Working conditions for 77,000 staff in Victorian government schools, and the learning conditions of our 650,000 students, are being renegotiated. As we pass the 30 April expiry date of the current Victorian Government Schools Agreement, it’s important that school staff are familiar with the main claims of the Australian Education Union. We need to discuss what sort of action will be needed to win these claims, and be confident to argue that there is plenty of money available to pay school staff. 
Here are some of the most important claims from the union:
Reduction in teaching hours to 18 per week, from 20 in high schools, and 22.5 in primary. For teachers, workload is the issue. Surveys show that Victorian teachers work an average of 53 hours per week during term. This means that many teachers are doing an extra two full days of work, every week, on top of a standard working week. 
Australian teacher workloads are <a href="https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/australian-teachers-work-longer-hours-than-those-in-most-oecd-countries-20190807-p52evu.html">extreme</a> by international standards. Apart from the issue of unpaid labour, this overwork grinds many teachers down and has negative effects on health and wellbeing. Extreme overwork limits the time teachers can spend with students, and makes it harder to work effectively with other educators and school staff. 
The current agreement, negotiated between the union and Victoria’s Labor government four years ago, introduced four “professional practice days” per year. These extra days are much needed, but they are no substitute for reducing the weekly teaching load. For teachers’ wellbeing and students’ education, it’s crucial that we don’t retreat on the claim to reduce teaching hours to a maximum of 18 per week. 
There are also claims to include all meetings in workload planning, to limit meetings to one per day, and to have no meetings in the first and last weeks of term and in the weeks of parent-teacher interviews. Many schools abide by these common-sense measures already, but having them written into the agreement would make this standard in every school.
Significant pay increases for education support staff. Education support staff have always been grossly underpaid. The union log of claims includes lifting all support staff from the current range one classification to range two, which would increase starting salaries to $57,514, equivalent to a pay rise of about $10,000. It also includes a paid 45-minute lunch break and a 15-minute morning tea break for all support staff (the current agreement has only a half hour unpaid lunch break), and 10-minute paid break for every hour spent assisting a student. (Currently, support staff have no dedicated time to write up the reports they are required to submit.)
If all these demands were met, support staff would still be poorly paid, earning well below the median wage and in many cases stuck working part-time hours. The claims should therefore be considered a minimum to be achieved, not an ambit claim to be negotiated away. 
A pay rise, not wage stagnation. Essential workers, including teachers, had promised pay rises snatched away last year by the <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-11-03/nsw-public-servants-will-not-get-their-2.5-per-cent-pay-rise/12842642">Liberal government in NSW</a> and the <a href="https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/queensland/public-servants-wage-freeze-issue-pushes-on-towards-state-election-20200617-p553n9.html">Labor government in Queensland</a>. We shouldn’t accept this. It would be a slap in the face to all of us who worked hard to educate kids in incredibly difficult conditions through the pandemic. The last renegotiation in Victoria included a headline wage rise of 3.25 percent per year and also moved many teachers up an increment. But because teachers on the top increment don’t benefit from this arrangement, a larger flat increase or healthy percentage increase is a preferable approach. 
Mandatory funding for schools to pay staff as per the agreement. This claim is unglamorous but crucial. Many school staff are told that there simply isn’t money in a school budget to pay for entitlements—even when the entitlements are written in black and white in the (supposedly legally binding) agreement. 
School-level budget constraints are a product of policies implemented in the 1990s by the right-wing Liberal government of Jeff Kennett, including the devolving of responsibility for hiring and budgets to school councils and principals. This policy has not been reversed by Labor in the decades since. It puts enormous pressure on principals to get rid of experienced teachers on higher pay grades to allow the hiring of less experienced—and less expensive—teachers. 
The union’s log of claims doesn’t dismantle this model, but includes a clause that would reduce its disastrous effects by giving an enforceable entitlement to full funding:
7 (3) Employment conditions and entitlements provided for in this agreement will be fully funded by the State of Victoria at the actual cost of provision, including the allocation of funds to each school based on the actual cost of employing the staff engaged at each location.
Union rights and consultation. Even if we win improvements in the agreement, we’ll still need strong local enforcement. So the claims to do with union rights and consultation are important. They include: that union and staff representatives comprise a majority of school consultative committees; that each representative on these committees is released from 40 hours of work time per year; that union representatives are collectively released from 145 hours of work time per year; and that health and safety representatives have full access to Edusafe reports. There are plenty of other worthwhile clauses in the union’s log of claims, including:
<ul>
<li>Capping class sizes at twenty at all year levels, with a maximum of eighteen in tech classes and ten in specialist schools (compared to the current maximum of 25 in years 7-12, and “an average” of 21 in P-2, and 26 in years 3-6).</li>
<li>A new model of ongoing employment for casual relief teachers, employed in ongoing roles in sufficient numbers on a regional basis to enable vacancies to be filled.</li>
<li>Employers to take “all reasonable efforts” to place staff declared in excess in suitable alternative positions. This would wind back some of the damage done to the concept of permanent employment in the 2013 agreement.</li>
<li>Infectious disease pay—which would provide for full payment for staff required to self-isolate, without running down sick leave.</li>
<li>16.5 percent superannuation.</li>
<li>Automatic progression.</li>
<li>Acknowledgment that “employees are not expected to read or respond to emails or other work related correspondence outside working hours”.</li>
</ul>
The money is there. In last October’s Victorian state budget, the total wages bill for the Department of Education was projected to be $8.67 billion. That’s a lot of money—until you look at the sort of cash that the richest in our society have piled up in the past year. 
An Oxfam report released in January this year found that 31 Australian billionaires have increased their fortunes by nearly $85 billion since pandemic began. Maybe read that again. $85 billion piled up in extra wealth for the already obscenely wealthy.
Meanwhile, teachers work ridiculous hours under enormous pressure and support staff scrape by on meagre wages, all of which cuts into the quality of students’ education. And our governments cut taxes on business and cry poor. 
There is plenty of wealth available for better teaching, working and learning conditions. But it will require a hell of a fight to get it flowing to government schools. Strikes and protests have always been essential to challenging the priorities of the rich and powerful. We have to prepare for these—starting with the widest possible publicity about our claims, why they matter and how we’re going to organise to win them. 
Our working conditions are student’s learning conditions. It’s up to us to use the current bargaining round to win dramatic improvements, for ourselves, our fellow school staff and our students.

