-28 million deficit over the next five years. But the National Tertiary
Education Union wasn't having any of it and pointed to the cuts in federal funding as the root
cause of the problem.
In Queensland, cruelly under-funded TAFE colleges are now being scrutinised in a Big Brother-
style campaign in which call centres are conducting surveys of individual TAFE students to
measure the level of "client satisfaction". These surveys, organised by the state's Department of
Education, ask such things as where the student was taught, the number of hours taught and
the number of hours claimed. The Queensland Teachers' Union says it has long held concerns
about such spying tactics carried out in the guise of audit requirements, presumably because
they're an excuse to cut jobs. Dingo wondered, what with all the outsourcing going on with call
centres, if perhaps the surveys are being conducted from India.
In the almost laughable Liberal Party leadership battle between John Howard and Treasurer
Peter Costello, one snipe last week is perhaps the most revealing. Costello claimed credit for
the introduction of that regressive tax, the GST. Why didn't he just come out and say, "This
country needs a bigger bastard than John Howard as prime minister".
CAPITALIST HOG OF THE WEEK: is Foreign Minister Alexander Downer. In
response to the International Atomic Energy Agency calling for the major nuclear powers to
reduce their nuclear arsenals, Downer stated it was "intellectual folly" to link the US nuclear
stockpile to safeguards against such weapons.