Sharp rise in child protection interventions in Australia

Michelle Stevens

A report released this year by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare revealed a 25 percent rise over the past five years in the number of child protection interventions—that is, children who were the subject of an official investigation, care and protection order, or out-of-home care.

The statistics in the Child Protection Australia 2016–17 report point to a deepening social crisis, particularly in working class and rural areas, with the worst impact on indigenous families, who are among the most vulnerable layers of the working class.

A total of 168,352 children, a rate of 30.8 per 1,000 children aged 0–17, received child protection involvement throughout Australia in 2016–2017, with 74 percent of these children being repeat referrals. This included 47,915 children, with a median age of nine, who had been removed from their families and placed in out-of-home care as at June 30, 2017. That was an 18 percent increase over four years.

These figures partially mask the disproportionately high rate of state intervention among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children, which was 164.3 per 1,000, seven times higher than non-indigenous children.

Indigenous children were placed in out-of-home care at 10 times the rate for non-Indigenous children. For indigenous children aged 5 to 9, the rate of out-of-home care rose to 12 times their non-indigenous counterparts.

Out-of-home care means children are taken from their birth families and placed in the homes of relative or foster carers, or residential facilities or family group homes run by governments or non-government organisations (NGOs).

Many of the carers in these programs are volunteers, paid only rent and board or out-of-pocket expenses. They are not required to be qualified to deal with these children’s complex needs, including past trauma.

Teenagers can be placed in “lead tenant households,” where an adult lives and supervises them in rented premises. Alternatively, they may be housed in hotels or motels.

The high proportion of children remaining in out-of-home care for five years or more—41 percent of the total—contributed to the overall increased rate.

About 1 in 20 children in out-of-home care were living in residential care, ostensibly used for children with complex needs. Some were very young—3 percent of those in residential care were aged under five years.

Residential care facilities can be described as mini-institutions where children are denied the consistency of care and opportunity for a loving bond provided by a parent, permanent carer or guardian.

Moreover, in 2017–2018, according to a Productivity Commission report, almost 6 percent of children in out-of-home care across the country were victims of sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse or neglect. That was only among the reported cases, so the true level of abuse is likely to be higher.

Bernie Geary, the Children’s Commissioner in the state of Victoria for 10 years, until 2015, provided a damning condemnation of residential homes in that state in a report he released as he left his position. After visiting 21 residential care homes, he reported 189 incidents of the alleged sexual abuse of 166 children. That was 1 in 3 of the 500 children in residential care at the time.

The Child Protection Australia 2016–17 report did not ask or seek to explain what accounts for the increase in state intervention, which leads, in many cases, to the forced and traumatic removal of children from their families, for years on end.

The Productivity Commission report showed that police, not doctors, schools or social workers, initiated the greatest number of cases. It also showed that the highest rate of substantiations—notifications found to be true—came from poorer families. This indicates the impact of falling wages, soaring living costs, poverty, unemployment, homelessness and mental health issues, especially on low-income households.

However, another factor has also contributed to the rise in interventions. Governments have slashed budgets and staffing to government-run child welfare departments, and transferred the residential care of children to NGOs and corporate residential care providers, creating a profitable industry. There is now a clear economic incentive to remove children from their families and place them in out-of-home care.

In 2016, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Four Corners” program revealed aspects of this process. It reported that one company, Premier Youthworks, with a revenue of around $20 million in 2015, was paid between $550 and $1,700 per child per day to house and “care” for approximately 80 children. As a proprietary limited company, it was under no obligation to report its profits.

Nationally, there have been over 40 official inquiries into child protection and care provision over the past two decades. Yet the crisis has only worsened. The brutal conditions exposed in state-run institutions have been replaced with a model where similar conditions exist behind the doors of smaller facilities, run by private providers. A multi-billion-dollar government-funded industry profits from placing children into residential care, with little or no transparency to assess the quality of the services provided.

In 2015, the New South Wales state government commissioned an “Independent Review Of Out Of Home Care,” which was not made public until this year. It said the number of children in out-of-home care in that state had doubled between 2006 and 2016, a rate far greater than the population growth of children and young people.

The previously-buried report concluded that the system was “ineffective and unsustainable, not client centred.” Expenditure was “crisis driven and not aligned to an evidence base” and “failing to improve long-term outcomes for children and families with complex needs.” Almost three quarters of cases of suspected abuse or neglect reported to Family and Community Services (FACs) were closed without investigation, even where the risk of serious harm was “high” or “extremely high.”

The review also reported that the average cost per child of out-of-home care had more than doubled since 2012, when the state government began to shift programs to NGOs. It said 60 percent of children in out-of-home care were placed with NGOs and they were staying there longer because the bulk of funding was paid to NGOs “instead of addressing family needs earlier.” Despite this, the state government is seeking to transfer all children’s out-of-home care services to the private sector by 2022.

Child protection departments across the country remain understaffed and unable to cope with the number of cases reported to them. Lack of resources has increasingly led to the ditching of any pretence of addressing the underlying family crises that lead to state intervention. Instead, children are simply removed and offloaded to private “care providers.”

Ten years ago, the last federal Labor government offered a phony apology to the “Stolen Generations” of indigenous children who were taken from their families, shattering their lives. Today new “Stolen Generations” are being created of both Aboriginal and non-indigenous children.

Governments, state and federal, Labor and Liberal-National alike, are divesting themselves of any responsibility for community and family support. At the same time, vulnerable children have been reduced to an economic commodity, worth thousands of dollars a day to NGOs and business operators.

Labour Party-run councils escalate austerity in UK

Alice Summers 

Councils in England are facing the biggest cuts to local government funding since 2010.

Figures from the Local Government Association (LGA) indicate that the revenue support grant, which is the main source of government funding for local authorities, will be cut by 36 percent next year—the largest annual reduction in nearly 10 years. This equals a loss of £1.3 billion of central government funding for local services in the 2019/20 financial year.

In total, councils across England will see the funding they receive from central government slashed by as much as 77 percent by 2020. Almost half of local authorities (168) will no longer receive any central government funding by this year, with councils facing a funding gap of £5.8 billion.

The decades-long onslaught on the public provision of services by the British ruling elite, exacerbated since the 2008 global financial crash, has led to a crisis within local councils across the country. Reports appear on a daily basis detailing the savage effects of budget cuts on local communities, with virtually every municipality witnessing an increase in food-bank usage, homelessness and poverty, and seeing the closure of valuable public resources such as libraries and leisure centres.