Manolya Moustafa

Victorian school staff need to fight on workloads and wages

The escalating public health emergency in Melbourne has pushed the city back into lockdown. But incredibly, the Victorian government is still requiring staff and senior students to attend school next week.
As news of the Al Taqwa College outbreak (the largest in Victoria at the time of writing, at 119 cases) continues to filter in, Victorian year 11 and 12 students, specialist school students and staff are left to contemplate “business as usual” at the start of term three. Other year levels have been granted a five day holiday extension while the government decides their fate.
The current situation is much worse than the first stage of the pandemic in Australia, which was largely confined to overseas arrivals and their close contacts. Now there is widespread community transmission, including in school communities.
As well as the Al Taqwa College cluster in Melbourne’s west, Aitken Creek Primary School in the northern suburb of Craigieburn is the centre of a cluster of 10 cases, and a total of 29 schools and dozens of childcare centres are shut due to COVID-19 cases.
Unbelievably, the state government has put the VCE results timeline ahead of the health and lives of students and school staff. Premier Daniel Andrews’ argument for this rests on a startling new realisation – apparently, if we don’t act soon, education in Victoria may not be on an equal playing field!
Andrews claims that, in the interest of fairness, there must be total consistency between year 12 students in regional areas and those in metropolitan areas. This, it seems, is an ideal worth sacrificing lives for. But the premier appears to have no problem with bumpiness of the playing field when it comes to the glaring divide between private and public schools, or between schools in wealthy and working-class suburbs.
What’s more, Andrews committed to the current VCE exam date schedule in the middle of the pandemic and in a situation that he admitted was rapidly changing and which would inevitably produce more outbreaks. Now Victoria is in its worst position yet, and schools are being re-opened.
Victorian Chief Health Officer Brett Sutton has admitted that the Al Taqwa College outbreak involved transmission among senior school students: “They are older kids, they tend to have more transmission that is akin to adults if they’re not doing the physical distancing appropriately.” The students were not distancing, in line with the education department’s insistence up until now (against all science and common sense) that it was not necessary.
If Sutton and Andrews are now changing their advice regarding distancing, then this just begs the further question of whether either of them have ever actually seen a Victorian public school. There is just physically no space for students to distance in classrooms filled with the average 25 students, nor in the corridors, locker bays, offices or canteen lines.
With more and more evidence of aerosol spread of the virus, keeping classes of senior students in closed rooms for up to two hours at a time is an extremely effective way to spread the virus, no matter how they are seated. And on the Friday morning before the Monday students were scheduled to return, schools had still not received the School Operations Guide from the department – not that the Department of Education is known for it’s useful recommendations during this pandemic!
Some are quick to deduce that fewer students on campus will lessen the risk. It will – for some. The risk remains, however, in large cohorts, and is completely unchanged in senior classrooms and senior colleges where all, or close to all, students are in year 11 and 12. No consideration has been made for the six senior schools in metropolitan Melbourne in this situation, several of which are located in the north-west hotspots. In addition, many specialist school students do not understand or cannot physically effect social distancing, meaning teacher aides must work dangerously close with students to cater for their personal needs.
News today is that there will be temperature checks for all staff and students before admission to school grounds. Leave aside the logistical nightmare of doing this for hundreds of students and the crowded bottlenecks this will likely cause at school gates, temperature checks are not a reliable test for carriers of the virus. The Al Taqwa College cluster should at least teach us that lesson where, according to a statement from the College, “Temperature checks on a daily basis were conducted for all staff, students and anyone needing to visit the school… Any staff or student that presented with even the mildest cold and flu symptoms were sent back home as a safety precaution.”
These kinds of precautions will not prevent an outbreak – they are more about the optics of being seen to be doing something. The latest advice is that non-contact temperature checks are not as accurate but contact devices are more time consuming, expensive and, more worryingly, risk cross contamination. Around half of all positive cases have no symptoms, so would not be picked up by temperature checks in any case.
The government feigns concern for student wellbeing and education, yet they are happy to send them into harm’s way, knowing full well that it could mean death or severe long-term illness for students, staff and their families. Each day new information comes out about the lasting effects of those who “recover” from the virus, including the warnings of UK medical scientists of the risk of a wave of COVID-related brain damage. Given all this, you would be forgiven for assuming that an education union might be advocating that their members not be pushed into such demonstrably unsafe situations. While other sectors are told “if you can work from home, you must work from home” the Australian Education Union has been in consultations aimed at “clarifying” some of the finer points of how best to march school staff back into our crowded classrooms. While some of the requests for adequate protective equipment and special payments for casual relief teachers are well overdue, it would stand to reason that when state borders are closed and reinstatement of six week heavy lockdown is occurring that school closures would be the most reasonable demand. Don’t worry – union officials are most certainly working from the safety of their homes.
We are being asked to be the sacrificial lambs, supposedly in the name of education, but really so as to not interrupt the all important process of ranking school leavers. But the value of VCE ATAR scores is not to student learning but to their use as a sorting process for university entrance admissions. In a pandemic, when our lives are on the line, education should be urgently repurposed towards assisting students to keep students and their communities safe, not the warped priorities of justifying social stratification, something we should be critical of at the best of times.
The status quo sees students from wealthy families, with all the access to the resources and cultural-capital privilege affords, competing with the kids of single-parent house-holds, often juggling long hours in part time jobs alongside their study. They all take the same standardised tests and compete for the same university courses, with well documented outcomes.
There are other options that can and should be used to allow year 12 students to receive their ATAR and completion certificates. Exam dates can be changed, the way we assess can be modified. It is possible. Sending them to high risk situations where more outbreaks will occur should not be an option.
Keeping students and teachers at home remains one of the most important public health measures available. There are identical battles being fought in other countries, including the UK and the US. The stakes are just as high in Victoria.
 
Victorian school teachers have initiated a change.org petition, demanding that students and teachers are not required to attend school in the midst of a public health emergency: <a href="https://www.change.org/p/james-merlino-remote-learning-for-all-students-during-lockdown">https://www.change.org/p/james-merlino-remote-learning-for-all-students-during-lockdown</a>

