The international statistics say that Australia’s education performance is slipping, but how can this be when spending on education has been increasing in real terms for decades?

Part of the answer to this riddle can be seen in the words of educationist Stewart Riddle.

According to yesterday’s Australian:

In an article posted on The Conversation website last week, Dr Riddle invokes a two-tier school system, saying the literacy skills needed by Aboriginal children in remote communities are different from those required in major cities as measured by the national literacy tests, NAPLAN.

“What relevance does sitting for the NAPLAN tests have for a young child, living in a largely oral-language culture in remote communities, where English may be their third or fourth language?” he says.

“It might be argued that such attempts (to close the gap) are no better than historic attempts to make Aboriginal kids more ‘white’ by sending them off to missions to be properly educated.”

I can see no reason why Riddle should not be sacked, or demoted. This quote exhibits a racist tendency. Apparently Aborigines simply aren’t capable of mastering normal intellectual concepts because they are not “white”. Their future should be limited to the past.

It also exhibits a complete disregard for the normative educational values of not just western, but human society. If this is his attitude towards Aborigines, what is his attitude towards poor “white” kids, or migrants? How does he judge their needs

Our society is based on the idea of progress, which rests on the idea of the autonomous individual. To be autonomous every individual needs access to a common pool of cultural knowledge and intellectual understanding.

That is why, for over 100 years, the most advanced societies have placed such a premium on education that they have made it freely available to anyone up to the age of 17 or 18.

The reason that Australian educational standards are dropping is that the Stewart Riddles of this world are a significant percentage of the population of education faculties across the country.

While he should get the sack for this outburst, he is more likely to be rewarded with promotion, and trips to conferences to discuss educating with cultural sensitivity.

Education in Australia won’t start to improve until state governments cut not just the power of teachers’ unions to set terms and conditions in the classrooms, but the power of university education faculties to determine what sort of teaching graduate is turned-out.

Perhaps states need to do their own teacher training and cut unis and loonies out of the loop.

Professor Joseph Stiglitz is over here to tell Australia how to run an economy, when it really ought to be a research tour so he can educate his fellow Americans on best practice.

What Australia has done contradicts much of what Stiglitz recommends, and proves empirical proof that he’s wrong.

This is a situation when MiltonJohn Maynard Keynes would have been sure to advise him to “change his mind”.

And while Australia is close to best practice, there are some other countries that are even better practice, and one of them, is in the vicinity.

Yesterday Fitch Ratings affirmed their AA ratings and revised their outlook to positive.

I don’t put a lot of faith in ratings agencies – which of them picked the GFC toxic debt crisis – but it does focus attention on New Zealand, which didn’t suffer the handicap of the Rudd and Gillard governments.

As a result it didn’t “Go hard, go households”, and still had growth better than the US since 2008. Its growth is not quite as good as Australia’s, but they also didn’t have mining and population booms.

NZ is facing a budget surplus and is repaying debt. It also has a polity in which all sides seem to be responsible about the economy, unlike Australia where Shorten and Palmer are happy to vandalise the place for their own personal gains.

Stiglitz should economise on his plane fare and drop over the ditch. He might take some of our own soothsayers with him as well. Everyone can learn from our cousins.

As an introductory primer her could do worse than read this short news report on the NZ budget from the ABC.

One of the best reasons for being skeptical of many of the claims made about CO2 emissions is not the science, but the language. I went from being a more or less mainstream adherent to a skeptic when I read a defamatory media release from the IPCC.

In it Rajendra Pachauri branded Ian Castles, former head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and Ian Henderson, Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and the ANU “so-called experts” because they had dared to point out that economic projections being used as a proxy for rate of growth of CO2 emissions were incorrectly based on market exchange rates rather than purchasing power parity.

At that moment I knew there was a scandal, and was surprised that none of my journalistic colleagues picked up on it.

In Climate change: The moment I became a climate skeptic journalist Zev Chafets recounts his own encounter with language that gave the game away.

I called the professor, one of the authors of the report, for a clarification (he remains nameless because we were off the record). “If global warming is caused by man-made emissions,” I asked, “what accounts for the world warming to this same level 10,000 years ago?”

There was a long silence. Then the professor said, “Are you serious?”

I admitted that I was.

The professor loudly informed me that my question was stupid. The panel’s conclusion was indisputable science, arrived at after years of research by a conclave of the world’s leading climate scholars. Who was I to dispute it?

I told him I wasn’t disputing it, just trying to understand how, you know, the world could have been this hot before without the help of human agency. Maybe this is just a natural climate change like ice ages that once connected continents and warming periods that caused them to drift apart or …

At which point I heard a click. The professor hung up on me. At that exact moment I became a climate skeptic. I may not know anything about science, but I have learned over a long career that when an expert hangs up in the middle of a question, it means that he doesn’t know the answer.

If a politician behaved like this expert, or Pachauri, a journalist would sense a major scoop and chase it. But not, it seems, for most, with climate change.

What is it about the term scientist that euthanases the common sense of journalists and transports them into raptures of conformism? They may not understand the science, but there job is to understand words.

The science and words both point in the same direction. When it comes to CO2 emissions we’re not really sure what effect they might have, but it’s likely to be a lot less than the alarmists would have you think.

Nobel Prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz is in Australia to tell us how to run a successful economy.

According to Stiglitz our government should be spending more, not trying to get its budget back into surplus.

It says a lot about Australians’ inferiority complex that we give people like this the time of day. Because if we weren’t so certain that all wisdom resides overseas we’d recognise that our economic performance since the 1980s has been one of the best in the world.

And that stellar economic performance was not driven by following any of the policy prescriptions that Stiglitz preaches.

Stiglitz, influential in the US and as a former World Bank economist, doesn’t exactly have a successful track record to run on. If you were looking for examples of what to do, neither of those institutions would be the place you would look.

The US has been overspending for years, aided and abetted by the Greenback being the world’s reserve currency. But it hasn’t brought them extraordinary wealth, and their performance after the GFC compared to ours has been anaemic.

Rather than telling us what to do Stiglitz should be asking our advice on how to structure an economy and a banking sector so that they don’t go into shock and meltdown so easily.

He’ll find that the reason Australia has fared so well is that we have built ourselves a flexible economy which reacts quickly to stimuli, preserving financial and social capital. We allow entrepreneurs to get on with the business of business, and we have a tightly targeted welfare system that ensures those who need support get it, and those who don’t can look after themselves.

We don’t have quantitative easing, and we do have banks whose key business is lending, not merchant banking and speculation.

There are some blemishes – we have a housing sector which has become overpriced as a result of town planning policies, and unwinding this bubble will be difficult and take time – but they are minor compared to the boils that need to be lanced in the US economy.

And we had a government for the last few years who decided to spend without looking at the return. By doing this they raised expenses and expectations unrealistically in advance of income.

Stiglitz is here as a guest of The Australia Institute, one of the cheer squad for the debilitating economic policies of the last 6 years.

As such he is not here as an economist, but as a prop in the agitprop of domestic politics.

Much like Al Gore lent his Nobel Laureate to the reprobate Clive Palmer.

It’s unlikely to end any better for Stiglitz than it did for Gore, although at least the TAI is on his side.