According to Labour councillor Richard Watts, Chair of the LGA’s Resources Board, the loss of £1.3 billion of central government funding “is going to tip many councils over the edge. Many local authorities will reach the point where they only have the funds to provide statutory responsibilities and it will be our local communities and economies who will suffer the consequences.”

Against this backdrop, Labour councillors from across the UK wrote an open letter to the Conservative government criticising the cuts to councils. The letter, which announced a campaign launched by Councils Against Austerity at the Labour Party Annual Conference, was signed by 24 Labour council leaders and 12 local Labour group leaders. It called on the Tory government to “recognise the catastrophic impact which eight years of uninterrupted austerity has had on local government.”

Appealing to the government to reverse the “disastrous policy of austerity that has dominated thinking in the Treasury since 2010 and has been disproportionately weighted against local authorities,” the open letter called for a “needs-led approach” to funding and for more local control over council tax rates.

Labour council leaders who signed the open letter include Joseph Ejiofor from Haringey, Susan Hinchcliffe of Bradford, and Barking and Dagenham leader Darren Rodwell.

In fact, one of the focuses of last month’s Labour Party annual conference was ostensibly the party’s opposition to, and fight against austerity measures and their impact on local councils.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn delivered a speech in which a significant section was dedicated to criticising Tory austerity measures and praising Labour councils for standing up against them:

“Eight years of destructive austerity and obsessive outsourcing have left… councils teetering on the precipice…,” he proclaimed, “[A]nd this Government must be held to account for their social vandalism. It is Labour councils and only Labour councils that are taking every step to protect people and services and we must thank them for it.”

This could not be further from the truth.

Claims that the knock-on effects of these austerity measures are merely the result of central government Tory malignancy, and that Labour is the defender of working people against cuts to vital public services, are utterly disingenuous.

Far from standing up to Tory-led austerity measures, Labour councils have loyally imposed every cutback demanded of them, and in many cases are blazing the trail when it comes to attacks on public services and facilities. Local authorities have in effect become property speculators, in moves pioneered by Labour councils. Selling off social assets to private developers, they have earned themselves windfalls in the process.

According to property market data, local authorities in England and Wales spent £758 million buying up commercial property in the first eight months of 2017.

Labour-run Haringey for example, whose new council leader, Joseph Ejiofor, signed the open letter to the government, planned a £2 billion transfer of local authority assets to private developer Lendlease through a 50:50 partnership—the Haringey Development Vehicle (HDV).This would have seen huge swathes of public housing demolished to make way for 6,500 expensive private homes, forcing thousands of working-class families out of London.

Massive public opposition put a halt to the HDV. Haringey Labour members successfully fought for the deselection of Blairite councillors who had given HDV their backing. Having built up intimate connections with property developers, Blairite Claire Kober departed as council leader to take up a lucrative position as director of housing at the housing management group, Pinnacle. The council, however, is still pursuing a social cleansing agenda, with working class areas remaining under the threat of demolition.

In Bradford, whose leader Susan Hinchcliffe was another signatory to the open letter, £30 million of cuts were agreed by the Labour-council earlier this year, primarily targeting adult social care and school nursing and health visiting.

Liverpool, the city which hosted Labour’s conference, has seen some of the worst cuts to public services in the country. Last year the Labour-dominated council slashed £90.3 million from local spending, to be enacted before 2020. In total, between 2010 and 2020, the council will have cut a staggering £600 million from its budget. When adjusted for inflation, the spending reduction equates to a cut of at least 64 percent of the council’s overall budget over the last decade.

A report from the Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research at Sheffield Hallam University showed that in Liverpool, cuts to social welfare programmes will reach £920 a year per working-age person, well above the national average of £690 a year.

Over a quarter of Liverpool’s population of roughly half a million residents are officially poor, making the impact of these cuts doubly painful.

Another flagship Labour council, Birmingham, will have imposed more than £650 million worth of cuts by 2020. As part of its savings programme in preparation for the 2022 Commonwealth Games to be held in the city, the council plans to cut £5 million for Birmingham Children’s Trust, an organisation which supports disadvantaged children. Another organisation, which assists adults who have suffered life-changing events, will lose £2.4 million and 21 children’s centres will also be shut.

Following the example of Conservative-run Northamptonshire County Council, which was declared effectively bankrupt in February this year, there are fears that Birmingham City Council may also become insolvent before 2022.

Despite the claims by Councils Against Austerity that they are waging a struggle against austerity, its signatories do little more than issue toothless criticisms from the side-lines while reliably imposing every spending cut demanded, at a massive human cost.

The duplicity of Corbyn’s claims to be standing up to Tory austerity was clear from the moment he became party leader. He and shadow chancellor John McDonnell issued a letter instructing local Labour councils to abide by the law and set legal budgets, i.e., impose austerity cuts demanded by the Conservative government.

Ever since, Labour councils have continued to enforce the spending cuts first demanded by the 2007-2010 Brown Labour government, and then by the Tory/Liberal Democrat coalition, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of jobs and the decimation of vital services.

French government staggered by Interior Minister Collomb’s resignation

Francis Dubois

The resignation on October 2 of Gérard Collomb, the second-ranking minister in the government, under conditions without precedent in France’s Fifth Republic, has laid bare the extreme weakness and deep crisis of President Emmanuel Macron’s government.

After Macron initially refused Collomb’s resignation on October 1, Collomb submitted it again and forced Macron to accept it a day after having refused it. Macron, apparently taken by surprise, was forced to give the job to Prime Minister Edouard Philippe, while he looked for a replacement. Philippe was then forced to cancel a scheduled official visit to South Africa.

Collomb had already announced last month that he intended to leave the government after the May 2019 European elections, supposedly to run in the municipal elections in Lyon in 2020. This announcement had effectively left France’s powerful interior ministry leaderless.

The departure of one of the Macron presidential campaign’s first supporters and the sudden collapse of the Macron-Collomb alliance, a pillar of the executive since Macron’s election last year, has directly undermined the president. While it was expected, it has also staggered the entire French ruling elite. It underscores the instability of the government as it sets out to make many fundamental attacks on democratic rights and cuts to basic social programs, including pensions, health care and unemployment insurance created by workers’ struggles over several generations.

The press was alarmed at the circumstances of Collomb’s resignation. “In the second year of his term, the late Interior Minister defied the president of the Republic and made him back down. It is a first in the Fifth Republic whose 60th birthday we are celebrating on October 4,” wrote Le Monde, adding: “With his departure, the former ally of Emmanuel Macron has indeed unleashed a crisis of authority at the summit of the state.”