Close Victoria's schools now

Victorian teachers and school support staff stand to make fairly modest gains in the new industrial agreement between the Australian Education Union (AEU) and the Labor government. It is hardly the “great win” claimed by branch president Meredith Peace.
Teachers and support staff will get a wage rise of 13.7 percent over the life of the four-year deal, well short of what we were asking for (principals will get 17.1 percent). Daily rates for relief teachers will rise more significantly, but they will still earn less than their counterparts in other states. Some welcome initiatives include paid family violence leave, some time release for AEU reps, union training leave for all members and bans on quotas on the number of staff who can progress up the salary scale and on lump sum performance pay.
However, ask any teacher what their major concern is and the answer will be loud and clear: workloads. An independent survey commissioned by the AEU last year found that 80 percent of teachers worked an average of 53 hours per week – a whopping 15 hours of unpaid overtime. So our log of claims included a reduction in face-to-face teaching hours and a cap on class sizes. But there has been no improvement whatsoever on this front.
Instead, teachers will get four “professional practice” days per year when they are released from teaching duties for other work “directly related to teaching” such as planning, preparation, assessment, professional development and peer observation. To say this is a drop in the overall workload bucket would be an overstatement. And it will be another four years before we can address the workload issue again.
A side deal between the government and the union also means that eligible employees on fixed-term contracts will be able to get permanent employment, determined centrally (though principals will still have some say). While this is a positive development, it is not enshrined in the agreement itself, which means it cannot be enforced if, for example, there is a change of government.
Negotiations for the agreement started more than a year ago and had stalled until the union applied to Fair Work in February for a protected industrial action ballot. The government then quickly offered some concessions. The inescapable conclusion is that we could have done much better if we’d proceeded with an industrial campaign, including strikes. But the AEU leadership chose to accept what was on offer without firing a shot. Many teachers will see this as a missed opportunity.

