One of the significant benefits of the Gillard Government's Gonski reforms is that it is a step that begins to address the future of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Young Australians, especially those not from middle-class backgrounds, are having a pretty hard time. The labour market prospects for young people without skills and qualifications is likely to remain bleak, especially with the slowing of economic growth and the decline of manufacturing.

If you’re poor, young and white with low educational qualifications then a future of unemployment and living on welfare beckons. This is especially the case if you happen to live in an area marked by economic decline, poor schools and employers uninterested in developing the skills of young people in low-paid jobs.

Improving school education by making the funding more equitable to improve the skills and qualifications is a better policy approach than that of the those of the “flag, faith and family” social conservatism who point the finger at immigration as the cause of the Australian turning sour for the unskilled, white working class.

They tend to argue that low-skilled immigrants have taken jobs from unskilled natives, leaving them languishing on benefits; and that high-skilled immigration reduces both the incentives and opportunities for ambitious and talented natives (suburban aspirationals) to move up the mobility ladder.

The possibility of a long-term exclusion of Labor from government means that the Coalition is evolving into a Little Australianer grouping that favours Fortress Australia with its distorted version of what it is to be Australian; a version that will favour the funding of private schools at the expense of poor public ones and the wind back the commonwealth's spending on health and education

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Posted by: mars08 | June 12, 2013 5:03 PM