The newspaper also warned about the visible impotence of the “head of government, Edouard Philippe, who will look like a fool in front of the deputies as he seems totally taken by surprise,” although the constitution makes him responsible for nominating and firing ministers.

Echoing broader media accusations that Collomb deserted his post, the paper adds that after Macron and Philippe, “The third victim is Collomb himself, as one wonders if he understood very well the implications of his actions for what is known as the authority of the state.”

After his departure, Collomb immediately distanced himself from the president. He announced his intention to run in the Lyon municipal elections as an unaffiliated candidate, thus abandoning Macron’s Republic on the March (LRM) party. And over the last several days, Collomb and his associates have made multiple biting or alarmist comments in the press about the viability of Macron’s presidency.

Collomb’s associates told La Dépêche du Midi that shortly before his resignation, Collomb told them: “Those who are still able to speak frankly to Macron are those who were there from the beginning: Ferrand, Castaner, Griveaux and me … He will end up hating me. But if everyone bows down before him, he will end up being isolated, because occupying the Elysée presidential palace by nature isolates people.”

Collomb himself declared on LCI that his relationship with Macron exploded because “I tried to bring him news of what is happening on the ground.” He added on BFM-TV that Macron will be a victim of “hubris ... the curse of the gods. When at a certain time, you become overly sure of yourself, you conclude that you will clear out everything in your path. There is a phrase that says that those whom the gods would destroy, they first strike blind.”

Above all, Collomb’s departure takes place amid persistent and broad-based protests and complaints among the police and domestic security forces.

This already erupted into public police protests at the end of 2016 and in 2017, to which Collomb alluded in his resignation speech at the interior ministry on October 3, mentioning the ongoing “revolt” of the police. Thousands of policemen had marched multiple times in cities across France, demanding more funding and recognition for the repression of mass protests against the labor law that they were carrying out under the state of emergency and the so-called “war on terror.”

This opposition also emerged in the Benalla affair this summer, which thoroughly destabilized the government. When it emerged that Alexandre Benalla, a close Macron aide, had beaten up peaceful protesters on May Day while posing as a policeman, much of France’s parliamentary opposition applauded the police against Macron.

At the head of this operation stood Unsubmissive France (LFI) leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who declared an open alliance with the right-wing The Republicans (LR) party on the issue and also worked in concert with the neo-fascist National Rally (formerly National Front) of Marine Le Pen. All of them took the opportunity to support the police repression on May Day.

This episode has confirmed that Macron has indeed lost the support of significant sections of what has long been a key social base of the French government: the police forces.

While the ongoing police protests are fertile grounds for various far-right provocations, Mélenchon is trying to pass them off them off as progressive, and to pass off the police as democratic supporters of the Republic.

In fact, faced with the unpopularity of the executive, the police are preparing stepped-up repression of workers’ struggles and working class neighborhoods. In his resignation speech last week, Collomb insisted on the need for greater police intervention in working class suburbs, saying the police had to “ensure security” and carry out a “Republican reconquest” of these districts.

With Collomb’s departure, it is not simply one of Macron’s longest-standing supporters that is leaving the sinking ship. It is the second top-ranked minister to resign in a month, after Ecology Minister Nicolas Hulot. After the rail strike and the privatization of the National Railways (SNCF), Macron’s popularity ratings have evaporated. An Elabe poll found that only 6 percent of French people believe that his policies will improve their well-being.

Collomb’s departure confirms the enormous weakness of the Macron government, which is fundamentally due to the enormous and growing social inequality in France, and the deep opposition in the working class to Macron’s program.

The rallying of LFI officials close to the union bureaucracy to the side of the police underscores the urgent need for the working class to make a new development in their struggle against Macron and the European Union. As the Socialist Equality Party has explained, to stop the drive to austerity and military-police rule, workers cannot fight within the straitjacket imposed by the unions, which they have already largely abandoned. The task is to build their own committees of action and prepare a movement that will raise the necessity of the transfer of power to the working class.

Israeli mass murder of Gazans targets children

Jean Shaoul 

The Israeli army opened fire on Palestinian protestors in the Gaza Strip Friday, killing three people, including a 12-year-old boy.

Fares Hafez al-Sersawi died along with Mahmud Akram Mohammed Abu Samane, aged 24, after being shot in the chest during demonstrations east of Gaza City, while Hussein al-Rakab, aged 28, died after being shot in the head near the southern city of Khan Yunis. A further 376 people were wounded, seven of whom remain in a critical condition.

The previous Friday, following a relatively quiet period as Israel and Hamas discussed a now-stalled agreement brokered by Egypt, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) escalated its slaughter of unarmed civilians, shooting and killing seven Palestinians demonstrating near Gaza’s border with Israel, and injuring 500.

The seven murdered included 12-year-old Naser Azmi Musbeh and 14-year-old Mohammed Naif al-Houm, while 90 children, four medics and four journalists were among those wounded by live fire. Not a single Israeli was hurt during this bloodbath.

According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, Friday’s toll brings the total number of Palestinians killed to 197 and the number injured to at least 21,600 since the March of Return protests began on March 30. According to the United Nations, 77 Palestinians have required amputation, including 14 children and one woman, while 12 people have been left paralysed due to spinal injuries.

The most powerful military force in the Middle East faces an impoverished and essentially unarmed population. It is brutal and cowardly slaughtering civilians who have faced an economic siege, the destruction of their livelihoods, repeated bombardments, and military assaults over the last 11 years.

Originally scheduled to finish on May 15, the date of the establishment of the State of Israel Palestinians mark as Nakba (Catastrophe) Day, weekly rallies demanded the right of Palestinians to return to the homes from which their families were driven in 1948. Demonstrations have continued, with mid-week beach protests in northern Gaza and the launching of incendiary kites and balloons into Israel, sparking fires that have destroyed forests, burned crops, and killed livestock.

Tensions in the occupied territories have risen following Israel’s introduction of the “Nation-State Law” and Washington’s ending of its financial support for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency—the Palestinian refugee aid body. The law institutionalises discrimination against non-Jewish citizens, sanctions state-supported segregation and the exclusion of Arabs from exclusively Jewish communities and removes Arabic as an official state language.

Of the 197 killed by Israeli forces, a staggering number of children—some 44 or one quarter of the total—have been slain since the protests began, according to the group Defense for Children International, indicating that the murder of young children has become Israel’s new weapon of terror against the Palestinians.