Tess Lee Ack

Missed opportunity to tackle teacher workloads in Vic deal

Early in 1967, radical Black artist Emory Douglas was invited to an organising meeting for the visit of Malcolm X’s widow, Betty Shabazz, to the Bay Area in California. Emory was to design the poster advertising the visit.
Given Malcolm X’s recent assassination, security was a priority. Two guys came to the meeting and agreed to be in charge of security. They were Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale of the Black Panther Party. “After that, I kind of knew that’s what I wanted to be a part of”, Emory says, speaking in Melbourne after speaking at the annual Marxism conference.
“After the event, I asked them how I could join and Huey and Bobby gave me their phone number. I used to call over and catch up with Huey early in the morning … He’d take me around the community and introduce me to folks in Oakland and then we’d go by Bobby Seale’s house. That was my first involvement.”
The first thing that struck us during our conversation with Emory is that he talks about key figures of the Black Liberation movement of the late 1960s with their first names: Huey, Bobby, Eldridge, Kathleen, Assata, Little Bobby and Fred. Here we are talking to a man who knew the heroes of our history books, who lived that history, who was an important part of an inspiring and powerful movement.
It was a humbling and awesome conversation. We knew that Emory had been asked these questions thousands of times before, but he is a patient and generous interviewee.
Art as practice
In the 1960s, Emory was involved in the Black Arts movement in the Bay Area around San Francisco, along with others like Amiri Baraka (then known as LeRoi Jones). He joined the Black Panther Party shortly after it was formed, in 1967 and became its minister of culture, a position he held until the early 1980s.
He did layout and artwork for the Black Panther newspaper, which had reached a weekly circulation of hundreds of thousands by 1969. His depiction of the policeman (and later Uncle Sam) as a pig became an enduring image for all who understand the true nature of the police force and its role in the oppression of the Black community in the US.
His artwork exposing the corruption and brutality of the system while celebrating the struggle for Black liberation and many other anti-colonial struggles has an international legacy. Emory and his work have toured the world, presenting exhibitions, working with youth groups and speaking about his history.
During his latest visit, Emory was invited to the Auckland Arts Festival and worked on a mural project at the Mangere Arts Centre with Maori youth. He also worked on a collaboration with Aboriginal artist Richard Bell at the Milani Gallery, and mentioned that the pieces included embroideries of his work done by the Zapatista Mayan women’s collective.
When speaking about his artwork, Emory makes it clear that there is a message, that art is much like the famous manifestos, programs and communiqués of the Black Panthers. Art is “a visual way of communicating with people, for those not into reading and who learn by observation and participation, by actual practice … They can get something of substance out of the art work that is relevant to them.”
Black Panther Party
We turn to the Black Panther Party. What inspired Emory to get involved? “Young people across the country were frustrated and were trying to figure out what to do because the climate in the country was that of protest – coming from the south, the civil rights movement, you see all that on TV… the beatings, the murders of the civil rights marchers and all those things.”
Emory began to help Huey and Bobby organise and go on neighbourhood patrols. He tells a story of a group of kids seeing the patrols for the first time. They were absolutely astonished that the Panthers were standing up to the cops and, because they knew the law better than the police, getting away with it. Did people find it inspiring? “For some, it was in the beginning. For some, they said we were crazy! After a while it became more understanding when they seen it in conjunction with the programs.” (The Panthers carried out a range of social provision activities.)
It might have been crazy, if not for the solid foundation that Huey and Bobby had developed before setting up the party. “Before they even got started on the street, they had everything in place … Huey used to work at a law office … so he knew about the law in relation to the Second Amendment, giving you the right to bear arms.”
According to Emory, Huey and Bobby got the idea of the patrols after watching the Watts riots in 1965 on TV. Young people patrolled the community with cameras to try to prevent incidents of police brutality. They called it Cop Watch.
Other inspirations included Robert Williams’ book Negroes with guns, which the party organised to sell, and the Louisiana Deacons for Defense, a southern local armed group who protected their community and civil rights activists from the Ku Klux Klan and other racists.
California, and particularly the Bay Area, was bursting with political ferment in the late 1960s. The Black Panthers arose from and then shaped the revolutionary atmosphere. This is illustrated in a story Emory tells of how they raised the money to buy their “technical equipment” (guns) – by selling Mao’s Red Book to students at the University of California. The Panthers read the book as well, not to transpose the Chinese revolution onto US soil, but for the universal principles contained in it that could be applied to what they were doing.
Survival Programs
At the end of our interview, Emory raises a point: “Huey always said the party was not to be forever, the party was to negate itself. The whole idea of the party was to inspire people to take on these [survival] programs, therefore it would negate itself, the negation of the negation … That was the whole idea of putting on these programs – at some point the people would become revolutionised and the party wouldn’t be needed anymore.”
