One Week in Melbourne

Two items dominate the local media in Melbourne this week. The disappearance of an Irish girl last Friday night and the sacking of a school principle. The fact the two stories get almost equal coverage in the posher end of the media market is a little sad but speaks volumes for what is important to middle class Melbournians.

 

The school mistress story broke first. Rosa Storelli was the principle of Melbourne’s prestigious Methodist Ladies College until she was fired two weeks ago. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing a few Methodists in my time and as Protestants go, they are the best of the bunch. They are humble and keen to help the poor, which by all accounts is why they left the Anglican faith in the first place.

 

Clearly no one has passed this message onto the people who run Methodist Ladies College. They charge $23,000 a year in tuition fees and attract the offspring of lawyers, doctors and various other social climbers. No doubt they throw out the odd scholarship to an aboriginal kid or a child genius from the poorer Western Suburbs, but the school is a factory to perpetuate social class and to ensure that the female lawyers and doctors of tomorrow are the children of today’s lawyers and doctors.

 

Ordinarily, this wouldn’t bother me. The world is an unfair place after all. But as with Ireland, the Australian government pays the same subsidy per pupil to fee paying schools as it does to state schools. And in both countries, capital expenditure on gyms, libraries etc are based on a matched payment basis. If the school can come up with $100k, then the government will match it. Needless to say, this means that the rich schools get most of the money and the inequity gap gets wider.

 

Right wingers complain about paying taxes to fund dole payments to layabouts. Well, I have the same problem in paying taxes to subsidise the education of the elite and to pay for the Australian militaries’ misadventures in Afghanistan. If we were all able to direct our taxes to the places we thought they should be best spent, then I reckon we’d have good schools and hospitals, ten members of parliament instead of hundreds and an army presence in the Middle East that would fit into a phone box.

 

The head involved got sacked after the school board discovered that they had overpaid her by about half a million dollars over the last ten years and she refused to pay it back. In fairness she probably hadn’t noticed the overpayment as her salary is also half a million dollars a year. And to think I passed up on teacher training college because I didn’t think the pay was good enough.

 

The principle and the school board are busy leaking information to the media every day and mediation councillors have been called in. The pupils must be laughing. In my day, a headmaster getting sacked would have caused great levity among the masses and a new catalogue of nicknames.

The parents however, seem to be fairly solidly behind the ex principle. A fighting fund has been organised and the city’s best legal brains (who coincidently are also parents in this case) are talking about taking a High Court case to get her reinstated. All of this makes the front page of Melbourne’s broadsheet newspaper each day and must baffle the vast majority of citizens, for whom $23,000 is annual income.

 

The other thing that this throws up is that if a school discovers that it has been overpaying it’s principle for the past ten years, you’d have to wander about the standard of bookkeeping that they are teaching their students.

 

I had the dubious pleasure of auditing a school back in my early working life. It was run by an order of Priests who covered the full gambit of religious stereotypes. The youngest Priest on the management committee was committed to social justice and argued the case of the school caretaker who was earning a wage equivalent to that of a Bombay street beggar. The young Priest was looking to get him an extra twenty pounds a week in his take home pay. The head master, who came from the pre Vatican Two tradition of the Catholic Church, tutted dismissively and explained that because of the penal tax and national insurances rates that existed in Ireland at the time, the school would be required to find 50 pounds per week to pay a net twenty and this was simply out of the question.

 

They looked to me for a suggestion and I swallowed my socialist pride for a moment. I told them to get the caretaker to give a note each week saying that he bought twenty pounds worth of nails or paint and seeking reimbursement. They could then pay him this amount without any implications for tax and insurance. The young Priest beamed with enthusiasm but they headmaster stared at me with a face as dark as thunder. Suddenly my heart fell as I realised I had just explained an illegal scheme to a group of clerics.

 

“That’s brilliant” he said.”Can we do the same for all the staff?”

 

I learned a lesson that day, that schools are not the paradigm of virtue that we think them to be and yet we entrust them to educate our young and to set them on a moral path.

 

There is nothing moral about charging $23,000 a year to school a kid or to pay a principle half a million a year in my book.

 

The other issue that has filled the papers was the disappearance and murder of a young Irish girl called Jill Meagher. She was snatched from the street not far from where I live and discovered six days later in a shallow grave. It is a desperately sad story and makes me wish that the papers were only filled with tales of sacked headmistresses and the angst of middle class parents.