Human rights groups have told the United Nations Human Rights Council, which is carrying out an investigation into Israel’s use of lethal fire against the protestors, that there is no evidence that a single protester in Gaza killed during the march was armed. This gives the lie to the government’s claims that it faces armed terrorists that plan to rush the border with Israel.

The chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court in The Hague, Fatou Bensouda, has warned Israel that its leaders may face trial for the killings of unarmed demonstrators. But this slaughter of men, women and above all children has largely been treated as a non-event by the major imperialist powers and the corporate media.

Secure in Washington’s support, mass murder has been used repeatedly by the Zionist state since its foundation to terrorise the Palestinians and drive them from their villages, farms and homes. Israel’s criminal political elite are now braying for more blood. A bitter battle of words has broken out between two of Israel’s extreme right-wing parties, Israel is our Home and Jewish Home, as they position themselves for what is expected to be an early general election in the New Year, over whether Israel’s deadly crackdown on the protests in Gaza has been harsh enough.

On September 29, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, leader of the far right religious-nationalist Jewish Home party, excoriated Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Gaza policy, calling it insufficiently aggressive. Lieberman, whose Israel is our Home party is in sharp decline, replied on Israel Radio, “Bennett is brazenly lying… What softness is he talking about? Just last Friday seven rioters were killed and over 500 injured and not a single Israeli was hurt.”

Later, Lieberman told Army Radio, “There is a real dispute here—that will remain with us as we enter the election process—between a bizarre, sleepwalking, messianic right, and a responsible right.”

Bennett responded in his own interview on Army Radio by urging the IDF to shoot any Palestinians flying incendiary kites and balloons over the Gaza-Israel border, saying that Lieberman’s policies were only encouraging Hamas, the Islamist party that controls Gaza: “The policy toward Gaza is a leftist policy that will ultimately lead to a full-on flare-up. The situation will be unbearable.”

On Thursday, the IDF announced that it would ramp up its forces in the south and deploy Iron Dome air defence batteries in the Gaza area, claiming that its aim was to “thwart terrorism and prevent penetration into Israel along the Gaza border fence.”

On Friday, Lieberman declared that Israel had in fact pulled back from responding harshly to the Palestinian protests to avoid a major conflict during the Jewish Holy Days season (September 9 to October 1), and tweeted, “The holidays are over, and I say to the heads of Hamas: ‘Take that into account’.”

He followed this up the next day with an announcement that Israel was reducing Gaza’s fishing zone from nine nautical miles to six nautical miles, in further breach of the 20 nautical miles agreed under the Oslo Accords, citing Friday’s “riots” as justification for this collective punishment.

In another move calculated to intensify the divisions between Hamas and Fatah, the rival Palestinian faction for control of the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank, Tel Aviv approved Qatar’s purchase of fuel for Gaza from Israel, overriding the PA’s objections. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu threatened a further crackdown against the Palestinians in Gaza. Speaking alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a press conference on Thursday, he warned that Israel’s response to an attack by Hamas would be “very harsh.”

Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’ leader in Gaza, called for a ceasefire with Israel, telling an Israeli newspaper that he did not want another war. He said, “It’s in no one’s interest. We cannot prevail in a confrontation against a nuclear power. And certainly [another conflict] is not in our interest. War gains nothing.”

Far from seeking to rein in its chief ally in the Middle East, the Trump administration believes that Tel Aviv can be used to further Washington’s own imperialist designs for global domination. Green lighting the murderous offensive against Gaza by its Israeli attack dog is only a means to an end: the removal of the Syrian and Iranian regimes, by means of an economic and diplomatic blockade, subversion, and war as part of the broader aim of transforming the resource-rich region into a de facto colony of US imperialism.

Limo crash in upstate New York kills 20

Josh Varlin

A limousine crash on October 6 in Schoharie, New York, killed 20 people, making it the deadliest transportation accident in the US since 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed in Buffalo, killing 50 people. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating the crash, with initial reports indicating that a dangerous intersection contributed to the accident.

NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt told reporters Sunday: “The fact that the NTSB is here indicates we’re very concerned about this. I’ve been on the board for 12 years and this is one of the biggest losses of life we have seen in a very long time.”

The crash is the worst in the Albany-area Capital Region since the 2005 sinking of a tour boat on Lake George, which killed 20 people, many of whom were vacationers from Michigan.

Family members of some of the victims have told the press that the limo passengers were traveling to a birthday party and came from multiple families. While the names of the victims have not been officially released as of this writing, some information has become public through relatives’ statements and GoFundMe pages.

Among the deceased are two newlywed couples: Erin Vertucci and Shane McGowan, as well as Axel and Amy Steenburg. Vertucci worked at St. Mary’s Healthcare in Amsterdam, New York, as an administrative assistant. Employees of a local superconductor manufacturing company, GlobalFoundries, were also among those killed.

Saturday’s crash happened just before 2 p.m., when the limo driver failed to stop at an intersection at the bottom of a hill, continued into the parking lot of Apple Barrel Country Store, hitting two people and an unoccupied SUV, then collided with an earthen embankment. All 18 people in the limo, as well as the two struck in the parking lot, were killed.

As deadly as the crash was, it could have been even worse. Apple Barrel Country Store is a popular tourist destination during the fall, when tourists travel to upstate New York to see the foliage change colors. Jessica Kirby, the store manager, told the New York Times that the store was packed for Columbus Day weekend, which is usually its busiest. Most of her customers had arrived from New York City, the state capitol Albany or New Jersey, she told the Times.

The intersection, where State Route 30 and State Route 30A meet in a T, is notoriously dangerous. The two roads meet after descending “steeply downhill,” according to the Times. There is only a stop sign at the intersection, rather than a more visible traffic light. The speed limit leading into the intersection is 50 mph, according to a Google Maps Street View capture from August 2016.

Kirby told the Times, “We’ve had three tractor-trailer type vehicles—they come down that hill too fast, they go through our parking lot and they end up in a field behind our business.”

Schoharie Town Supervisor Alan Tavenner said that the state Department of Transportation worked on the intersection about seven years ago, although to no apparent effect. The Albany-based Times-Union quotes Tavenner saying, “There have been tractor trailers that have come barreling down that hill and it was a miracle they didn’t kill somebody.”

Tavenner told the Times, “I honestly think it was a more dangerous intersection than it was before.”

Accidents are so frequent that Kirby immediately recognized the sound and called 911. “We’ve heard accidents before. You know that sound when it happens.”

