My demise as a teacher at Wollongong TAFE began when I pointed out the huge waste of time, money and effort in all the trades courses.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
In the days when TAFE was genuinely concerned about providing the best tradespeople to a building industry plagued by skills shortages, I upset quite a few of those higher up when I asked why all the wasted manpower and materials could not be used to build real houses on real building sites for real people to live in, instead of putting so much effort into building practice homes and then pulling them down and filling scrap bins at the end of every semester.
I was given an endless tirade of negative responses. It turned out that most objections came from those who supported the privatisation of training and who ended up issuing trade certificates for underqualified and undertrained tradespeople who never got what they paid for.
The genuine teachers were given araw deal by TAFE management. TAFEshould be thinking of expanding its courses and training to the thousands of unemployed Australians in this nation, instead of taking covert measures to close its campuses to reap the benefits of questionable real estate deals.
There should be a royal commission into why 457 visa holders are allowed to flood into the open gates of Australia as our unemployable youth stand outside the locked gates of TAFE.
Dave Cox, Corrimal
It would seem many NRL fans are puzzled by the generosity shown to NSW forward Josh Jackson when he fronted the NRL judiciary as a consequence of his spear tackle during the Canterbury vPenrith match.
Is it possible the impending third match of the State of Origin had something to do with Jackson’s kid-glove treatment? Whether or not it did, we will never know. However, the evident inconsistencies of the NRL judiciary decisions must surely have been in the mind of Rabbitohs hooker Isaac Luke.
Luke stands out as one NRL player treated poorly by the NRL in recent years. He has been denied an opportunity to represent New Zealand and an appearance in the 2014 grand final as a consequence of inconsistent judicial decisions.
Barry Swan, Balgownie
Surely, Gladys, it is insensitive, to say the least, to spruik about a budget surplus when even one Aussie is homeless, when even one kid can’t find a safe place to call home, can’t get to school any more, because he doesn’t have a home, is smelly, hungry, cold and scared.
Get your priorities straight, Gladys, forGod’s sake. Aim to make Australia the first zero homeless population country in the world. Make that your legacy to Australia, not a dodgy budgetsurplus.
Martina Thiele, Port Kembla
Man-made climate change is the most deceitful fraud in modern history. Reporters are paid and scientists are given huge research grants to keep propaganda and scaremongering alive.
If anyone dares question man-made climate change, they are either smeared or, if a qualified scientist, discredited, while serious debate is suppressed by tree huggers and lovers of weeds.
In spite of all the misleading nonsense of how brown coal and clean coal are major contributors to climate change, the fact remains that this has been an environmental propaganda campaign and beat-up from the start.
Adrian Devlin, Fairy Meadow