| Popis: |
The economy of Australia, reflecting current difficulties evident in the operation of the global economy, is slowly and painfully moving out of recession — a trend for which the current Keating federal labor government assumes full credit. Basic to the latter has been a centralist and pervasive micro-economic reform agenda covering many areas of the economy including transport and ‘the waterfront’, for example, and encompassing areas of schooling and workplace reform for teachers. The largest budget allocations for provision of health, education and social-welfare services have evidently taken the brunt of the push for cost efficiencies and the pruning back of public expenditure under an economic reform agenda seeking ‘more for less’. The main feature of the Australian government’s superordinate socio-economic reform policy has been to treat education overwhelmingly as a mechanism for economic development at the expense of something to be intrinsically valued for its own sake. |