The scope and breadth of the survival programs that the Panther’s ran is impressive, especially in a country where even the most basic social programs are denied, particularly to the Black community. The party ran everything from the famous free breakfast programs to childcare, an old folks’ program, free medical clinics, even a free ambulance service.
The survival programs were seen as an integral part of the revolutionary aspect of the Panthers. In Emory’s words, “Being a revolutionary meant you served the people, in the interests of the people … because you’re transforming the thinking and mindset of the people by what you do, by your example, and you’re inspiring people to begin to ask for these kinds of programs that were in their interest, and pointing out the contradiction between what the government wasn’t doing and what it should have been doing. That’s a part of what’s revolutionary, transforming society from being exploitative [and] capitalist oriented.”
Emory points out that the free lunch programs in US schools today came about as a result of the Panthers’ breakfast program.
Colossal Events
What really made the party grow “was the events, we called them colossal events, that captured the attention of people”.
The first of these was the delegation of Panther Party members, led by Bobby Seale, to the Sacramento legislature (the capital of California) when a politician was trying to change the gun laws to prevent the Panthers’ patrols. Huey Newton stayed in Oakland because they knew that they might be arrested and that someone would be needed to talk to the press. “So they knew how to play the press back then … [After that] you had people calling, wanting to know about the Black Panther Party.”
The second event, the “one that took it over the top”, was an incident between two police officers and Huey Newton, which resulted in one policeman dying, another being injured and Newton being injured and arrested. That began the Free Huey movement. The party decided that Eldridge Cleaver would run for president with the Peace and Freedom Party, and use the platform to talk about Huey’s case and build the Black Panther Party.
The Black Panther Party sought alliances and solidarity with revolutionary movements across the US and the world. Emory tells of trips by Panther members to Algeria and all over Africa, to Cuba and China, of the Panther Party chapters in Japan and even the Polynesian Panthers.
Solidarity for Huey Newton, as written in many of his articles, was about “revolutionary solidarity” – with the American Indian Movement, Basta Ya! (the Spanish language paper the Panthers printed following the Los Siete de la Raza incident in 1969), and many more. As Emory notes, “We were the first ones who took a position in solidarity with the gay liberation movement.”
Today
Emory is still very much involved in community projects today. One is the Eastside Arts Alliance, a cultural centre for young people in Oakland. They organise cultural events such as the annual Malcolm X Jazz Festival and block parties. For Emory, it seems, the cultural and political have always been entwined. These events are about “making sure people are aware of what’s going on so they can come together and demand justice from the local government in relationship to their concerns”.
We ask him if he’s noticed a change since the Ferguson rebellion last year. He believes that people have become more aware of things like the militarisation of the police and the staggering levels of incarceration of Black men in the US. The rates of incarceration in the US are higher than anywhere in the world, with over 2 million people behind bars. Black men have a 1 in 3 chance of imprisonment during their lifetime.
But Ferguson was also the latest in a line of rebellions against police murders of Black men. “They had been doing it before but Ferguson was the spark that lit the prairie fire this time around because you had Trayvon Martin before, young people were very upset about that. You had Oscar Grant prior to Trayvon Martin – there were riots and rebellions behind that in Oakland.”
This theme is taken up again when we ask Emory if he believes it is necessary to be a revolutionary today, “Oh yeah, revolution is about change and sometimes you know it’s going from A to B and sometimes it can be abrupt, you know sometimes it can be the spark that lights the whole chain. Revolution is always necessary. Today, absolutely.”
Free Mumia Abu-Jamal!
The Black Panther Party faced extraordinary repression from the police and the federal government’s Cointelpro. The legacy of that repression survives today, with many Black Panther Party members incarcerated as political prisoners.
Mumia Abu-Jamal was a former member of the party who became a radio journalist and was sentenced to death for the 1981 killing of a Philadelphia police officer. The investigation and trial were a farce, and it is clear that he was targeted for his political beliefs.
For 30 years of his sentence Mumia was held in isolation on death row. His sentence was overturned in 2001, yet he remained on death row for another 10 years. He is now serving a sentence of life without parole.
On 30 March, Mumia was hospitalised after going into diabetic shock, following inadequate medical treatment. He suffers from chronic health problems and his supporters are worried that his continued incarceration and lack of medical care may be fatal.
Despite his condition, Mumia Abu-Jamal has released a statement on the South Carolina police murder of Walter Scott, “Of punks, predators and pigs”.
The campaign to free Mumia continues, with more urgency than ever.