The tragedy underscores the dangerous state of roads in the United States. Despite the intersection’s hazards being known for years, adequate measures were not taken, apparently contributing to the avoidable deaths of 20 people.

It also underscores the semi-regulated nature of stretch limos. After a 2015 limo accident on Long Island that killed four people, a grand jury found serious safety issues with limos with aftermarket modifications.

Aftermarket limousines are not subject to the same safety regulations as factory-made limos. According to the Associated Press, “A grand jury found that vehicles converted into stretch limousines often don't have safety measures including side-impact air bags, reinforced rollover protection bars and accessible emergency exits.”

The main outcome of the 2015 crash was that the NTSB would investigate limousine crashes on a case-by-case basis.

It is not clear as of this writing if the 2001 Ford Excursion in the crash had aftermarket modifications, although it did have 17 passengers in addition to the driver.

Fascistic candidate Jair Bolsonaro places first in Brazilian presidential election

Miguel Andrade 

The Brazilian general elections held on Sunday resulted in the most right-wing Congress since the end of the 1964-1985 US-backed military dictatorship and gave the fascistic former Army reserve captain Jair Bolsonaro a wide lead in the presidential contest.

Failing to win an outright majority of the ballots, Bolsonaro faces a run-off on October 28 against Workers Party (PT) candidate Fernando Haddad. Bolsonaro won 46 percent of the vote, barely 4 percent short of a first-round victory. Haddad, a former mayor of Sao Paulo, came in a distant second, with 29 percent, corresponding to roughly 30 million votes. Abstention and spoiled ballots were at a record high, at 40 million votes, a significant figure considering that voting is mandatory in Brazil and repeated abstention is punished by fines, withholding of passports and, most importantly, exclusion from civil service.

Twelve percent voted for Ciro Gomes, of the Democratic Labor Party, the oldest functioning bourgeois party in Brazil, which is the heir of the 1937-1945 corporatist politics of dictator Getúlio Vargas and is associated with bourgeois opposition to the 1964-1985 military regime.

Geraldo Alckmin, of Brazil’s former traditional right-wing party, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB), saw his party’s electoral obliteration, dropping from 48 percent of the vote in the 2014 run-off against the PT to only 5 percent in Sunday’s balloting. Marina Silva, a former PT environmental minister who since 2010 commanded the support of sections of big business such as the powerful heir to Brazil’s largest private bank, Neca Setúbal, saw her vote collapse from 21 percent in 2014 to only one percent.

The PT’s main self-declared “left” opposition, the pseudo-left Morenoite-Pabloite alliance, the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), won just 0.6 percent of the vote, down from 1.6 percent in 2014 and a far cry from its first election in 2006, in which it won 7 percent of the vote based on its criticism of the PT’s neoliberal policies.

The elections were overshadowed by the worst economic crisis in Brazil’s history, with the GDP drop between 2015 and 2016 the largest since the 1929 crash, and the slowest recovery in history, with employment and median income projected by bourgeois economists to return to their 2013 levels only by 2027.

The entire political system has been thoroughly discredited by the massive corruption scandal surrounding the state-run energy giant Petrobras, exposed in the so-called “Lava Jato” (Car Wash) probe, which has so far uncovered 12 billion reais (US$4 billion) siphoned from public funds into bribes and kickbacks. The scheme was further shown to be an integral part of the so-called “national champions” policy of favoring nationally owned industrial, infrastructure and agribusiness monopolies in the national and international markets, whose expansion was made possible by the late 2000s commodity boom.

Having overseen the massive corruption scheme and the beginning of the economic crisis, the PT saw a wholesale desertion of working-class voters in regions it had historically dominated, mainly in the country’s industrial south, winning there by the smallest margin since it first came to power in 2002 with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, popularly known as Lula.

The collapse of support for the PT, combined with major youth and working-class protests against the brutal austerity and privatization program imposed by Lula’s successor, PT President Dilma Rousseff, beginning on the first day of her second term with the nomination of “Chicago Boy” Joaquim Levy as her finance minister, emboldened the far right to push for Rousseff’s impeachment in 2016. While her ouster was initially opposed by bankers, agribusiness bosses and industrialists as “disruptive,” it finally gained their support in order to accelerate the austerity program she herself had implemented.

As the Car Wash probe developed, endless accounts by jailed businessmen of their corrupt relations with PT officials, including first and foremost Lula, provided further means for the weakening of the PT and finally, for the jailing of Lula himself. Lula’s conviction on the charge of receiving a beachfront penthouse in exchange for rigging Petrobras contracts further eroded the PT’s position, taking Lula out of the electoral race. While he initially was the front-running candidate for president, with 30 percent support, he also faced a 50 percent rejection by those polled, while a clear majority has indicated its opposition to his release from prison.

Anti-corruption rhetoric, together with ultra-nationalist agitation against the “sale” of Brazilian assets to China and Chinese investments in African and Latin American countries (condemned as “handouts”), combined with tough-on-crime and anti-immigrant demagogy has served as the stock-in-trade of the far-right crusade against the PT. This has been consciously directed at the neglected working class, especially in declining or struggling industrial regions.

The Car Wash probe became a major tool for a violent turn to the right. After Rousseff’s 2016 impeachment, her vice president and successor, Michel Temer, imposed a labor reform allowing unhindered contract work in companies while decimating health and safety regulations. His government later imposed a 20-year spending freeze through a constitutional amendment. In the face of every attack, the PT was unwilling and unable to mobilize the working class. Together with its affiliated trade union confederation, the CUT, it called off at the last minute a series of general strikes, even in face of immense working-class militancy, thereby strengthening the ultra-nationalist, far-right appeals to workers.

With Brazil’s ruling class determined to wage a class war on workers, Bolsonaro has garnered decisive support from business circles, which used to swing between the PSDB and the PT, most prominently the so-called “Bible, Beef and Bullets” caucus which grew to comprise a third of Congress during the 13-year rule of the PT and provided its governments with decisive support for right-wing policies on many occasions.

Most importantly, the caucus was the breeding ground for the fascistic Bolsonaro, who has held a seat as Rio de Janeiro state’s representative in the lower house for seven straight terms since 1991.

In 1999, he stated his desire for “an audience” with then-Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, declaring him “a hope for Latin America,” and stating that neither he nor Chávez were “anti-communist.” For these supposedly “nationalist” positions, Bolsonaro was not only tolerated in the PT-led congressional alliance, but considered an important vote against neoliberal measures that the PT government itself rammed through over more than a decade, such as the 2003 pensions reform, allowing him to fashion a fraudulent right-wing populist and nationalist appeal.

