Australia talks a big game on innovation – but keeps cutting the institutions that make it possible. Why we need to reverse course, fast. 🧪📉 #SciencePolicy #CSIRO #HigherEd #PublicSchools #AustralianPolitics #STEM #Innovation #EducationFunding #Auspol
johnmenadue.com
Innovation talk, austerity walk: Australia’s failing science policy
Despite constant rhetoric about innovation, Australia is steadily dismantling its scientific capacity. Public schools, universities and the CSIRO are all under pressure – the result of decades of market-driven policy-making that prioritises short-term cost-cutting over long-term national capability.
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![… come next Tuesday these friends of mine - lapsed Catholics one and all - will eagerly record their religion in the census.
… It's about strategy, not salvation. Their only belief is that their children should attend a well-funded private Catholic school.
In the same way they have those kids baptised by a priest, the census is another box to tick.
… at a time when the number of Australians identifying as religious is in freefall, … why should it play any role in influencing how governments allocate billions of taxpayer dollars on education?
… in a nation now abandoning the gods it seems absurd that state and federal governments continue funding significant parts of our education system according to the religious affiliation of various schools.
Governments should be neutral on this issue. Their sole responsibility should be funding education, not theology. … Maths before mass. Now there's a bumper sticker ...
… A public system founded on the principle that education should be free, compulsory and secular will continue funnelling billions of taxpayer dollars into schools whose only defining characteristic is their faith in deities fewer of us believe in.
And what about that belief of my friends that Catholic schools and those of other faiths deliver better academic results? Some certainly do - particularly those elite private schools whose students hail from affluent, university-educated families.
But the data gets more interesting the deeper you dig.
…
Several studies have shown that once you account for the socioeconomic background of students (Catholic schools tend to enrol fewer students with severe disabilities, behavioural issues or from disadvantaged families in extreme poverty) there is little evidence that publicly funded religiously affiliated schools produce higher outcomes in literacy or numeracy.
… Educating our children is a public [matter] and among the most important responsibilities of any government.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zktxpckkp2fcezzgxnbxl3ql/bafkreiampdfgiyovru2ilo3qkh3dhdwrrfu46harf3sqvgrhzvnullpl5a)