Katie Wood

Revolutionising the people: Interview with Black Panther Emory Douglas

If you wear a “Fuck Tony Abbott” T-shirt, the hysterical cries of “Won’t somebody please think of children” roll in on cue. But when the Liberals flout Article 31 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (“children have the right to relax, play and to join in a wide range of leisure activities”), the same moral crusaders are strangely silent.
The Department of Social Services has announced that $2.7 million of funding will be cut from five adventure playgrounds in Victoria over the next three years, robbing many working class kids of the opportunity to play in a safe outdoor space.
Adventure playgrounds are primarily built in high rise public estates that house working class families, single parents, newly arrived migrants and the disadvantaged.
The Fitzroy adventure playground, affectionately known as “Cubbies”, opened in 1974. It was Australia’s first. Located in the Atherton Gardens Estate, Cubbies is a rare green space in Fitzroy that offers a free, safe and secure space to play for children living in commission high rises.
According to Makot Wol, a playground worker who spoke to the ABC’s 7:30 program, Cubbies “is like a backyard or front yard to anyone who is living in the flats. As we all know, the flats are a very tiny space for kids to run around, so when they come down here they have the space to express themselves.”
Jo MacFarlane from the Brotherhood of St. Laurence, also speaking to 7:30, said: “Many of the families and their children that attend Cubbies are from the Horn of Africa or from the South Sudanese community and come from refugee backgrounds and fled from war overseas. Cubbies is part of the healing place for many of these families.”
Barbara Champion, executive director of Play Australia, asked: “Why is it that the most disadvantaged, marginalised and at risk children, like those that are supported through the adventure playground programs, are made to suffer at the hands of those who make these budget decisions? We can find millions of dollars for roads, warplanes and infrastructure, but not for children who need a safe and secure place to play.”
In response, a spokesperson for social services minister Kevin Andrews wrote, “Local playgrounds are a matter for local and state governments – the federal government should not be responsible for swings and slides.”
The Liberals are well aware that adventure playgrounds provide more than “swings and slides”. They have no hesitation in destroying the sense of community and belonging that adventure playgrounds can provide.
Conservative politicians love using children to point score. Their attitude is clear: when there are single mums to demonise, conventional gender roles to reinforce or racist lies to peddle (think “children overboard”), there is no shortage of appeals to “kids’ welfare”.
Once the point’s been made, the same kids can rot, for all the politicians care. The Abbott government’s horror budget, not content with targeting students, pensioners and the unemployed, is also out to get the kids.
The Liberals hate children.