Coming from Rio de Janeiro, a city the PT transformed into a virtual federal protectorate in order to build the infrastructure to host the 2014 Soccer World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics in the face of massive opposition to evictions, the under-funding of health and education and military operations in working-class neighborhoods, Bolsonaro was able to exploit a widespread perception of the PT’s betrayal of workers in favor of big business. He also appealed to fear of crime with extreme pro-gun, pro-military rhetoric—the signature gesture used by the candidate and his supporters has been pointing their fingers as if they were firing guns. Bolsonaro has called for making it easier for police to kill criminals, this in a country where cops killed over 5,000 people last year.

Bolsonaro faces a 45 percent rejection rate in the polls, compared to 40 percent for his PT adversary, Haddad. If this widespread rejection proves enough for Haddad to defeat him on October 28, the result will be a return to power by the PT at the head of the most right-wing government since the end of the military dictatorship.

Bolsonaro has indicated that his defeat at the polls would be illegitimate and has openly appealed to the military—which has recently intervened in politics in a manner unprecedented since the end of the dictatorship—for support.

While appealing to big business for support and seeking to cobble together an “anti-fascist alliance” embracing demoralized right-wing “democratic” politicians in the PSDB and even discredited media conglomerates that have carried anti-Bolsonaro reports, such as the right-wing O Globo network and Veja magazine, the PT, a thoroughly bourgeois party, is neither able nor willing to make any class appeal to the working class.

The PT’s policies will only strengthen the far right and heighten the threat of a return to an even bloodier dictatorship than the one that ruled the country for two decades beginning in 1964.

The only answer to these dangers is the building of a new revolutionary leadership in the working class through the construction of a Brazilian section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Reporting 2018

Application Deadline: 24th October, 2018 by 4pm

Eligible Countries: Nigeria

To be taken at (country): Nigeria

About the Award: The 13th Edition of the Wole Soyinka Award for Investigative Reporting is now open for entries from Nigerian professional journalists or team of journalists, full-time or part-time, with stories published between 4th October 2017 and 3rd October 2018.
An annual event of the Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ), the award, seeks to honour journalism works from the print, radio, television, photography, online and editorial cartoon categories.
Submitted reports must involve in-depth coverage of clandestine activities on public and or corporate corruption, human rights abuses, or on regulatory failures in Nigeria.
Received entries will be collated using the award coding system and assessed by a panel of media experts and related professionals with good understanding of investigative reporting. The judges’ board would broadly score stories based on quality of investigation, evidence, human rights elements, ethical reportage, courage, individual creativity, public interest, impact and quality of presentation.

Eligible Fields: 

• Print
• Radio
• Television
• Photography
• Online
• Editorial Cartoon

Type: Contest

Eligibility and Selection Criteria: The main criterion for eligibility is that the work (single work or single-subject serial) must involve reporting on public, and or corporate corruption, human rights violation, or on the failure of regulatory agencies. The story should reflect a high quality of investigation in terms of newsworthiness, capacity to expose or prevent clandestine activities, corruption in the public domain, an understanding of human rights implications enhanced by the quality of delivery/presentation/writing. Such works should have been first published or broadcast in a Nigerian media between 4th October 2017 and 3rd October 2018.
An applicant may only submit a maximum of a total of two entries.
Print Entries – Newspaper and Magazine

• Entrants are required to send the original and a CLEAN Photocopy

Broadcast Entries – Radio and Television

• Transcripts should be written in English language
• Audio entries should be sent in audio CD format, with accompanying script while video entries must be on CD, with accompanying script.
• 2 copies of each entry is required

Photographic Entries

• In addition to the broad criteria, photo entries will be scored on creativity, impact and technical quality.
• Each entry must be well captioned in English
• It must come with the original photo, a copy of the published work with a clean photocopy of the latter and a CD with the picture(s)

Online Entries

• Clearly indicated URL (web link) for the published work is required as printouts are unacceptable.
• Entry should be sent online to entries@wscij.org

Editorial Cartooning

• In addition to the broad criteria, editorial cartooning will also be scored on impact, creativity and originality.
• An original copy of the published work with clean photocopy are required

Generally

• Entry is free.
• Only a maximum of two entries across all categories of the award will be allowed per entrant.
• All submitted works must be in English Language.
• The reporter with the most outstanding work(s) amongst the finalists will be selected as the WSCIJ-Nigerian Investigative Reporter of the year.
• Entering for this competition commits you to grant WSCIJ a worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free licence to use your works for any purpose deemed appropriate for the development of the award initiative, the Centre and the Nigerian and global media.
• To enhance the development of media in the country, reporters that have been winners in this competition on at least three occasions are ineligible to enter.
• Employees of the WSCIJ and/or their immediate families are ineligible to participate in the competition.
• WSCIJ guarantees that there is no connection between any sponsor and the judging process despite possible sponsorship of some categories of the award.
• The competition shall be covered and interpreted with the laws of Nigeria.

Selection: All entries will be collated using the entry coding system and judged by a panel of experts from the media and related professions who are keen on investigative journalism. Judges would score stories based on ethical reporting, courage, individual creativity and public interest slant.

How to Apply: The submitted package should include:

• A brief synopsis of the story/series, picture, or portfolio.

In the synopsis,  the applicant is expected to:

• Explain the background of the project, identifying the issues and key players.
• Describe what led to the topic or caption, any unusual condition faced in developing the project and whether the investigation had any ramifications.
• Describe challenges to the content of the story/series that were not reported in the original work.
• Include up-to-date curriculum vitae for every reporter who bears the byline of the story with passport photograph(s).
• Include any relevant background information on submitted work(s).

Kindly send entries to:
The Centre Coordinator,
18A, Abiodun Sobanjo Street, Off Lateef Jakande Road,
Agidingbi, Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria.
Online entries must however, be sent via email to entries@wscij.org

Visit Contest Webpage for details

Award Provider: Wole Soyinka Centre for Investigative Journalism (WSCIJ)

Important Notes: 

• Synopsis should be in English and a maximum of 400 words
• All submissions (apart from the online entry where submission is to be made by email) should be in hard copy for all categories.

