When a Canberra Political Columnist Mentions Education Its News. (June 26, 2004)

    The Sydney Morning Herald's chief political writer, Alan Ramsey, has been occupying the Canberra parliamentary press gallery for more years than most mammals have teeth.

It's a rare event when the topic of education, no matter how obliquely, crosses one of his columns so a paragraph in today's effort is newsworthy:

It has been a wonderful week for the absurd. The compulsory school flagpoles were bad enough. Yet nothing quite matched the pomposity or ridiculousness of Brendan Nelson, the Sydney Liberal infamous for abandoning his earring to become a Howard minister, when he stood beside his patron and Prime Minister on Monday to fulminate about the Commonwealth's election intervention, with the new fitness and egregious funding rule, in state education, and who said, with genuine horror, as if he'd just discovered he stepped in dog poo: "A number of schools don't even have a motto!"

That's our Minister for Education, Science and Training who is responsible for steering our nation's federal higher education policy and together with the junior Minister for Science, Peter McGauran, is in charge of overseeing and determining Australia's research, development, and innovation direction.