Why the Liberals hate children

A wave of revolt has swept Turkey in the wake of the country’s worst ever mining disaster. Thousands are directing their anger at the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Çetin Uygur, former head of the miners’ union Maden-İş, said an explosion and subsequent fire in the Soma coalmine in the province of Manisa is “truly a work-related murder of the highest degree. We are currently facing the worst work-related murder in the country’s history.”
The official death toll of more than 300 surpasses that of the last major mining disaster in Turkey, in Zonguldak in 1992, which claimed 263 lives.
But locals claim that the official figures understate the true loss of life. One miner, quoted in the British Guardian, said, “This is disgraceful; an incredible lie. They are trying to cover up the exact numbers of the accident.”
The response of the already unpopular Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan added further to the outrage. “These things happen”, he said, before ridiculously citing examples from 19th century Britain to make his case. Just two weeks prior to the explosion, the AKP government refused an investigation into the working conditions of the mine.
A 2010 report by the Turkish Chamber of Architects and Engineers (TMMOB) warned of major safety deficiencies in the Soma mines. Ventilation systems, pre-warning mechanisms and faulty wall supports all presented a serious danger to workers’ safety, according to the report.
“No production should be made before the necessary research has been completed. Carrying out production with the lack of experience might lead to disaster”, the TMMOB report warned.
A survivor told Turkish media: “This is not something that suddenly happened. I can tell you that there are people here who are dying, people who are injured and it’s all because of money. People are dying and there’s nothing we can do about it. They send us here like lambs to the slaughter. We are not safe doing this job.”
Soma Holding, the parent company of Soma Coal, has close ties with the AKP government. The Soma mine was privatised in 2005. Melike Doğru, a councillor with the AKP, is also the wife of the general director of Soma Holding Mine Enterprises. Soma Coal also provided charity coal bags which were distributed by the AKP during the previous local elections.
Ninety percent of the 5,000 work accidents recorded in the Soma region in 2013 were in the mines. Most of these were burns, but the hospitals in the area do not have the necessary burn units.
President of Turkish Labour Union of Mine Search and Enterprises Tayfun Görgün stated: “As soon as these mines were privatised, accidents started increasing dramatically because sub-contraction has gradually become a state policy.
“People started to work in mines on very low wages, and also illegally. Occupational safety has been ignored. Safety precautions have been put aside in order to lower the costs. Inspectors started to ignore the deficiencies. The only goal is to make more money. These are not accidents, but murders, for which everybody is responsible including the inspectors, ministers and prime minister.”
Nobody needed to tell this to Soma residents: when Erdogan visited the area he was forced to hide in a local supermarket as protesters denounced him as a “murderer and thief” and carried banners reading, “It was not an accident, it was murder.”
Protests across the country have been met with heavy police repression. Turkish police have used rubber bullets, teargas and water cannons to disperse crowds and quash resistance. Perhaps the most disturbing image has been the one of Yusuf Yerkel, an advisor to Erdogan, taking aim for a running kick at a protester who was being held by riot police.
A one-day strike was called on 15 May by the major trade unions. Further and greater industrial action is what is needed to bring down the Erdogan government that callously murders workers in the pursuit of profit.

Murder in a Turkish mine

Social services minister Kevin Andrews says that welfare is becoming “unsustainable”. Yet billion of dollars in federal handouts continue to go to do-nothing rich snobs.
For one thing, private schools including campuses like Geelong Grammar, which boasts of its students being able to bring their horses to school thanks to the indoor equestrian centre, are being given millions.
The Productivity Commission’s Report on government services, released in January, shows that federal funding of private schools has increased 3.4 percent per year over the last five years. Public school funding has increased only 2.4 percent a year.
The report shows that, when all funding is taken into consideration, private schools receive on average $1.2 million a year more than public schools.
The working class is concentrated in public schools. There is also a much larger concentration of students from poor, migrant and Indigenous backgrounds. The current system of handouts to elite schools reproduces the inequality that exists in society, rewarding the privileged and ignoring those in need. The message of this two-tiered system is, “If you can’t afford a decent education, then you don’t deserve to get one.”
Largesse to the little darlings is just the tip of the iceberg.
The Commission’s figures also show how much direct assistance goes to the bosses: more than $1 billion to the water, electricity, gas and waste services industry; close to $1 billion to finance and insurance companies; and more than half a billion to the property, professional services and administration firms.
 What about the mining barons? The Australia Institute estimates more than $4 billion is gifted to companies every year. And, as Tom Bramble previously wrote in Red Flag, “this figure doesn’t include the infrastructure that’s laid on for the industry, fringe benefit tax exemptions and, soon, the billions to be allocated for Abbott’s useless ‘Emissions Reduction Fund’.”
This in the middle of the biggest boom since the 1850s Gold Rush – so don’t say no one’s getting fat off the land down under. No, it’s a bonanza all right. And you’ve got to be filthy rich to get a piece of the action.
Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson in 2012 told us all about superannuation tax concessions, which actually distribute wealth from the poor to the rich:
“Tax revenue foregone on superannuation ($31.8 billion) compares with $30 billion forgone on housing tax concessions such as capital gains tax and negative gearing. By 2015-16, projected concessions will rise $44.8 billion foregone.”
The list of tax breaks, handouts and preferential treatment for rich individuals and their companies goes on and on and on. Astoundingly, the beneficiaries actually believe they are hard done by. The Per Capita Tax Survey 2012 found that many in the richest 5 percent of Australian households “believe that they are not in fact wealthy”. The majority think that they pay too much tax.
Forgive me for not taking seriously Joe Hockey’s mantra that “the age of entitlement is over”.