Swiss – sub-Saharan Africa Business Development Programme for African Entrepreneurs 2018

Application Deadline: 31st October 2018

Eligible Countries: sub-Saharan African countries

To be taken at (country): Nairobi & Switzerland

About the Award: The Swiss – Sub-Saharan business development program (SSABDP) aims to boost the entrepreneurial know-how and exposure of Sub-Saharan graduate students – entrepreneurs seeking growth opportunities by offering a unique program bringing entrepreneurs to innovation hotspot in Nairobi and Switzerland.
Offered free of charge to ambitious young entrepreneurs, this highly competitive program comprises a 3-days workshop for advanced innovation entrepreneurs, and for the top eight candidates, a 4 days intense business development Venture Leaders program in the Swiss startup and business ecosystem.

Type: Training, Entrepreneurship

Eligibility:

• Open to graduate students – entrepreneurs and startups from Sub-Saharan African innovation hubs, with a strong link to academia, developing products or services in the fields of mobile health, pharmacometrics, innovative financing and digital humanities/knowledge transfer.
• Your project or company must be based on research or technology developed at a local university/research institute.

Number of Awards: Not specified

Value of Award: The program is free of charge. Accommodation expenses on site in Nairobi are covered by the program. For the Swiss week, flights, transport and accommodation in Switzerland are also covered by the program.

Duration of Programme: 

• Selection of participants: Nov 19^th 2018
• Advanced entrepreneurs workshop in Nairobi : December 10^th to 12^th 2018
• Business development bootcamp in Switzerland
  Spring 2019 (dates to be confirmed)

How to Apply: Apply here!

Visit Programme Webpage for Details

Award Providers: 

1. Venturelab
2. Universität Basel
3. AfriLabs
4. SERI (Swiss Confoederation)

Syria’s No-Fly Zone

Askiah Adam

The Russian Defence Minister has announced that the promised S-300 air defence system has been delivered to Syria with the Karushka 4 radar systems jammer and other related military equipment, to boost the safety of Russia’s military personnel and facilities. The system will be in place by 20thOctober. Syrian Army personnel will, meanwhile, be brought up to speed in three months to operate the system which has the combined effect of effectively closing the Syrian airspace to unfriendly air crafts.

There is then no room for doubt that Russia’s promise to bolster the security of her interests in Syria is about accomplishing a no-fly zone over most of Syria, if not all of it.

Israel, on her part, even while sending condolences to Moscow, is remorselessly threatening to carry on attacking what Tel Aviv claims are Iranian targets in Syria, regardless of the S-300s and the jammers; there only because her fighter jets’ cynical manoeuvres resulted in the recent downing of Russia’s EW aircraft IL-20 shot by friendly fire killing all 15 crewmen on board. The Israeli fighters were attacking Latakia province at the time and the detailed data of the incident as captured by the S-400 on Russia’s Hmeymim air base proved this in no uncertain terms: Israeli jets were using the IL-20 as cover.

Russia’s Defence Minister’s anger left no room for speculation but President Putin appeared to be initially looking for a non-confrontational way out. In the end, irrespective of how one reads meanings into his words the outcome is, indisputably, a no-fly zone over Syria.

For Israel, this will mean a substantial crippling of her formerly undisputed air superiority over the region. However, even as is, without Russia’s forbearance — the deconfliction measures agreed to between her and Russia, as is true of the agreement between Russia and the US — the skies over Syria already invited caution because in place is a combination of Syria’s S-200, and Russia’s S-400 and S-300, the latter two to guarantee the safety of her air base, Hmeymim, and her naval base, Tartus. In short, it is fair to assume that had the deconfliction measures been in place the 200 attacks carried out by Israel on Syrian territory over the past year, which Tel Aviv recently boasted of, could not have been so easily achieved.

Thus far this triangular power configuration has been as if playing at war. The aim is to free Syria of terrorists. For as long as the deaths of civilians and damage to infrastructure caused by US allied bombings can be classified as necessary collateral damage there is very little Russia can do without escalating tensions between the major “players”. But the IL-20 tragedy is without doubt a pre-meditated move by Israel, which resulted in the loss of a valuable Russian military asset and 15 highly specialised airmen.

John Bolton, the White House National Security Advisor, has warned Moscow that this Russian move is considered an escalation. But of what? If at all there is a war it is with the terrorists. Is Washington admitting that these are not terrorists but rather mercenaries of an American proxy army?

Israel promises to keep attacking Syria. President Putin since intervening in Syria has, on many occasions, gone out of his way to prevent the outbreak of war with NATO that could bring the world to the brink. Unfortunately, this is perceived of as a weakness waiting to be exploited.

But much as Putin might want to avoid a war with another nuclear power whose  total disregard for civilian lives is beyond dispute, what pretext can there now be which will not appear to the Russian people as a betrayal of the 15 airmen, crew of the IL-20? Russian lives have been lost in what to many is a foreign war.

Then, too, what about the prestige Russia has built over the recent years that helped restore her position as a superpower and, necessarily, the Cold War balance of terror that afforded the world a measure of security. And, what about the threatening and callous actions of the US and her allies, which makes discounting a nuclear war impossible. Subservience to Washington is, therefore, not an option.

That the US and her allies are pushing for war is difficult to ignore and Israel’s security is a good enough excuse for them. Placing Iran squarely in their cross-hairs to secure Israel’s safety facilitates this. But can they find a way of undermining the no-fly zone, militarily, now that Russia has lost all goodwill for compromises? Or, has Russia really lost all goodwill for her adversaries?

Apparently the deconfliction agreement is still operational. But are the gloves now irretrievably off such that one false step will witness “enemy” fighters dropping from the skies over Syria? Israel’s belligerence is unrelenting. Washington though, while no less so, is more circumspect.

Are the US and her allies, including the ever vacillating Turkey, virtually checkmated in Syria? Will a crushing defeat of the Jihadists in Idlib be possible without civilians being sacrificed? After all, without their backers the proxy army of assorted terrorists will be crippled as has been demonstrated time and time again.

Of course, this assumes that reason will prevail. But what if reason, already so elusive in certain quarters, cannot prevail? Can a surprise attack on Syria and her allies be on the cards and low yield nuclear weapons be used by the US in the belief that it is a feasible option in a first strike strategy?

That is the clear and present danger which the world is now facing. To the neoconservatives and the Deep State this is the best opportunity they have for obliterating the challenger once and for all and global hegemony be achieved. Will they chance it?

Bearing in mind America’s Nuclear Doctrine of pre-emptive nuclear war this is not as far fetched as it may seem. And, while Russia is way ahead in terms of military capability has she the means to counter this suicidal desperation successfully? For, according to the experts in a nuclear war, no matter how limited, the one who makes the first strike cannot but be victorious.

