Weekend Wrap for 3 March 2024

Ross Gittins: Two-class school system a great way to entrench low productivity.
"In 2011, the Gonski report recommended that government funding of schools be needs-based and sector-blind. More than 12 years later, it still hasn’t happened. And it’s by no means certain it will happen any time soon. The idea of sector-blind schooling – funding all students according to their needs, rather than their religion – fell at the first hurdle. Sectarianism has bedevilled attempts to ensure all our kids get a decent education since the introduction of compulsory schooling in 1880. And so fearful of the religious vote are both major parties that this time’s been no different. Providing adequate funding for the more disadvantaged kids congregated in public schools could have been a simple matter of redistributing money from privileged private schools, but no." (26 Feb 2024)
Read more at the Sydney Morning Herald

Sheila Ngọc Phạm: How my daughter has taught me the importance of public education for non-religious and religious children alike.
"I know many people — non-religious and religious alike — who would be afraid to send their child into the public school situation we have. Perhaps because they do not want their child to be a minority, and perhaps they are even fearful or overwhelmed by the majority — in this case, a religious majority. It’s important not to deny this is how some people feel. Grappling with such a reality is the only way to ensure our pluralism remains robust. After all, many of our social institutions are struggling with questions of “diversity”, so there is considerable value in clearly understanding how everyday multiculturalism in Australia is experienced. There’s a good deal of tension Australian public life at present, due in part to the increasing segregation of different groups in our society. Because of this, the fact that only 64 per cent of Australian children attend a public school should be a cause for concern — not only because of what that entails for widening inequality, but also because it signifies the erosion of a common life, as people retreat from opportunities to peacefully co-exist with others from different class, cultural, and religious backgrounds." (27 Feb 2024)
Read more at ABC Religion & Ethics

Bernard Keane: Scott Morrison maintains his God delusion to the last.
"That belief in divine selection — revealed by David Hardaker in a brilliant Crikey investigative series in 2021 — was always the key to understanding Morrison. According to his supporters and New Corp’s culture warriors, critics attacked Morrison’s faith. But the problem was never his religion. Australia has had prime ministers of strong, mediocre and no faith at all. The problem was how Morrison saw himself through his own strange composite of a faith, and his belief he was above the basic standards of accountability and behaviour of the secular world. It wasn’t until after he was ejected from the Lodge that the full scope of his belief in his own divine exceptionalism became clear to his colleagues." (27 Feb 2024)
Read more at Crikey

Tony Wright: Scotty from Sunday school lays it on thick in final sermon
"And he’d gone on quite a bit about the “unique Judaeo-Christian values” that were “the very basis for our modern understanding of human rights”, and he’d warned against “diminishing the influence and the voice of Judaeo-Christian faith in our Western society, as doing so risks our society drifting into a valueless void”. “In that world, there is nothing to stand on,” he lectured. “There is nothing to hold on to. And the authoritarians and autocrats win.” Authoritarians and autocrats? Were those distant, disbelieving sobs from victims of robo-debt, that most authoritarian of policies delivered by none other than Scott Morrison, the scheme that a royal commissioner found was a denial of human rights to the most vulnerable?" (27 Feb 2024)
Read more at The Age

David Hardaker: ‘Nobody quite understood’: What role did religion play in Scott Morrison’s ‘bulldozer’ moves?
"Throughout Morrison’s time in office the question of the influence of religion on his politics has been largely off the table: not a question to be asked in polite company. Morrison himself has always rejected the idea, even though it was Morrison who blurred the lines by inviting the media inside his local Pentecostal church to capture him, flanked by wife, Jenny, in an ecstatic moment with hand-raised to receive the Holy Spirit. This week Morrison repeatedly referenced and gave his thanks to God in his valedictory speech to parliament. Australia’s political media has largely abided by the convention that religion is personal, that it has nothing to do with politics and that it is not to be pried into. Yet Morrison – as the evidence now shows – has been anything but a conventional politician and, despite his protestations, there is a growing trail of breadcrumbs to demonstrate that he may have made policy decisions that reflected his personal religious commitment." (2 Mar 2024)
Read more at The Age