Rich snobs cheating welfare

After a two-year campaign, the Victorian joint teachers and education support staff EBA has been ratified. The Australian Education Union and the state Liberal government finally reached agreement on 18 April.
At first, media coverage repeated the union officials’ false declaration of a huge win, with pay rises of 16-20 percent. Closer inspection revealed not only that the pay rises are mediocre at best (some AEU members receiving rises that do not even match inflation). Hard-won conditions have also been lost. For example, teachers who had been declared in excess due to declining enrolments used to be prioritsed for new jobs.
In effect, we’re all on contracts now. Experienced teachers in excess will have to compete with graduate teachers for jobs, and principals will no doubt see the advantage in hiring “cheaper” graduates rather than experienced teachers. As a former research officer for the AEU federal office, Peter Job, wrote in The Age, “Permanence is effectively gone, with teachers supposedly in permanent positions no longer entitled to a job elsewhere if they are declared in excess, only the right to be considered for a position”.
The process for the new agreement to be carried through started with a series of ratification meetings held in various locations from 6 to 16 May. The purpose of these meetings was to debate the pros and cons of the agreement and then have delegate representatives from schools vote either yes or no to the in-principle agreement. The meetings didn’t really work like that, though. Delegates were already tied to votes taken at their sub-branch meetings (which occur prior to debate). The union leadership has little interest in a participatory meeting – in the Broadmeadows meeting I went to, the chair encouraged delegates to leave before the proceedings and just to make sure to place their vote in the box on the way out.
A genuinely democratic process would allow members to debate the agreement fully, without any information being given out to the media, and certainly no hefty claims of a “historic win”, until it’s passed by the members. Many members have expressed resentment towards pressure to vote “yes” to an agreement they don’t support.
The Teachers and Education Support Staff Alliance (TESA), a rank and file group, intervened into these meetings to argue that teachers and ES staff should reject the agreement. In the end the agreement went through with 78 percent support, a significantly smaller proportion than last time. It seems that a lot of “yes” votes were due to a combination of the false claim of a “historic win”, campaign fatigue and the union leaders’ groundless assertion that we’d get something worse if we fought on.
The next step was for all Department of Education employees to vote on the agreement as part of the Fair Work ballot. Non-members, who have played no part in the campaign, were given a vote. The results of the ballot were revealed in mid-June: 81 percent in support.
Many teachers and ES staff are rightly disappointed with this agreement and the ratification process. As a result, some have threatened to quit the union, but this would be a mistake. As individuals, we’re powerless; the only gains workers have ever made have been won through collective action. We need to win the argument that we need a fighting union, not to quit – something that can only make us weaker.
TESA is committed to fighting for a union that represents our interests. We have consistently argued that to win real gains, we need sustained industrial action. After such a weak industrial strategy, we shouldn’t be surprised that the new agreement has made no significant improvements and has instead gone backwards. A strike every six months was never going to wrangle any gains out of a Liberal government, even one as weak and indecisive as the one we let off the hook.
TESA’s next project is to work towards a more democratic ratification process for the next agreement, one that involves member participation rather than reliance on an opaque backroom deal by a union leadership that has failed us yet again. If you’re in the AEU, join us!
[To get in touch with TESA, email <a href="mailto:info@teachersesalliance.org.au">info@teachersesalliance.org.au</a>]

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