And then there is the theological doctrine that the goyims (non-Jews)are  dispensable when they serve no purpose. What more when they are obstacles. To the apartheid Jewish state this has serious political consequences. Therefore, most logically, a nuclear armed Israel gone rogue would be the biggest threat to the world.

Australian government hands private schools another $4.6 billion

David Cohen

The Liberal-National Coalition government has pledged an extraordinary $4.6 billion in additional funding, over the next decade, for private schools across the country, including some of the most elite and wealthy institutions.

The latest windfall will accelerate the gulf between well-resourced private schools and cash-starved public schools, in what is already one of the world’s most unequal education systems.

A recent OECD report, “Education at a Glance 2018,” showed that Australia has the highest proportion of private funding for non-tertiary education—19 percent of total spending—of any advanced economy. This is twice the OECD average of 8 percent.

Between 2005 and 2015, the government’s share of total expenditure on non-tertiary education fell from 73 percent to 66 percent. Within the OECD, only Turkey and Colombia have lower proportions of public funding for primary and secondary schools.

The promotion of private schools by successive Labor and Coalition governments has resulted in the rate of secondary private school student enrolments rise to 40 percent, with the proportion greater than 50 percent in parts of the country’s large cities.

The latest pretext for doling out more public money to private schools was provided by the release of a government-commissioned report into how private schools’ “socio-economic status” (SES) is calculated. The SES affects the level of public funding they receive.

In June, the National School Resourcing Board issued its final report (known as the Chaney Report, after the board’s chair Michael Chaney). Like his education advisor counterpart David Gonski, Chaney is a major figure in the corporate world, currently serving as chairman of Australia’s largest conglomerate, Wesfarmers. The Chaney Report examined the SES methodology that was first introduced in 2001 by the Coalition government of John Howard as a means of funnelling greater public money into elite schools. The SES calculated a school’s status, not on the basis of the actual wealth of its students’ families, or the institution’s existing assets and infrastructure. Instead, it applied a census data average of income, education, and employment of all households in the area where the students lived. This allowed multiple distortions favouring wealthy private schools.

The Chaney Report concluded that enhanced government data collection now allowed a different calculation, based on the median income of parents and guardians at each school. The report stressed that private schools would not be negatively affected by this shift. “Preliminary modelling of the potential financial impact of using a direct household income approach indicates that nationally, both the Catholic and independent sectors would continue to receive significant funding increases, well above inflation, assuming all other variables remain unchanged,” it explained.

Chaney rejected a consideration of household wealth (a more accurate indicator of socio-economic status than income). He also dismissed school wealth, including bequests, fees and assets. The latter was rejected for inclusion in a school’s socio-economic status on the grounds that “the assets a school possesses may not reliably indicate the parents’ or guardians’ capacity to contribute.” The report declared that “it is often the case that new school capital facilities like swimming pools, drama centres and new classrooms or laboratories are funded by a relatively small proportion of the school community, with a large proportion not doing so.”

In other words, the ability of an ultra-wealthy layer within a school to finance (as has been documented in different elite schools) Olympic-class athletic facilities, quadrangles modelled on Oxford and Cambridge, or an “aquatic and wellbeing centre,” has no bearing on the amount of public funding it should receive.

This amounted to such a blatant diversion of public funds that one National School Resourcing Board member, Australian Catholic University Vice-Chancellor Greg Craven, issued a dissenting statement. He warned that ignoring schools’ private incomes “would be correspondingly corrosive of the public’s acceptance of any system as robust or reliable,” adding: “In my view, it simply passes belief that the average Australian, faced with the fact that the fees for a school were $30,000, or indeed $20,000, would not conclude that these figures were to a significant extent reflective of the capacity of that school’s community to contribute to recurrent costs of that school’s education.”

Responding to the report on September 20, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Education Minister Dan Tehan ignored Craven’s concerns and endorsed the Chaney Report’s recommendations. They pledged an extra $4.6 billion for private schools—$3.2 billion over 10 years for “non-government schools identified as needing the most help,” $170.8 million to be handed over next year in the name of “funding certainty,” and an additional $1.2 billion for vaguely-worded “specific challenges in the non-government school sector,” including “schools that need help to improve performance and to deliver choice in communities.”

The government’s mantra of “school choice” is a fraud. Working-class families who cannot afford the fees charged by private schools have little choice but to send their children to local public schools, many of which are badly over-crowded, with run-down infrastructure and over-stretched teaching staff.

Even those private schools in working-class areas, mostly Catholic institutions, receive more public money than equivalent public schools. According to data collected by the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA), and made public via a freedom of information request, Catholic schools in disadvantaged areas annually receive an average of $10,000 per student extra funding than neighbouring public schools. For a public school with 500 students, this equates to a funding shortfall of $5 million every year.

The entire parliamentary establishment is responsible for the crisis in public education. The Labor Party directly paved the way for the latest handout to private schools. Opposition leader Bill Shorten attempted to curry favour with the Catholic Church ahead of a forthcoming federal election by promising its schools extra cash. Last March, a week before a by-election in the Melbourne electorate of Batman, Shorten wrote to Archbishop Denis Hart pledging that “Catholic schools would be more than $250 million better off in our first two years of government alone.” The church then made 30,000 “robo-calls” and sent letters to all Catholic school families in the area, urging a Labor vote in the by-election.

The politics of education funding, however, is not merely bound up with crass electoral calculations. Public schools have been deliberately neglected and run down by Labor and Coalition governments alike. This is one of the sharpest expressions of the offensive waged by the ruling elite against the working class. While no resources are spared for the children of the upper-middle class and the super-rich, public schools for working class youth, for whom the capitalist system has no decent future, are being systematically downgraded.

The teacher unions have been complicit in the public school funding debacle. While the Australian Education Union issued empty verbal protests over the latest funding deal, it was only in order to promote its bogus “fair funding now” campaign, which aims to help elect another pro-business Labor government.

The working class—including teachers, school staff, parents, guardians and students—can only take forward a genuine fight for the right of all to a freely accessible, high quality public education by striking out on a new road. The basic social right to free public education and healthcare, along with decent jobs, housing and full access to culture, requires the socialist reorganisation of society. The banks and major corporations must be expropriated and transformed into publicly-owned utilities, under the democratic control of the working class, so that the wealth it produces is used to satisfy social need, not to boost corporate profits. This perspective is alone advanced by the Committee For Public Education, established by the Socialist Equality Party.