Roy Hay

(This article appeared in the Geelong Advertiser,  28 November 2011, p. 18 as’ Red, white and blue in the top End.’)

A great deal has been made of the decision by Australia and the United States to have a training base for American troops in the top end.

Tandberg summed up a common response with a cartoon in which a US soldier says it is great to be in a country which offers no resistance for a change.

The old stories about Australia as the deputy sheriff in the Pacific got a good airing as well.

Then there were those who thought this was the USA throwing its weight around and setting up an imperial base in a client state so that it could dominate and contain China and probably India as well.

Barack Obama certainly set out to cheer up his regional allies with his affirmation that the United States would henceforth be a Pacific power and that  it would continue to show leadership in the years to come.

Yet there is an alternative explanation for all of this which is perhaps nearer to the truth.

The United States is now entering a phase when it can no longer project its force in the way it often did in the last century.

Its aircraft carriers are now vulnerable to attack by Chinese weapons systems.

Even its nuclear submarines are no longer as safe as they were,

So the need for a land base astride the main sea lanes from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean rather than a maritime presence becomes pressing.

Moreover the United States cannot afford to maintain standing patrols and mobile forces on the scale it once did because of the huge costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and the impact of the global financial crisis and its aftermath.

It might like to put its unemployed to work in war related industries as it did at the end of the Great Depression and during the early years of the Second World War before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

But that would be economic nonsense unless a war was imminent and there is no sign of that at present.

So the United States, whatever its leadership might claim, is probably trying to fend off the evil day when its economic capacity will be overtaken by China and this will no longer be able to be compensated for by superior technology.

The implications for Australia are also significant.

It is possible that Australia will become more valuable to the United States and thus have a greater capacity to influence United States policy than it does at present.

If Australia can maintain good relations with its northern neighbours, Indonesia and China, then it might be able to achieve the position of a force for peace and compromise when United States and Chinese interests diverge.

This is not going to happen overnight but in the longer term it is certainly possible.

In the meantime it is in Australia’s interests to take seriously the Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono’s suggestion that involving the Chinese military in the exercises with the United States in the Northern Territory would help defuse suspicions that the scheme is solely aimed at containing China.

There are those who want to divide the world into competing blocs and who see conflict between them as inevitable, but this is a despairing and desperate view of human relations.

There is just as much evidence in history of compromise and the ability of groups to maintain relatively peaceful relations as there is of hot wars between the leading powers of the day.

American and Chinese relationships can develop peacefully and Australia can play a part.

The fact that all parties have the capacity to end peace by resorting to conflict can have a sobering effect on each of them.

Predictability and openness are the keys and Australia, facing both ways, can have an influence for good in this uncertain and developing world.

Isn’t it fascinating when you have Rupert Murdoch and Julia Gillard singing from the same song sheet?
Rupert Murdoch’s fourth Boyer Lecture was aimed directly at ‘our public education systems [which] are a disgrace. Despite spending more and more money, our children seem to be learning less and less—especially for those who are most vulnerable in our society’. Other countries, and he cites Finland, Korea and Singapore, are leaving us behind. In a competitive world we have to set much higher expectations for our students and hold schools accountable when they fail.

Much of what he has to say is sound and has the backing of the current Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard. In her introduction to an education forum in Melbourne earlier this week she stressed that the current government wanted a transformational change in Australian schools. She brought the Chancellor of the New York Department of Education Joel Klein to explain the changes he has presided over in that city. Gillard claims that Klein has ‘demonstrated that change has to be systematic, that it has to focus unrelentingly on quality improvement and that we must demand high standards of achievement from every student no matter how disadvantaged’.

‘The people who need a solid education to lift them out of deprived circumstances are the people who are falling further and further behind. That is unacceptable to me,’ Murdoch says. Rural areas, indigenous communities and inner urban poor areas tend to have under-resourced schools relative to the needs of their students. As Gillard points out, ‘A child from a working class family is only half as likely as a child from a high income family to go on to tertiary study.’ While tertiary study may be expensive, its contribution to the life-time earning stream of the recipient is massive and growing. A country like Australia which cannot compete in wage costs needs to offset that by greater investment in human capital, in the skills and knowledge of its workforce at all levels.

All three contributors to the debate want greater transparency and accountability, because lack of these hides failures, the sheeting home of responsibility and the ability to focus on where greater effort and investment are needed. That information needs to be available to parents and students, not just to educational bureaucrats and politicians.

So far so good, but let’s just be a little careful about some of the arguments being advanced. Murdoch asserts that ‘corporate leaders know better than government officials the skills that people need to get ahead in the 21st century’. Where is the evidence for this blanket statement? Of course, we have to improve basic literacy and numeracy, and students would benefit from exposure to the kind of conditions they would face in various forms of employment to help them make rational, informed choices of career. But there is a danger if we make a competitive industrial model the key to our educational system we may finish up with a vocational training structure rather than an educational one.

We have had examples in the past where we have tried to use a competitive model. In England in the 19th century it was called payment by results and it was abandoned as a failure. Measurement in education is one of the critical areas. It has its uses but also its limits. It is vital for accountability but it can be narrowing and misleading. It may well result in concentrating only on producing what is measurable and hence not valuing that which is not, or what is more difficult to measure, quality and variety.

Everyone will have his or her own experience from schooling of those occasions when an enthusiastic and capable teacher managed to awaken a love of learning and puzzle solving. When individuality and difference was encouraged and it helped change your view of the world. Whatever we do in the education revolution we have to retain that core of what it means to educate rather than train someone for the complex world we live in.